Book Project 1: 13 Reasons Why Tape Pack

            Attention, attention! Fans everywhere have been exclaiming how much the 13 Reasons Why Tape Pack makes the book ten times more intriguing. Within the package, there are all of Hannah Baker’s tapes (with the recordings), a Walkman, a pair of headphones, and a map with pictures of the locations Hannah wanted Clay to visit. Sounds enticing? It definitely is.

      In 13 Reasons Why, a high school student named Hannah Baker recently committed suicide. Within weeks of the tragedy, Clay Jensen receives a mystery box with no return address. Inside he finds 7 tapes, each numbered front and back up to 13. A little suspicious, he

decides to listen to them anyways. After grasping that he was listening to Hannah retell events that led up to her suicide and naming the people involved with them, it wasn’t a clever idea to continue listening to them inside his own house. Strolling over to his friend’s house, Clay manages to snag a Walkman from him. This takes the reader through the rest of the book. Clay merely walks around listening to the tapes and visiting each place on the map Hannah drew out for him. Luckily, with this pack, you can follow along right with him.

By purchasing the 13 Reasons Why Pack, the reader can truly experience the book to its maximum potential. Clay is the narrator of the story. He’s the character that the reader gets to hear thoughts from. He’s a great character and all, but also very disrupting. When the tapes are playing and it’s reaching the climax of the story Hannah is retelling—boom. The story is put on hold for, yet again, another comment put in by Clay. It’s becomes irritating and ruins the suspense. But by having your very own tapes with ONLY Hannah’s voice, you can listen to it straight through. The suspense will not be ruined at all. It’s just you and Hannah’s voice. Her emotion and tragedy will get across better through the pack. Clay didn’t have to hear Hannah’s story along with someone else’s thoughts, so why should you? It allows the reader to become more intertwined with Hannah. Because of Clay’s comments, the audience seems to lose touch with Clay and the spot light seems competed for. The whole goal is to get hooked on Hannah. It’s important to become so interested in her that putting the book down becomes impossible and wanting to know every detail of Hannah’s life is inevitable. Luckily, that’s what the 13 Reasons Why tapes will allow. The reader will be isolated with the recorded tapes to only focus on her. Then after getting to know Hannah alone, adding Clay’s thoughts into it will simply broaden the story, not take away.  
  Finally, the last item found in the pack would be Hannah’s map. In the book, it is hard to picture all of the locations that Hannah is saying each story occurred at. Everything happened in one small town. So what could be better than a map of the town with pictures included of each location? Everything in the 13 Reasons Why pack with do nothing but enhance the story and makes everything more hands on. The reader will become intrigued by Hannah’s story in a way that the book couldn’t offer by itself.

Post #2 (What is a book?)

A book is an escape route from reality into the deepest parts of your mind. Opening a physical book and flipping through the pages, releases an entire world into your thoughts. When you begin reading, there's a battle in your head. The world from the story is attempting to remove and reject reality and take it's place (momentarily). When you take that and shove it behind a screen, that world becomes trapped. It can't escape. It immediately loses the battle with reality because of the fact that technology is a constant reminder of the world we live in. If you're reading a book about the colonial times, how does that piece of technology bring the story to life? They don't fit. You don't experience the true era. And that's why i agree completely with Tom Piazza's argument. He states that when caging a book behind a screen, "you get no sense of the scale of things, of the nature of the artist's ambition...". He aslo goes on to say that "the information has no smell, no weight, no texture. Nothing that seriously impinges on your reality". The Kindle and iPad just don't do it for me. They don't draw me into the book as much as turning pages do. It's my own little world that isn't a part of the reality I'm currently in right now. I can completely disconnect from technology, struggles, anything. That's what I'm not willing to give up for the sake of using technology. I strongly disagree with Victor LaValle when he said that books are treated like a pair of stone tablets. It's not like we worship books. It's simply that once you pick up a book, you crave it. You love the feeling of escaping into it. Is that so wrong to find that insanely special? So saying that a book is "no more divine than a toaster" is completely ignorant. A toaster is the same every time. But a book is definitely not.