presentation????

Okay. So today, Jon asked us to make a presentation about the 3 books me and my classmates read in summer. One part was about the plot overview (Jon specifically said to put in what i understood, and not the ones from sparknotes or wikipedia. Well I'm too lazy to even read wikipedia or sparknotes and I understood nothing so haha I'm screwed.) The second part was "How could the novel be understood differently if it was read in a different culture/different time?" <<<< what is this question anyway.

The 3 books I've read were Looking For Alaska by John Green, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, and 1984 by George Orwell. I'm really lost right now. (And I am so scared for IGCSE EFL because I can't even answer a question that Jon gave to us ;_;)

People would have different point of views and thoughts of what they would have read, so I'll spill out what I thought. Looking For Alaska. In this story, the characters loved to prank, and most of the time the prank that they thought of was like "what." I thought that it would be a bit inappropriate for readers that live in a kind of environment where the people around them are "behaved"? is that the right word? Like honestly, I've never experienced being in a kind of environment where people around me are known to prank. No one around me was brave enough to prank the Dean of the school, let alone a teacher. So I was surprised at the characters' actions.
Another would be the whole "smoking and alcohol" scenario. From what I know, people in Indonesia at least, were not allowed to drink alcohol in college (i think.) I mean, Indonesia is kind of a religious country, so we wouldn't be doing that, especially when we're in college. Our culture's different than the western culture.

I've got nothing else so far, so let's move on to the next book, The Lovely Bones. To me, I liked that book. I also liked the fact that it was told from a 14 year old girl (from heaven)'s point of view. She talked about  her own kind of heaven, and how she still felt pain and suffering watching her loved ones below on Earth mourn for her. People always told me that heaven is a happy place, and there was now way that you could feel pain and suffering. I'm not a religious person, so I didn't care. But maybe for some other people, the book might be considered as negative and bad. Some might think that the author is questioning aspects of religion, and some might think that it could talk people into reconsidering their beliefs.
This book also had scenes (a scene actually) of rape and murder. Even if the description wasn't that detailed, some might think that it's inappropriate (I don't know any other word to describe this), especially to have this scene in the very first chapter of the book.

Last book I read was 1984. Now this novel, I couldn't quite understand, probably because I wasn't really used to his writing style. It was quite heavy for me (I suck okay.) But I could capture this; the whole setting of the book was in England in 1984. I heard that the author didn't like the British government on how citizens there couldn't keep their privacy, so he wrote this book. When I read this book, I felt like "ohmygod, i can't believe that the characters had to go through this. No privacy? C'mon." I could imagine it, but I couldn't imagine myself actually being in that kind of situation. I just didn't get it. To me, this was absurd. But maybe to some other people, like... I don't know, the people in Singapore maybe (they have cctvs everywhere are you kidding me) would agree to this. They would think that it was the right thing to do. If they did that, then there was no room for anyone to commit even the smallest crime. The world would be at peace (or something like that.)

So yeah, basically that's what I thought of right now. Just my opinion.

Bye guys~