Being a freshman, I recently had the unfortunate displeasure of being forced to read Hiroshima written by John Hersey. I certainly don’t mean this in a disrespectful way to those who died in the bombing in Hiroshima nor am I trying to be rude to the author, but the book, I’ll be honest, bored me to death.
Primarily, a key factor in my discontentment of the book would be the fact that I disapprove of reading unless the book is short and interesting enough to keep me hooked on to at least read a few pages per day. The book has to be a downright powerful piece of literature which should either be able to make you cry, rejoice, and simply feel like you’re a part of the whole plot. For me, an intriguing book would most likely be extremely sad, a cute love story, or a love story with a very sad resolution (which most people actually detest). For instance, at the same time that I was at our Pitman library for a research project (once again for my Honors English class), my eye caught A Child Called It and that book is unbearably influential, with enough strength to actually make me cry. On the other hand though, as I attempted to vigorously get through (not read) Hiroshima, my head tended to nod away as the ever-so-boring story slowly lulled me to sleep.
In my opinion, the author should have readjusted his layout of the storyline in order to create a bit more of an interesting literary work. One of them would be to have a separate chapter with segments for each character instead of illogically jumping back and forth. Another method for constructing an overall improvement would be by not focusing so much on certain characters such as the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto and Father Kleinsorge who seemed to have countless, lengthy, tedious paragraphs in pretty much every chapter. A third considerable possibility would be to either not tell us which route they took by using highway names etcetera and just briefly mention that these six survivors faced many difficulties while doing a certain task or by providing the readers with a straightforward, easy-to-read, clear map containing the names of streets and so forth referred to during the course of the story. Despite the fact that the book was only about a hundred fifty pages, it seemed to me, more than a thousand pages (as highly exaggerated as that may sound).
Personally, I think that students shouldn’t even be compelled to read certain books as school assignments. This might sound as though it’s coming from a lazy, procrastinating student in a teacher’s point of view, but the reason I believe that is because for me, as well as for many other peers, when they have to read a book they aren’t too fond of, the reader doesn’t acquire any knowledge, it doesn’t soak in. Instead, we feel like a robot just looking at words and saying them in your mind but not knowing what it is saying or meaning. We as students do realize however, that reading may be essential to improving our personal and academic vocabulary but that can also be achieved by reading books of our own choice that doesn’t come with a greatly stressed deadline.
Therefore, I would just say good luck to those incoming freshmen who will have to, with my great remorse, read Hiroshima. Don’t worry; those one hundred fifty pages will eventually end—they’ll have to!
