Halfway Reflection

Through the first half of Song Of Solomon, keeping straight all the character’s relationships and pasts and the book’s whole timeline has been the most challenging for me. The vocabulary throughout the book challenges me, as well. How the book starts really makes it hard to fully follow the relationships between characters because we are thrown right in the middle of a storyline without any knowledge or context. This made it exceptionally confusing to follow the timeline as we find out more about all the characters. It is hard for me, as we get more context and knowledge of the characters, to put all the events in order because we jump back and forth from character to character and from different times in the past.

I’ve had to use many reading strategies to address these challenges. For example, I’ve had to re-read sections and pages of the book to fully understand what and when an event took place. And I’ve started to read some parts aloud. This makes me read slower and more thoroughly catching some important parts of chapters that I might have missed otherwise. I also write many questions and mark passages that I find confusing or important, which can be seen in my annotated page down below. I also circle difficult vocabulary words and write their definitions at the bottom of the page. For example, in the page below I wrote down the definitions of “guileless” and “vacuousness” to make sure I fully understand the meaning of the passages.