Battle Royale letter

First of all, I want to mention how saying that I wanted to read a happy book was a lie, the book I read wasn't happy at all (pretty much). There were a few small humorous moments in it but I don't think it depressed me any less than Schindler's list would have. I'll start off saying that I couldn't annotate, unfortunately, I had borrowed the book from the friend who requested it from me. If I was able to annotate it I probably would have kept track of deaths and payed more attention to things near the beginning (like I would have written on the map in the front of the book.) As for now, I'll say how fucking awesome this book is. Although it's not heart-wrenching or tear-jerking, Battle Royale is a fantastic book filled with different points of view as well as different opinions and emotions.
The parts of the book that I liked revolved around Shuya and his friends Shogo and Noriko. They were the most intense points because the book follows them more, giving you a greater connection with them. I love how you can sense Shuya's growing affection for Noriko and vise versa. Their personalities are very three-dimensional and it's almost as though you can connect with them. Another thing that I like with the book is the relation to what we're learning in school currently, that being the Holocaust. In the book, they live in a new Asia ruled by a totalitarian system under a dictator. This is a lot like what it was like back then (as well as what it's like in North Korea currently.) When you think about how cruel the officers were towards these innocent teenagers, it relates a lot back. I didn't come across many questions during the whole thing, the book made a lot of the moments very straight forward so there was no confusion. I generally.. skipped the parts that didn't have to do with Shuya and the gang, sometimes their deaths were really interesting (such as the couple who committed suicide as well as Shinji and his friend) but most of them just kind of mowed each other down.
The only real question I would have would be what someone would do in that situation. I'm not sure what I would do myself, I think I'd try to get a group with my friends and then hide out; then i'd probably let everyone else kill each other so that I'd only have to kill one or two people? Most of the time though I would just hide, try not to get myself killed. I can't really speak for that though because it isn't happening, if it were I'm sure I would act a lot differently than I thought I would. A lot of the people in the book went insane, not trusting anyone and killing their own friends; it was a very depressing thing, mostly because you could see it happening in real life. When people are under that kind of pressure then they'll do practically anything, kill their own brother or sister just to stay alive. It's amazing how dearly caring we are for our own lives. I'm just going to bring this back to what the holocaust survivor told us; he told us that during the holocaust he wanted to die, that he would rather die than receive torture, he said that his faith was so strong that if his God wanted him to die than it was not his choice. That kind of faith is a little inspiring, it seems so selfless and nice; the people in the book seemed a little selfish, only really caring for themselves. Only Shogo, Shuya and Noriko seemed to care otherwise.