# data[].attributes.body
Your understanding of literature is absolutely amazing and such a strength you have.  I always enjoy reading your interpretation of the plot and characters along with your thoughts and feelings.  Keep up the great work.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Year in the Life of a Complete and Total Genius by Stacey Matson

# data[].attributes.subject
A Year in the Life of a Complete and Total Genius by Stacey Matson

# data[].attributes.body
I slur my words a lot during this audio due to circumstances beyond my control. Sorry.
Original script (the audio is there, you just have to scroll down a lot):
I’ve already talked about whether the main character, Arthur, is good. (The answer was a definitive NO.) But is his writing any good?

This is kind of a confusing question to answer, since it’s sometimes difficult to separate Arthur from his writing. He often lets elements of his personality leak into his writing, so how can I really be objective here, given my bias against Arthur?
Actually, I might be able to use Arthur’s innate horribleness to judge his writing.

Like I mentioned, Arthur often includes elements of his life in his writing. While this can be a good thing for him - after all, one of the most important writing tips is to ‘write what you know’ - it can sometimes worsen his writing. For example, one of his first pieces of writing is entitled, ‘Elegy for Bobby Mack, a Totally Made-Up Bully who is No Way Based on Real Life’. Of course, this last part isn’t true, and the bully he’s writing about is blatantly his archnemesis, Robbie Zack. His teacher allows him a do-over, but, even though she compliments him on what he ends up coming up with, she’s still angry with him for killing off one of his classmates. This is, obviously, a very biased standpoint on Arthur’s work. Then again, when judging something based on creative value, it’s extremely difficult to be 100% objective, and his teacher, after all, doesn’t want Arthur to get in trouble for his extremely murdery writing.

In my opinion, though, his elegy isn’t that bad. In fact, it would probably be pretty funny if it weren’t so cruel. It’s witty and sarcastic, making fun of Robbie Zack by feigning remorse for his hypothetical death before delivering the punch line. (Gosh, I just sound like a poetry critic now. Oh well. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the greater good.)

This isn’t the only assignment his teachers have personal issues with. In fact, this is probably a large part of the reason why he’s never received higher than a B+ (his report card for the year is in the back of the book). In a poem about war he has to write for Remembrance Day, he adapts the poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ to show that war could be considered bullying on a much larger scale. It actually wasn’t that bad of a poem. However, his teacher struck it down, saying that his interpretation of the assignment would be “inappropriate for… an occasion as solemn as Remembrance Day.” His call and response poem with Robbie Zack turns into Robbie telling Arthur that “Poettry is for loosers sports are way more cool like hockey and bassketball and even baseball is beter than a pome” (his spelling and grammar, not mine) and Arthur informing Robbie of his stupidity, cruelty, and inadequacy. While Robbie’s lines in the poem were just plain mean, Arthur’s were actually well crafted and clever and prove that he should probably ditch writing and become a professional book reviewer. His teacher gave them both terrible grades on the poem for obvious reasons. And as for Arthur’s spot in the newspaper? He uses it almost entirely for insulting his enemies while simultaneously cramming in as many puns as he can.

So what does this mean? Is Arthur’s writing really terrible?Maybe not.

Remember, these were all graded harshly because of Arthur’s usage of them to attack others. When you take that out, maybe they’re not so bad. Almost everything Arthur writes is clever and creative, and he even manages to turn a worksheet into a sarcastic mockery of the lack of creative freedom worksheets give students.

But Arthur can’t write a short story for the short story competition! I hear you saying, small hypothetical voice in the back of my head. (Actually, I’ve been hearing that a lot recently. Should I get it checked out?) He can’t even write correctly for his teachers or turn assignments in on time!

That’s where you’re wrong, mysterious voice in the back of my head! Arthur can write a short story - he can and he does.While he can’t come up with any ideas for the short story competition, at the end of the year, he has to write another short story for class. What he comes up with is actually pretty genius - a short story poem that works in elements of wit, alliteration, and his trademark pun-tastic humor, all while remaining surprisingly objective. Of course, he turned it in late, so a lot of points got taken off, but still, it was pretty good. His teacher even acknowledged it.

And - not being able to write “correctly”? That’s not true, either. He can’t write in the way his teacher wants him to, but that doesn’t make his way of writing wrong. If he chooses to become a professional writer in the future, there’ll be no one grading him on how he writes, just on how good his writing is. His own unique writing style is what will decide his future, not how much his teachers like it.

Not turning assignments in on time doesn’t really affect the quality of his work, either. A lot of great writers were enormous procrastinators. Not being able to write quickly doesn’t mean you’re not good at writing; it just means you take a little longer to do it.

In conclusion, Arthur’s not a terrible writer at all. He just has a very specific style that his teachers don’t like. Honestly, his writing style is, like, the one thing I like about the guy. (That, and his love for the ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ series. Arthur may be a jerk, but he’s got good taste.)

# data[].attributes.body
(See other response on 'Mindblind' for statistics
I slur my words in this a lot. Sorry, I'm pretty sure my mouth has a saliva overproduction problem.
Original script (the video is there, you just have to scroll down a lot):
With most books, I can decide right away whether or not I hate them based on a few simple, basic formulas - action scenes: good; teenage romance: bad. Likeable main characters: good; awful main characters: bad. ‘Mindblind’, however, is probably one of the first books I’ve ever read that falls into sort of a grey area. In order to prove this, I’ll walk through the three main things I usually consider in order to judge a book.

First red flag: it doesn’t have any action scenes and one of the main plot points is the romantic relationship between the main character, Nathaniel, and his way-cooler crush, Jessa. However, this book doesn’t approach romance in the way most books do. The main character understands romance in theory and thinks there’s a small chance that Jessa likes him, but he’s too shy to ask Jessa out. As for all the action scenes (or lack thereof), the interesting concept of Nathaniel opening files in his mind kind of canceles that out. Therefore, this book remains with zero positive qualities and zero negative qualities so far.

The ‘file opening’ mechanic, however, can also be considered a negative trait of the book. The main character, Nathaniel, has the ability to ‘open files’ in his mind - those files being memories he’s kept since he was one or two years old. His memory is practically photographic. While this is very handy for establishing facts, it makes the book about 40% flashback, which simply doesn’t make for a very good book. Sure, a little flashback can be a good thing to establish facts without a prologue, but too much makes the book one big memory. Sure, you feel very connected with the characters, but there’s little to no plot. Again, these two points cancel out, and the book is left with nothing.

Finally, the characters. An issue I have with a lot of books is that the characters are boring, one-dimensional, stereotypical, or just flat-out mean and unlikable. Nathaniel is a bit boring, although his Asperger’s syndrome makes him interesting enough that the reader remains engaged. His father, on the other hand, is a stereotypical mean-father type with the stereotypical plot of learning to accept his son for what he is and love him blindly and unconditionally. Jessa was a bit like Nathaniel, except without any really interesting qualities about her. This kind of upset me. The book sets her up as intelligent and talented, yet we never really see this expanded on. Her character is boring.

However, there is one character to cancel out all the bad in these characters: Cooper.

Cooper is a spoiled rich kid whose parents give him everything he wants and whose teachers and grandma think he’s hopeless. However, instead of being confined to the stereotype of mean rich kids, Cooper is actually nice. He doesn’t pick on Nathaniel because of his Asperger’s syndrome, he befriends him because of it. He’s not talentless, he’s musical and creative. He turns the stereotype of mean rich kids on its head and proves that having a lot of money doesn’t automatically make you a jerk. He should give this book at least one good thing, right?

Unfortunately, Nathaniel’s father had to come along.

As I mentioned before, Nathaniel’s father is boring and predictable, not to mention mean. All in all, he’s not a good character, morally or storywise. Therefore, he cancels out all the praise Cooper could’ve gotten from me about this book.

There. Concrete proof. This book is not interesting enough for me to have any opinion on it whatsoever. All the interesting things in it only serve to cancel out the boring things.

In conclusion - Jennifer Roy, really? Nathaniel’s father is a terrible character and the book probably would’ve been better off without him.

# data[].attributes.body
(See other response on 'Lost in the Sun' for statistics)
Even though this book wasn't bad, I didn't really like the characters.
Not that they were all bad - Doug is stupid but nice and well-meaning, Kari seems kind of mean but just wants to protect her daughter, and Aaron seemed like a caring, competent older brother for at least half the book before he turned into a total jerk because plot convenience. My main issue with them was that they were all so one-dimensional.
In another book I've read, 'Mindblind', the characters have layers and personality. Nathaniel wasn't just an autistic math genius, he was intelligent, creative, had a major crush on a girl, played piano, and loved the TV show 'Amazing Race'. Jessa wasn't just a pretty, talented girl, she was also creative, nice, had an amazing singing voice, and was a great songwriter. In 'Lost in the Sun', however, the characters have just one ability or defining character trait. Trent is the boring middle child who doesn't care about disappointing others. Fallon is the pretty girl with a scar that she will not shut up about and a love for movies that borders on obsessive. Aaron is the protective, caring older brother lifeguard who turns into the moody, self-obsessed older brother lifeguard halfway through the book for no reason other than TRENT NEEDS MORE OBSTACLES, DANGIT! Doug is the stupid, nice little brother who loves pranking people but is horrible at it. In all of these instances, there's only one talent or character trait that sets them apart from others. They don't have personalities and are very hard to engage with. Instead of making the characters seem relatable and human like the best authors can, Lisa Graff makes all the characters stereotypes with no real depth.
Above all, though, there were two characters that bothered me: Jeremiah and Ms. Emerson. All the characters in this book are stereotypes in some capacity, but these two are the most blatant. Jeremiah is the spoiled rich kid who picks on people just because he likes shoving his wealth in people's faces and/or informing them that they're weirdo loser outcasts. Honestly, it's like Lisa Graff copy-pasted Draco Malfoy's character from Harry Potter into the story - which wouldn't even make sense, since Harry Potter is about wizard kids and 'Lost in the Sun' is about a kid getting over committing manslaughter a year ago. Ms. Emerson, on the other hand, is another overused stereotype - the misunderstood, seemingly crazy old lady. She keeps about a thousand plants in her room (which is never actually explained, by the way) and seems to hate Trent, but over time Trent realizes that he was just being a jerk and she's actually...
Now that I think about it, Ms. Emerson never really does anything to make us realize that she's normal. All that happens is that she makes Trent like her by forcing him to come in and water her plants for her every day after school and OH MY GOSH.
I literally realized as I was typing this that Trent has Stockholm's syndrome, a syndrome in which you sympathize with your kidnapper. Okay, it's not exact, but think about it! Even before she made him water her plants, he intentionally got detention almost every day to avoid having to go to dinner with his father, another stereotype character who hated Trent. The reason Trent didn't start to suffer from these affects sooner is that he wasn't going every day, since he didn't want to overwhelm his mother, another stereotype character who loved him, with phone calls about how much he was getting in trouble.
But then... why wouldn't all these detentions affect his grade? Surely the principal has to draw the line somewhere. With the amount of detentions Trent experiences throughout the course of the book, Trent probably should've gotten suspended, even expelled, by now...
(What I"m doing right now is essentially talking through my thoughts on paper, since I did not plan for this response to go in the direction that it did. Bear with me.)
*gasp* OF COURSE!!!!
On the first day of school, Trent broke one of Ms. Emerson's precious plants. Therefore, she must have been plotting her revenge, right? She knew that giving him detention would just give him what he wanted, so she hatched a plan. She played to his weakness of not wanting to go home right away after school, forcing him to stay and water her plants, ending each excruciating plant-watering session with the ominous words of "The plants will be thirsty again tomorrow." This not-so-subtle invitation keeps him coming back, day after day, even though he actually doesn't have to. He feels trapped in an endless cycle of plant-watering, when really the only thing trapping him is his brain, sympathizing with Ms. Emerson and her poor, poor plants, wondering what would happen to them if he weren't there. It's not long before he even begins to regret missing this amazing, once-in-a-day golden opportunity to preform a menial, tedious task for free that Ms. Emerson had, hitherto, been perfectly capable of handling herself. Trent turns from a cool, detention-seeking rebel that even the coolest kids admire for his snark into a sucking-up teacher's pet, voluntarily watering an old crone's arsenal of plants day after day after day, trapped there by subliminal messages and unnecessary guilt.
But it doesn't stop there. The horrifying plant-watering journey does not end with Trent. Instead, he does the dumbest, most dangerous thing possible.
He continues the legacy by forcing Noah, a person he claims is a friend of his and is possibly the only character in the entire book with any redeeming qualities whatsoever, to quit a sport he actually likes in order to water Ms. Emerson's plants so Trent can go watch movies with his friend, Fallon.
And guess what? Noah accepts.
Even though the real problem Trent was having with Noah at the time was Trent himself being a terrible friend to Noah - not returning any of Noah's calls, dragging him to sports games even though Noah used to hate sports, promising to hang out with him sometime even though he never did. And yet Trent claims that it's Noah's problem, that Noah needs to learn to be a friend to people by watering Ms. Emerson's plants. And so it continues. The cult of plant-watering zombies under the iron thumb of Ms. Emerson grows larger with each passing day (or so I would assume - if the book continued to show that, it would be a very different book). It started with Fallon Little, convincing Trent that Ms. Emerson was actually a nice person under the cover of genuine friendship. Trent continued it with Noah under the false and completely absurd pretense of Noah learning to be nice to people. Who knows where it will go next? Will someone realize what's going on and fight back? Will Ms. Emerson die or retire, and if so, can her army hope to continue without her? Or will her reign go on forever until every student at Trent's school is brainwashed and under Ms. Emerson's control?
In conclusion... wow. I did not expect this response to come to that dramatic of an ending. Umm... see you next response for more half-baked conspiracy theories, I guess.

# data[].attributes.body
Time taken: 139
Pages of book: 289
I'll admit, I was a bit disappointed when the thing the book had been hinting up to all along happened.
The book is about Trent Zimmerman, a baseball-watching fanatic (a fact which is stressed beyond belief in the first half of the book and almost completely ignored in the second) who also might join the baseball team. This is literally the entire main conflict of the book. Hmm... to join the team where I'll have a great time and there'll be no risk, or not to join the team, where I'll have no excuse to get out of spending time with my father that I hate? Truly a difficult question.
And you would think, you would think that he'd at least want to play in gym class, where there's less risk and much greater rewards, but no. He literally sits on the bleachers and does nothing all gym class. He literally does not realize that it will affect his grade at all until the book's practically over.
Then again, you can't really blame Trent for shying away from sports. He did kill a kid last year playing hockey.
The reason Trent doesn't want to play baseball, which he loves, or even participate in gym class, is because last year, he killed Jared Richards when he accidentally hit a hockey puck into Jared's chest. Jared just so happened to have had a heart defect, and that hockey puck caused his death. This, understandably, makes Trent feel terrible, and he spends the whole book grieving about it.
Then he meets Fallon Little, the girl with possibly the strangest name on the planet. Fallon doesn't care about what anyone thinks and always seems really brave, and she has a scar that comes down right between her eyes. Pretty much everyone asks her about it, so she tells people a different story every time.
At the end of the book, Trent pretty much moves on from the accident and Fallon finally tells him the real story of how she got her scar.
The obvious choice of object to represent this story would be a baseball, since it's Trent's obsession and the book is literally named after the idea of a ball - or a moment in time - getting 'lost in the sun' - you're so busy trying to shield your eyes that you can't see the opportunity as it passes by. However, I instead chose to represent 'Lost in the Sun' with this claw machine.
The idea of a claw machine metaphor is mentioned in the prologue and never brought up again, which was kind of disappointing, because I thought it was a good idea and should've come up at the end of the book or something. The prologue tells of how Trent, his older brother Aaron, and his younger brother Doug spent forty-eight dollars over the course of six months trying to get a toy out of a claw machine that was located at his family's favorite restaurant. Finally, the owner of the restaurant, feeling terrible about having wasted the kids' money, showed them that the claw machine was rigged, and no matter how good of an aim you had, the claw was too weak and the stuffed animals were packed in too tightly for even one of them to be pulled out. Trent mentions how this is a metaphor for his life - how, no matter how hard he tries, there are too many events packed around when he killed Jared for that moment to be pulled out of time. This is a pretty good metaphor for Trent's life, but it also works for the book as a whole.
All throughout the book, Trent is trying to metaphorically pull that moment out of history. He fills a notebook with what-ifs - what if Trent had declined the offer to play hockey? What if Jared hadn't been there at that exact moment? What if Trent hadn't hit the puck? He's trying to pull it out of time in his mind by picturing what would have happened if Jared were still alive. But in the end, he accepts that the claw is too weak, that the moment is too tightly packed in. He can't pull it out, no matter how hard he tries. Instead, he helps others beat their own personal 'claw machines', ones that aren't rigged,, ones that can actually be won. For instance, Fallon has a recurring nightmare that she's trapped somewhere and something is coming right at her, but she can't scream. She's terrified of not being able to scream in real life, knowing that she'd never find out until it was too late. Trent takes her to a deserted beach, and together they discover that yes, Fallon can scream. It provides relief to her, knowing that if she's in that life-or-death scenario, her voice won't let her down. He helps Noah become less of a loser, actually make a real friend, and reconcile with their least favorite teacher. In doing so, he's able to accept that this claw machine is just unbeatable. Sometimes, it just can't be won. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't help others beat their own claw machines. And who knows? Maybe one day, after you help them beat it, they'll share the prize with you.
In conclusion, reality is an illusion, the universe is a hologram, buy gold.

# data[].attributes.body
Time taken: 168 minutes
Pages of book: 248
This book contained something special. Something highly unusual in a book featuring high school students. Something almost unthinkable.
A MAIN CHARACTER WHO WASN'T A TOTAL JERK!!!!
That being said, however, it also did one thing I hate but occurs all too often in books - the strong, independent female character falls in love with an important male character.
Seriously!!!! WHY?????? I mean, not that Nathaniel isn't a nice guy and all, but still! Jessa, you're an amazing person, and just because Nathaniel has a crush on you and he's a nice guy does NOT mean that you have to fall in love with him!!!!
If this were just an isolated incident, I'd probably be okay. Sure, her feelings for him kinda seem like they come out of nowhere, but still, I think they'd be a good couple. They're both smart, they're both great musicians, and (the only one that anyone ever seems to care about) they're both attractive. All in all, it's not that much of a big deal on its own...
...except that it's in EVERY SINGLE BOOK ABOUT HIGH SCHOOL EVER.
Seriously, I challenge anyone who reads this to try to find a book about high schoolers where there is no romantic interaction between the main male character and the main female character in any way, shape, or form. (No, really. I'm pretty sure it can't be done.)
Anyway, that's not really an issue I have with the book - in fact, it's probably one of the books that pulls off this overused idea the best - just with this idea as a whole. Books need to use this less!!
But anyway. Back to the book.
I was pretty surprised not to find many issues with this book. The main character, Nathaniel, has Asperger's syndrome and an IQ of 182. He's been on a quest to become a genius since he was young and read that a genius must significantly contribute to the outside world in order to officially be considered a genius. While the top page of Google's search results begs to differ, if you want to waste your life to become something Google claims you already are, fine. Go ahead. The only things standing in Nathaniel Gideon Clark's way are a jerk father, the occasional bout of mania, his awkward relationship with Jessa, and the fact that he can't really think of any ways to become a genius.
Naturally, since he's the protagonist, he gets everything he wants, overcomes every obstacle that could possibly dare to face him, and lives happily ever after at the end of the book.
While I certainly did want to see Nathaniel succeed, it felt like kind of a cop-out. In my opinion, bittersweet endings are always the best. When done correctly, fully good endings can be satisfying, too, and this one kind of did it correctly but mostly didn't. Nothing is lost, everything is gained.
Other than that, though, it was a pretty good book. There was another thing besides making the main character not a jerk that it did well, a bold move that, to my knowledge, has never been attempted before in the fiction genre of literature.
The rich, spoiled kid wasn't a total jerk.
Almost every book I've ever read acts like being rich and having amazing things automatically makes you a bad person. Cooper, Nathaniel's best friend, proves these books wrong. He's helpful, nice, and friendly, and when Nathaniel accidentally gets drunk at a party and the alcohol has a negative reaction to the medication he's on, Cooper calls Nathaniel's parents and assures them that Nathaniel didn't know there was alcohol in the punch he drank and Cooper didn't even know he was at the party and would've stopped him otherwise. All in all, Cooper is a good friend. Plus, he's actually smart! He plays guitar and writes instrument parts during lunch for a song Nathaniel wrote. It took him one lunch period to write guitar and piano parts for a song. While he may not be the best academically (his algebra teacher calls him hopeless and his grandmother calls him a 'trust-fund slacker') he's creative, rich, and kind, an extremely unusual combination, especially in realistic fiction.
However, those were also the reasons I felt like his storyline should've been expanded on more.
As I mentioned before, Cooper's grandmother calls him a trust-fund slacker. However, this is really only established to guilt-trip Nathaniel into helping Cooper and is never brought up again. I would've loved to see some dramatic plot twist where it turned out Cooper was lying or his grandmother was dead or something. The story should've at least included a line from his grandmother at the end, telling Cooper either how proud of him she was or that this didn't matter at all in her eyes and he still needed to do better. However, there's absolutely no payoff. While it's not really a big deal, some of my favorite books have had minor details that turned out to be tremendously important later on in the book or series. Just saying, 'Mindblind' was good, but it could've been a whole lot better.
There are a lot of examples of things like this throughout the book. It seems more intent on telling a story as clear-cut and uncomplicated as possible than creating a sense of underlying mystery or even developing the characters to their maximum potential, and I can't fault it for that, but it makes rereading it very unsatisfying. With a lot of my favorite books, you catch something in your second read-through of it that you didn't understand before. I realize that this book wasn't set up to do this - that the plot is best kept simple, since it's pretty good as is. So am I wrong to fault the book for this? Probably. Do I expect every book to follow through on a full-fleshed plotline for every throwaway comment or random detail again? Yep. Do I expect every book to be Harry Potter? Pretty much. Should I expect every book to be Harry Potter? Never, except when it actually is Harry Potter. Will I in the future - I should stop.
Okay. Tangent of the day over. Back to the response.
Another obstacle Nathaniel encounters on his journey to greatness is his father. Why can books never have loving, supporting fathers who are behind their sons 100%? This is a parent who forces Nathaniel to go to a party where he suspects there will be drugs and/or alcohol (and, because it's teenagers and it's a party, there are both) when Nathaniel needs to work on his college application to MIT. Nathaniel accidentally gets drunk, the alcohol reacts badly to some medication he's on, and he completely loses control of himself before passing out for hours, maybe even days. And the father's reaction to this? He apologizes to Nathaniel's friends for Nathaniel not being able to control himself. Nice parental support, Dad. 10/10. Clap and a half.
Despite the jerk father part, though, I found Nathaniel pretty relatable. His mood had a tendency to go from ecstatic to full-on depressed within seconds, he wasn't very popular, and he had an extremely good memory. (Okay, his is more photographic than good, but still.) And he was amazing at math...
I'm okay at math.
NATHANIEL, WHY DO WE HAVE EVERYTHING IN COMMON BUT YOUR MOST USEFUL TRAIT?!?!?!?
GRR. FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ARE THE WORST!!!!
Not really.
...
SERIOUSLY, I WAS KIDDING!
...
There are a lot of fictional characters out there that I have to apologize too.
But really, Nathaniel, I'm jealous. He wouldn't have gotten a C- on that math quiz.
In conclusion, this book was, even by my standards, pretty good. There were a couple of things that I felt should've been more developed and a few things I thought shouldn't have been included, but I'm a really harsh critic who expects every book to follow through on minuscule details as well as the Harry Potter series, so I'm probably not the best judge of that. Nathaniel Gideon Clark, no matter what you do, I will look for you. I will find you.
AND I WILL STEAL YOUR MATH SKILLS.
Just kidding. Mostly.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Year in the Life of a Complete and Total Genius by Stacey Matson

# data[].attributes.subject
A Year in the Life of a Complete and Total Genius by Stacey Matson

# data[].attributes.body
Time taken: 149 minutes
Pages of book: 267
I've read a lot of books with hate-able protagonists that we're apparently supposed to root for, but Arthur Bean, the main character of this book, takes the cake.
Basically, his entire character arc is as follows: Arthur's mother dies, Arthur is sad, Arthur is bullied just a little bit by Robbie Zack, Arthur insults Robbie's intelligence at every chance he gets and then wonders why the bullying gets worse, Arthur is sadder, Arthur discovers a writing contest, Arthur is happy, Arthur is lazy and doesn't write a story for the contest in time, Arthur is sad and blames literally everyone except himself, Arthur bribes Robbie Zack into giving Arthur Robbie's amazing story, Arthur wins contest, Arthur gets caught, Arthur faces literally no consequences for it, Arthur is happy, Arthur goes through literally no real character development.
I will give Arthur a little credit: while the things he writes often involve making fun of his teachers and killing Robbie Zack, they're often very funny and clever. For example, when they get an assignment to write about their favorite author, Arthur writes about his future self, since he plans on being an author one day. While this definitely was not what the substitute teacher meant (their actual teacher had broken a bone and thus was in the hospital recovering) and she was right to take points off, I thought her response to it was pretty over the top. She called it "a snide mocking of the assignment" and "juvenile, unoriginal, and rude". Jeez, Mrs. Carrell! While I will admit that it's pretty juvenile, it does seem very original and I don't even know how she arrived at 'rude'. Arthur, however, makes a comeback. In an assignment to write a diary entry from the point of view of a secondary character in a story, he chooses a book about witches and makes the evil witch a substitute teacher who plans to bore her students to death, claiming that there's no way it could be based on Mrs. Carrell because Mrs. Carrell is a substitute English teacher and the witch in his diary entry is a substitute math teacher. It was actually pretty funny, and after receiving another extremely overkill note from Mrs. Carrell, Arthur writes an incredibly passive-aggressive apology letter in which he says that "I realize that, even though my assignments still followed all the rules you set out, they weren't written 'properly'. I now understand that I should've written my assignments in the same way that everyone else wrote them and that creativity can be very subjective." Wow. If I had been forced to write an apology letter to Mrs. Carrell, I definitely wouldn't have been brave enough to write it with that level of sarcasm. Artie may be a jerk, but he is pretty funny.
That alone can't save his character, though, since Arthur Bean comes close to being actually evil. He's convinced that Mrs. Carrell is conspiring against him because she "gives the class homework even though the deadline for the short story contest is only a week away". Yes, Arthur, you are at the center of the universe and the only reason anyone inconveniences a group you are a part of in any way, shape, or form is to stop you and you alone from turning in a project you should've finished already. Obviously. I don't know how everyone hasn't realized this. (Sorry, some of Arthur leaked into my writing there.)
And that's only one example of Arthur's terrible-person-ness! (Hey, I couldn't think of a better word for it.) When he makes a mistake, he blames everyone - everyone but Kennedy Laurel, his father, and himself. Sure, after Kennedy Laurel 'breaks up' with him (they were only even in a relationship to begin with in Arthur's poor, deluded mind), he does blame himself and get very self-destructive, but in his journal he laments about this being "worse than when Mom died".
No, I am not making this up. He cares more about a girl breaking up with him even though they weren't even really in a relationship more than he does about his mom dying. I don't know if this is typical behavior for seventh-grade boys. If it is - never mind, there's absolutely no excuse for that.
All throughout the book, he's selfish and rude and insults the intelligence of his classmates. And guess what? Except for a few 'see me after class' notes and the occasional harsh comment from Mrs. Carrell, Arthur faces literally no repercussions for it. Sure, he ends up making friends with Robbie Zack by the end of the book, but that doesn't mean Arthur feels bad for treating him like trash the whole book or that he's learned anything from his mistakes. He's constantly inflating his own ego, convincing himself that Kennedy Laurel likes him even though she totally doesn't and he really needs to stop acting like he's the only one in the world who she should ever be in a relationship with because she's actually an amazing person and a way better writer than he is, and he doesn't know whether artists eat hamburgers. Isn't it obvious, Arthur? Artists don't eat hamburgers. We eat cheeseburgers. Duh. Everything else is potentially water under the bridge, but this???? If you have to ask whether artists eat hamburgers, you really shouldn't be an artist.
(Unless you're one of those beings with unspeakable willpower that have the power to destroy all us meat-eaters - what are they called? Oh, yeah, vegetarians. Then you probably shouldn't be eating cheeseburgers. People claim that the next phase in their evolution is 'vegan', but honestly, given what I've heard about them, I don't think vegans exist. Either that, or they're aliens. I know vegetarians must be, since I've tried to become vegetarian no less than three times in my life and failed every time and - okay, I really need to stop this tangent; it's been going on for way too long already and has almost nothing to do with the book.)
Anyway, in conclusion, Arthur is a total jerk to everyone around him. Unless you're an extremely pretty female or in his immediate family, Arthur will hate you no matter what you do. If you thought that no one that un-ironically enjoyed knitting could possibly be a bad person, think again.