Independent Reading- Reading skills

I am reading the book The Best of Me by Nicholas Sparks. Before I started reading the book I thought the book was going to be about a good time in a characters life. I made this prediction based on the illustration on the cover and the title. The cover image was the front porch of a house. I feel like this represents life because there would be alot of memories there. The title "The Best of Me" made me think that it was referring to the best time in a characters life because that time period is when they would be the best version of themselves. The first line of the book is "For Dawson Cole, the hallucinations began after the explosion on the platform, on the day he should have died." This line I think was a very good first line of a book because it instantly made me interested. I started to wonder if Dawson Cole had been in the military. I also wondered if anyone else died and how the hallucinations were affecting him. A text to world connection I made is in the book Dawson Cole experienced an oil storage tank exploding, and this also happens a lot in the world today like the oil spill in the ocean. A text to text connection is in the book Dawson suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and I read an article that talked about soldiers who are coming home from being deployed and are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.