reading lists part 2

So here are some interesting lists I found. Click on the image to go to the site.

I strongly recommend this well-designed site from The British Council. It has recommended lists for different age levels with specific categories, and the blurbs are interesting and useful. I went in for a quick skim and came out with five new titles I want to read.

This seemed to be a pretty standard list of young reader classics from the American perspective. The same site has other reading lists.

This is a lively list of new stuff to read from New York Public Libraries. NYPL also has the ALA Top Ten Young Adult Books list, with short reviews.

Users can register and vote on books, and those books are assembled into various lists. It's a bit of a mess, but has lots of reviews of lots of books. I linked the teen section but there are many other lists as well.

A review site for 10-15 year olds written by 190-15 year olds. The newest reviews are of books from 2005, so it's not too up to date, but the categories seem useful, and it is well designed and easy to read.

For something more serious, check out a list of 101 Great Books recommended for college applicants.

The Big Read is a American National Endowment for the Arts literacy program, and they have assembled a nicew list of classics of American literature. Of course, it has the same name as the BBC Big Read, a 2003 competiton throught the UK to choose the nation's most popular books. They have ranked them up to 100.

Any other lists to recommend?

reading list part 1

I am often asked about recommended books for different aged students. I have some thoughts about how to choose books to read generally.

• My first recommendation is to go to a library and just start pulling stuff off the shelf. Does the cover look attractive? Is the blurb interesting? Read the first page. Browsing and sampling is what most readers do.


• Choose a genre and start working your way through it. I recommend mysteries, or spy novels, or westerns ... whatever you are interested in.


• Ask friends what they've read, and try out those books.


• I find the Amazon sites useful for finding new books. If you enter a book you like, look at the 'Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought'  listings for more ideas. Also, Listmania! allows Amazon users to make lists of books they like or that fit some category in which they are interested. For instance, I like Boy by Roald Dahl, and I found a list called 'Children's Books I could read forever' put together by a teacher in Norway.

In part 2, I have some links for some interesting and useful online reading lists.

10: Pride and Prejudice commentary assignment

Here's the pdf.

draft due: Monday 11 May
published due: Friday 15 May

9: Network clip

We were talking in class about how a System can be accepted and then opposed. I was reminded of this clip:

11: world lit intro slideshows

Antigone:


Three Sisters:


Mother Courage:

11: Room with a View introduction slideshow

11: Bible help

Literature often has references to the Bible with which you may not be very familiar. The Brick Testament is fun to read and accurate.

11: Frost on Modern American Poetry

Here's the entry for Robert Frost on the Modern American Poetry site.

10: Pride and Prejudice discussion questions, ch. 35-38

Pride and Prejudice discussion questions, ch. 35-38

What to discuss as a class or in small groups and put into your notes:

11: sample planning for 3 Sisters essay

This is the practice we did in class, developing a thesis for a Three Sisters essay.

10: Pride and Prejudice links

Sparknotes summaries

etext of the novel

a hypertext of the novel, with loads of other ways of accessing the novel

For those who want a little more action in the novel, check out this new book:

11: lecture notes for Mother Courage intro.

1. Bertolt Brecht (1898-1955); German political playwright, exiled in 1933

2. Brecht: ‘How can theatre be entertaining and at the same time instructive? How can it be taken out of the traffic in intellectual drugs and transformed from a place of illusion to a place of insight?’

3.Epic, non-Aristotelian or dialectic theatre

4. alienation effects :

• titles


• fragmentation of scenes


• music


• staging: minimalist, but with the texture of reality


• language


• acting style

5. Brecht: ‘What is a performance of Mother Courage & Her Children primarily meant to show?
That in wartime big profits are not made by little people. That war, which is a continuation of business by other means, makes the human virtues fatal even to their possessors. That no sacrifice is too great for the struggle against war.’ (xvii)

6. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648):
Imperial Catholic Germanic states
vs.
Protestant Germanic / Scandinavian states

7. Philosophical position of communism

• dialectic


• minimalism of individuality


• need for action

11A1: The Three Sisters reviews

When studying a play, it can be useful to read reviews of productions of that play. Here are a few I found:

• a NYT review of a 2001 production.


• a nytheatre.com review of a 2009 production

9: Caged Bird map

Here is a map of the locations of the book around the United States. Click the link below to zoom in and see street-level views.

View Larger Map

11: Three Sisters act I movie on YouTube

11: 10 things to know before studying The Three Sisters

12 standard: paper 2 planning

Here's the question we worked with on Wed. 11.3.09:

“What happens in fiction is what distinguishes it…” Using at least two works, show how far your interest in novels and short stories has been based on the events and how much of your interest has been in other aspects?

Here are the notes preparing a thesis statement:

See the great London race!

10: reader response essay

The goal of this essay is to explain how you experienced reading the play relative to specific techniques and elements of the play. In a reader response essay, you may refer to yourself as a reader, (using ‘I’ or ‘we’), explaining how specific elements of the play affected your emotional and intellectual response. You should not express your attitude about the quality of the play: it should analyze the way the author uses the text to have an effect on a specific reader, namely yourself or a reader just like you.

Basically, you are linking technique to the impact it has on the reader, instead of theme. Your thesis statement will identify the specific effect the identified techniques or features have on your reading of the play.

Choose one of the following prompts below: I have listed them in order of increasing difficulty. Again, please choose wisely.

Uploading London photos

I've created a Picasaweb site for our London pictures. Here's the link to see photos.

Here's how to upload photos: