ReadReviewRecommend

The mission of this blog is to get us started to Read what the students want, Review the self-selected readings, and share with the School community. The end result will be the Recommended WORKS for 1-2 months as voted by the students themselves. Students may create a display pairing up fiction with a non-fiction counterpart. The result might be students' answers to "WHAT IF" questions.

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READ, REVIEW, RECOMMEND: Fostering LOVE OF READING

How It Started? Our students love to read. They ask me to recommend the “next” book in a series, a book with a type of character like they just read in another text, etc. To help me in this process, I started to create a matrix with characters along corresponding works. The matrix will be populated with students’ choices. The works could be classical ones, legends and fairy tales, popular texts, movies and songs, all based on the same progenitor work, like Romeo and Juliette by Shakespeare. This work, for example, was used by Tchaikovsky in his ballet, and many others to create original overtures, stories, and films of their own.

The Process. Students read self-selected texts, review, vote, and recommend their BEST BOOKS for the months of… The recommendation is based on students’ voting. These selected books are discussed in small groups in the Library. Many English Department teachers welcome this project and have already agreed to serve as in-resident coaches.

Please use the table below to add your favorite characters and corresponding texts. We may not have time to come to all the texts immediately, but will surely try our BEST! :-)

Types of characters	Works: examples
Young lovers	Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare). Tchaikovsky’s ballet. Twilight.
Prince, the charming	Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Snow White. Sleeping Beauty.
The orphan	Cinderella.
The fool	Also see medieval jesters, the Shakespearian “fool” in King Lear, As You Like It, The Tempest.
Wicked stepmother	Snow White. Cinderella. Shakespeare’s Charles and Mary Lamb.
Strong women	Anne Frank; Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Charlotte Doyle.
Young beautiful maiden	Rapunzel
Alienated	Kafka, The Castle. Saramago, The Cave.
Person doesn’t fit in	The Ugly Duckling.
Cliques	The Clique.
Student – teacher relationship	J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace.
Adventure	Twain’s Tom Sawyer
Strong teens in wars	Esther and Nejma in The Wandering Star (J.M.G. Le Clezio)
Exploited children	Dickens. Gender and class in American fiction.
Vampires, witches	Meyer’s New Moon, Eclipse, Twilight. Bella and the gorgeous vampire (Edward Cullen). Beauty and the Beast. Mother Gothel.
Scapegoat	The real thief; The Gorilla did it; It's not my fault; chicken Sunday, etc.
Your character(tba)	Title(s) of works that include character(s)
Science fiction; Harry Potter; graphic novels, comic books.	The "atomic" era (space travel, invasion, mutants, mad scientists, computers and cyberpunks, virtual reality, viruses, pollution and ecology themes); also see http://www.uchronia.net for a bibl of about 3,000 novels and essays involving "what ifs" of history.

contact: Dr. Ercegovac
zorana.ercegovac@yourschool.org