Reading List C2 2011-2012

Readers C 2

Your assignments are:

A) You will choose a book to read. Tell your teacher which book you have chosen. (Deadline: 31 Oct.). You will then read the book.

B) You will prepare a short presentation about it. You can also include your favourite quotes from the book and add some explanations. You can also try to convince the class that the book you have chosen should (not) be on the Reading List next year. (February)

Reading List 2011-2012 (suggestions)

1. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a 2007 novel by Afghan author Khaled Hosseini, his second, following his bestselling 2003 debut, The Kite Runner. It focuses on the tumultuous lives of two Afghan women and how their lives cross each other, spanning from the 1960s to 2003. 384 pages.
2. Saturday is a novel by British author Ian McEwan, first published in 2005. set in London, on Saturday, 15 February 2003, during a large demonstration against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The protagonist, Henry Perowne, a 48-year-old neurosurgeon, has planned a series of chores and pleasures culminating in a family dinner in the evening. As he goes about his day he ponders the meaning of the protest and the problems that inspired it, however, the day is disrupted by an encounter with a violent, troubled man. 308 pages.
3.  Notes from a Big Country is a collection of articles written by Bill Bryson for The Mail on Sunday from 1996 to 1998. The book was published in 1998. When Bill Bryson returned to the USA he was asked to write a weekly column about what life was like in the big country. The results, combined here to make a book, are funny and insightful, making you snigger. Full of descriptions and statistics. 368 pages.
4.  The Island is a historical novel written by Victoria Hislop in 2005. It has won several awards. Set on the island of Spinalonga, off the coast of Crete, The Island tells the story of Alexis Fielding, a teenager on the cusp of a life-changing decision. Alexis knows little or nothing about her family's past and has always resented her mother for refusing to discuss it. She knows only that her mother, Sofia, grew up in Plaka, a small Cretan village, before moving to London. Making her first visit to Crete to see the village where her mother was born, Alexis discovers that the village of Plaka faces the small, now deserted island of Spinalonga, which, she is shocked and surprised to learn was Greece's leper colony for much of the 20th century. 320 pages.
5.  Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of theDog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by Jerome K. Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers — the jokes seem fresh and witty even today. 184 pages.