Author Lev Grossman talks about plot. Literary novels often turned away from the straightforward concerns of storytelling; writing became what was good for you, rather than what you enjoyed. Maybe things are changing?
LG: It's not easy to put your finger on what exactly is so disgraceful about our attachment to storyline. Sure, it's something to do with high and low and genres and the canon and such. But what exactly? Part of the problem is that to find the reason you have to dig down a ways, down into the murky history of the novel. There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot... More.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Kids reading, a different perspective
This is an interesting follow-up, also from the NY Times, to our last post. What's wrong with teachers just getting kids to read? Beats kids not reading, right? Whether or not kids should read the classics (or maybe we should say "classics") is an interesting point, but just having kids read has to, at some point, be the priority.
NYT: The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools... Starting this fall, the school district in Chappaqua, N.Y., is setting aside 40 minutes every other day for all sixth, seventh and eighth graders to read books of their own choosing... More.
NYT: The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools... Starting this fall, the school district in Chappaqua, N.Y., is setting aside 40 minutes every other day for all sixth, seventh and eighth graders to read books of their own choosing... More.
Reading for points
This is a rather disturbing article in the NY Times, about how kids get points for reading books. Nothing wrong with kids reading books, but the question is raised about the quantification of the process. Gossip Girl = 8 points, Hamlet = 7 points?
NYT: Accelerated Reader, introduced in 1986, is currently used in more than 75,000 schools, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. The Web site for Renaissance Learning, which owns the program, describes it as a way to build “a lifelong love of reading and learning.” As a novelist and mother of three passionate readers, I’m all for that. But when I looked closer at how the program helps “guide students to the right books,” as the Web site puts it, I was disheartened... More.
NYT: Accelerated Reader, introduced in 1986, is currently used in more than 75,000 schools, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. The Web site for Renaissance Learning, which owns the program, describes it as a way to build “a lifelong love of reading and learning.” As a novelist and mother of three passionate readers, I’m all for that. But when I looked closer at how the program helps “guide students to the right books,” as the Web site puts it, I was disheartened... More.
Ragtime revisited
E. L. Doctorow has a new novel out. The L. A. Times was not enthusiastic about it (which won't stop me from reading it anyhow, given the ELD is one of my favorite writers), but they then went back and looked at Ragtime, their praise for which was ebullient. Makes you definitely want to read that one, anyhow. (By the way, I hear they're reviving the Broadway play, which was not bad, but it wasn't the book.)
LAT: Freud and Jung travel together through Coney Island's Tunnel of Love. Pierpont Morgan causes himself to be locked one night in the Great Pyramid at Giza, where he is attacked by bedbugs...To make something never made before, yet comfortable and familiar, strange yet not estranging: there's a death-defying trick, the kind of escape from mortality the long-gone Houdini will relish... More.
LAT: Freud and Jung travel together through Coney Island's Tunnel of Love. Pierpont Morgan causes himself to be locked one night in the Great Pyramid at Giza, where he is attacked by bedbugs...To make something never made before, yet comfortable and familiar, strange yet not estranging: there's a death-defying trick, the kind of escape from mortality the long-gone Houdini will relish... More.
Friday, August 28, 2009
The American McGirl
The American Girl book series seems to have a girl for everyone. We love any series that gets kids reading, so even though the following story may not be to our personal taste (I haven't had a McDonald's meal since 2008, and then there was the one before that in 2007...), it's fine with us.
Amazon Daily: With so many great restaurants, coffee shops and bakeries in Seattle, my family rarely visits fast-food chains. But there I was, yesterday, in the McDonald's drive-thru, ordering a Happy Meal. Not for the Chicken McNuggets, mind you, though it was lunchtime. The real reason we were in line was for the American Girl toy... More.
Amazon Daily: With so many great restaurants, coffee shops and bakeries in Seattle, my family rarely visits fast-food chains. But there I was, yesterday, in the McDonald's drive-thru, ordering a Happy Meal. Not for the Chicken McNuggets, mind you, though it was lunchtime. The real reason we were in line was for the American Girl toy... More.
The kids are all writing
We worry so much about kids today. We hear all sorts of things (much of it absolute nonsense) about the death of literacy. This article in Wired may change your thinking.
Wired: As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write—and technology is to blame... An age of illiteracy is at hand, right? Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose... Her conclusions are stirring. "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says... More.
Wired: As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can't write—and technology is to blame... An age of illiteracy is at hand, right? Andrea Lunsford isn't so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose... Her conclusions are stirring. "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says... More.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Domenick Dunne by Tina Brown
Probably the absolute perfect person to write a remembrance of writer Dunne is editor Brown of The Daily Beast.
TB: What does it take to be a great social chronicler? Perhaps one of the key attributes is an understanding of what it feels like to fall from grace. Dominick Dunne, the best-selling novelist and defining voice for so many years of Vanity Fair magazine who died of cancer Wednesday at 83, was living proof that the best qualification for a writer’s life is a checkered past... More.
TB: What does it take to be a great social chronicler? Perhaps one of the key attributes is an understanding of what it feels like to fall from grace. Dominick Dunne, the best-selling novelist and defining voice for so many years of Vanity Fair magazine who died of cancer Wednesday at 83, was living proof that the best qualification for a writer’s life is a checkered past... More.
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