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Playing off of identity...

rachelr's picture

 I would really like to read actual books for the second half of the semester, and I am thinking that we could play off of the idea of identity. The Internet and blogs can both over display identity or keep one completely hidden; some people use it as a way to find themselves. And this identity can be found in many different was and for many different reasons. Some of my book suggestions are The Scarlet Letter, The Sound and the Fury, The Time Traveler's Wife, The Book of Salt, Invisible Man, The Lacuna, The Merchant of Venice, Bone (by Fae Myenne Ng), The Elegant Hedgehog… obviously we couldn't read all of these, but they're just a few ideas to choose from.

Comments

rachelr's picture

Yes!

 I would love to read the Poisonwood Bible and We Need to Talk About Kevin. And while I realize that yes, some of the books I suggested are books that some people may have read in school already, several are ones that I fell like many have not read at all let alone studied for a course.

aybala50's picture

Great books!!

 Ok, so going off books that I love. We should read the Poisonwood Bible!!! OH and some other books I thought about are some books by Wally Lamb. I just love Wally Lamb...maybe "She's Come Undone"?? or "I Know This Much Is True"???? OR we could read this great book "We Need to Talk About Kevin" these books are more contemporary, but very good. I would however still be interested in reading an older book. 

Herbie's picture

Skepticism

I'm not sure that it would be as interesting to cover a genre of literature that could easily be read in another class or that was covered in our high school curricula.  I would much rather pursue a new type of "literature" and learn something new rather than covering things that have been dnoe before in other classes.

xhan's picture

 whoo! i really like the idea

 whoo! i really like the idea of reading books with a particular theme, and identity sounds something would work really well. i also want to read books for the upcoming semester. I was wondering if people wanted to read a number of books by the same author, for example, we could all read ann rand's the fountainhead and atlas shrugged. Since these may be rather long, we could probably just read excerpts of it. Or we could read Barara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible and The Prodigals Summer. 

i think this would be a neat way of exploring genres.  we've talked alot about genres as a whole, but i think that we might want to go into something alittle more specific, now that we've had a more stable foundation on what constitutes genres.  i think choosing which novels to read would depend mainly on what the majority interests are. Kingsolver's novels have a rather "ethereal" writing style; her work was lauded as "literature of change" while Ann Rand's works are more philosophical in nature. We could even read books from different authors and compare and contrast styles so we can better grasp some of the unique aspects of each genre.

rachelr's picture

Common thread

 Ah The Poisonwood Bible is excellent! Actually the book I suggested, The Lacuna, is Kingsolver's newest book. I like your idea of comparing and contrasting style because that can also relate back to blogs and how different types of blogs and bloggers aim to accomplish different things through their writing styles and the information/details that they choose to convey through their posts. 

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