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  • Ten Modern Books Every Student Should Read (French version available)

    Ten Modern Books Every Student Should Read (French version available)

    Do you groan when you hear about the books you “should” be reading in High School? Do you roll your eyes when your parents or teachers mention “Catcher in the Rye”, “Fahrenheit 451” or “To Kill a Mockingbird”? While these are indubitably classics, and you should read them, fear not. Here is a list of ten modern takes on those classic themes. Even better, they all have film adaptations!

    1. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
    This is a heartbreaking story about two teenagers falling in love in the face of terminal illness. It’s a raw, irreverent look at what it means to really be alive.

    2. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
    Charlie is a mentally challenged patient who undergoes a boost in intelligence in a medical experiment. His journey mirrors that of a mouse named Algernon, also in the same medical trial.

    3. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
    Set in 1960’s Mississippi, this story explores lines between race and class during a violent period of America’s history. Three extraordinary women are introduced as they navigate race relations in the suburban south.

    4. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
    This book follows Oskar as he pieces together clues left behind by his father, killed in the 9-11 attacks in New York. He explores themes surrounding the bombings of Hiroshima and Dresden to find a sense of peace while solving the mystery.

    5. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
    This murder mystery, told from the unique vantage point of a teenaged rape-murder victim, displays the grief and frustration of a family who lost a daughter too soon.

    6. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
    A post-apocalyptic story of a communist-like government, keeping citizens in line using a yearly survivor game. Likened to Lord of the Flies by some, the story evolves into one of revolution, love, and survival against all odds.

    7. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
    This book follows Charlie, a shy introverted student, learning to live his life from the fringes.

    8. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
    Pi is a Tamil boy who survived over two hundred days lost at sea with a Bengal tiger. This is his story, which explores the theme of spirituality and faith vs practicality.

    9. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
    This book, set in the south of 1964, explores racism, family, and divine female power through Lily and her adoptive mother.

    10. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
    A science fiction read that explores childhood, war, and leadership. Ender is a very young genetically enhanced child beginning military training with his friends to become a leader to save the world.

    Hopefully this list provided new reading material, as well as new authors to explore. Happy reading, and while we’re at it, consider checking out: Orwell’s Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, or anything by William Shakespeare. With themes spanning coming of age, jealousy, good and evil, and human morals, these stories never go out of style.

  • The Importance of Reading in Every-Day Life

    The Importance of Reading in Every-Day Life

    All learning is important, but some areas are more important than others. Suppose that you needed to do a math problem or a science experiment. Both of those tasks would involve reading. Being able to read well is an essential skill in school and later in life.

    Most people learn to read early in life, either before they start school or in the first year,

    but not everyone reads much outside their classes. When they graduate and go to work, they might read even less as life gets busy for them. However, people need a lot of practice

    in reading so they can continue to learn and to understand more about themselves and the people around them.

    People read all the time, even if they do not think about it. Reading comes in many forms, including medicine bottle instructions, street signs, and cookie recipes. For some people, an ability to read well can make the difference between passing or failing a course, or possibly getting a job or not.

    The need for reading in a career like teaching is obvious, but even many very physically active fields need a certain level of reading. Truck drivers, for example, need to read highway and street signs to know what road to take, and they need to be able to fill out government forms and other documents. Gardeners need to be able to read the labels of weed killers or fertilizers to avoid harming the plants.

    People might think that the only important reading is whatever relates to their own fields, but that is a mistake. A wide range of reading, including fiction, can help build up people’s vocabulary and make it easier for them to learn what they need to know.

    For example, suppose that you wanted to become a doctor. You would need to know technical terms like fibula and capillaries, but you would also need to know a lot of other words that join the technical terms together. If you become a historian, you will need to know many different words that might not be directly related to your field but which are important for understanding a text.

    Still, not all reading is equally helpful. Reading a cereal box or a comic book is a good start, but people are unlikely to learn much vocabulary or to explore new ways of expressing themselves from them. Magazines can be good, but the length of books can often be helpful in teaching people to concentrate for longer periods of time. Most university students and many workers need to have this kind of ability to focus, and reading books can help.

    Do you have a special interest like reptiles or trees or maybe spies and codebreaking? You can use these interests to practice your reading skills. If you come across new words, you can write them down and then look them up in a dictionary or ask someone about them later on. However you practice your reading skills, it will help you now and in the future.

    Bibliography:

    Cohen, Kat. “The Truth About Outside Reading: Why It’s Important and What to Read.”
    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kat-cohen/the-truth-about-outside-r_b_5997698.html.

    Green, Tim. “17 Reasons Why Reading is Important for Children and Adults.”
    http://timgreensyracuse.org/17-reasons-why-reading-is-important-for-children-and-adults/

    Mississippi College. “Importance of Reading for Elementary Students.”
    https://online.mc.edu/articles/education/reading-for-elementary-students.aspx.

    PBS.org. “The Importance of Reading.” http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/learning-disabilities/types/reading/the-importance-of-reading/.

    Pearson.com. “Why Reading is Important.”
    https://www.pearson.com/uk/learners/primary-parents/learn-at-home/help-your-child-to-enjoy-reading/why-is-reading-so-important.html

  • Five Books to Have Under Your Belt by High School

    Five Books to Have Under Your Belt by High School

    Finding a book to read can feel daunting. It seems like there are countless choices. If you ask Google how many books there are in the world, the answer is close to 130 million. There may not be enough time to read them all, but the ones you do read can have a huge impact on your life. Here are five books you will want to have read before you start high school:

    1. Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
    The age difference of 10-year-old Winnie and 17-year-old Jessie Tuck is more than what it appears to be. The Tucks are actually immortal, and the spring water that made them this way is not only available to Winnie to drink, but causes more problems than expected for everyone. Death and the restricted nature of life are difficult things for children to ponder about, and it does not get much easier as an adult. This book explores that idea through the gift of eternal life, and shows that it may not be such a gift after all.

    2. Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
    A collection of absurd poems and drawings unlike any other, this is essential reading to blossom your imagination and hold onto the madcap creativity so many of us lose as we enter adulthood. From the craziness of dancing pants to the moral qualms related to not taking the garbage out, the book has inspired children of all ages for years.

    3. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
    You probably know all about the epic movie trilogy about the small hobbit creature who helps a band of dwarves battle a daunting dragon. What you might not know is that the 1937 book it is based on is actually a much smaller and quirkier tale. Bilbo Baggins is plucked out of the peaceful Shire to take back the treasure stolen by Smaug, and the imaginative world Tolkien created has inspired children and creators for decades since.

    4. I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai & Christina Lamb
    A more recent book, this inspiring true story talks about author Malala Yousafzai’s fight for education and equal rights for women. She was shot in the head while riding a school bus because of the Taliban’s beliefs about women’s education. Her miraculous survival and inspiring work since then makes this a must-read and a critical dose of optimism and hope in our modern age.

    5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
    Topical books are not necessarily just for their time. This 1960 novel is the timeless story told from the perspective of a young girl named Scout as she watches her heroic lawyer father, Atticus Finch, defends a black man on trial for rape in a heavily racist town. The issues of rape and racism are used to dive into human nature and the moral dilemmas we all face. Some people get away with horrible crimes, and some innocent people face undeserved punishments, but an individual’s actions can still have a huge impact.

    Sources:
    Goodreads. Popular Read Before High School Books. https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/read-before-high-school

    Parr, Ben. Google: There are 129,864,880 Books in the Entire World. http://mashable.com/2010/08/05/number-of-books-in-the-world/#RTvrwKODfEqz

  • Reading and You: Why it is Important

    Reading and You: Why it is Important

    We do not always get to choose what we read in school, in fact often times the books are chosen by teachers or predetermined by a course pack. This can make the action of reading seem chore-like and dull. Maybe every so often there is a book thrown in the mix that you actually like, but reading has become so much like work that you don’t enjoy it as much as you could. Reading is an essential part of school because it helps to shape the way you learn for the rest of your life. Here are some important skills that reading creates:

    • Language skills—Reading helps develop your vocabulary and strong language skills will make written and oral reports much easier as you get older.
    • Communication and speech skills—Communication skills will help you in many academic and even non-academic facets with friends and group hobby events. Having these skills builds your ability for leadership. Speech skills make social interactions more easy and enjoyable, and making a positive impression while applying for jobs easier.
    • Logical thinking— Reading helps to create problem solving and logic techniques that can help you in every portion of your life.

    Reading generates a kind of escapism that speaks to anyone with any interest. It allows you to visualize for yourself what you read on the page. You are given the blueprints—like directions for a model toy—and your imagination gets to fill in the rest. The main thing to remember is that, yes, reading is important. But it can also be fun! Here are some tips to help you turn a necessary thing into a fun one:

    Get recommendations from people you admire.
    Do you have an adult that you look up to? A celebrity? A comic book hero? Do you admire what they do and wish you could do it too? Look in to what they like to read!

    Associate reading with your hobby.
    What is your love? Do you love movies? Read a book on the best films of the last ten years. Do you love to play video games? Find what book or graphic novel it was based on. Do you like playing sports? Read the reviews of your favorite games and athlete interviews. By associating your favorite things with reading you happily invite the skills it creates with open arms.

    Keep a journal.
    Maybe you love to daydream. Make your own material you can read. Write in a journal and then review it every month. If you do not like a poem a teacher made you read in school, write your own! Get into the habit of writing responses to what you are forced to read. Use language to your advantage and create something YOU would love to read.

  • Job Profile: Book Publisher

    Job Profile: Book Publisher

    Books are amazing things. You can pick one up and travel to a world of elves, fairies, and exciting adventures. Or you can pick up another one to find out about the history of ancient Rome or about how beavers live and what part they play in the natural world. You can read a long novel or a short magazine article. Most of the time, the stories and information you read have gone through a publisher before they came to you.

    What actually happens when an author wants to get a book published? Sometimes they publish the books themselves, but often they want the skills and knowledge of a publisher to help them with the process. Most publishing companies have different people who each focus on one part of the process. In smaller companies, one or two people might do all of the different steps.

    The first step is usually deciding which books to publish. Sometimes, this means that an acquisitions editor will spend a lot of time reading books that people have sent in to the publisher.  The next step is editing for any problems with the book. These problems could be about the book’s contents, such as incorrect information or a confusing story line. The problems could also be much simpler issues of proofreading, such as writing “pan” instead of “pane” in a story.

    Once the editing is done, the book will go to the design department where people will decide what picture to have on the cover, the size of the type font, and anything else that affects the appearance or design of the book. Even electronic (online) books need this kind of work before they are ready for sale.

    Publishers are good at taking care of the many small jobs that are part of getting books ready for sale. One of these jobs is getting the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) and the Cataloguing in Publication information, which helps librarians to organize the books they buy. Another task is deciding what the price should be.

    After all of these small jobs are done, the book is ready to be printed and marketed.  Marketing is what happens when a publisher lets people know about a new book or magazine. They might put up posters, pay for advertisements, or go on tours to talk about what they have to sell. They might set up tables at special events and have some of the books and magazines for sale.

    How do people become publishers? Sometimes all it takes is knowledge of how to sell books and the money to set up a small company. At other times, it might mean getting a low-level job at a publishing company and then learning enough to get a higher-level job. Sometimes an education in business or literature is helpful. People can work in small, local companies or in big, international ones. If you love books and you also love to organize events and keep schedules, work as a publisher might be the right thing for you.

  • Study Help: The Best Websites for English Literature

    Study Help: The Best Websites for English Literature

    Studying English literature might seem like a very easy thing, with nothing complicated about it. You just pick up a book and read it, right? Reading is a large part of the work, but it can often be more complicated than it seems. Students often need help with understanding what the texts really mean and sometimes even with just finding the texts. A library is always a good source of information in this area, but sometimes students want the convenience of looking online. But how do you find the best and most helpful websites?

    When you study English literature, the first thing to do is to read the texts. You might read modern books by authors like Margaret Atwood or you might read ancient texts by authors like the Greek writer Sophocles. Most of the modern books are easy to find in bookstores and libraries, but the older ones might be a bit more difficult to find. You also might not want to spend a lot of money on buying books that you expect to read only for your classes. In many cases, you can solve this problem by finding the books online. If the book was written over seventy-five years ago, you can likely find the full text on websites like Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/), the Literature Network (http://www.literature.org/) or Adelaide e-books (http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/meta/titles/A.html).

    Why are only older books available on websites like these ones? It’s because as long as the authors are alive, they or their relatives own the copyright to the work. No one is allowed to reprint it without the author’s or publisher’s permission for at least fifty or seventy-five years after the author’s death. After that, however, the literary works are normally in the public domain, which means that they can be freely republished anywhere, including on the Internet.

    Finding places to read literature is the first step, but students sometimes need a bit more help. The Literature Network (http://www.online-literature.com) gives the full texts of many books and poems, but it also includes biographical and historical information. Do you need to know what Renaissance or Victorian literature was like? You can find out about these eras on the Literature Network. The site also includes quotations and many different kinds of information that can help people understand how literature reflects the history and culture of each time period.

    Understanding the background to literature is essential to understanding what it is about, but sometimes readers need an even more basic level of help. Writers from previous centuries often used a vocabulary and writing style that modern readers might find difficult to understand. Sometimes, the meanings of words change from one century to another. At other times, writers from different eras wrote very complicated works with advanced vocabulary. However, there is help for people reading difficult texts. The Visual Thesaurus VocabGrabber (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber) can help translate sections of text into something more manageable for modern readers.

    If studying English literature is difficult for you, you might want to check some of these websites for information that can help you.