Sunday, 25 October 2015

Young Book People: some teaching ideas for the class

Young Book People is an exciting new initiative which aims to encourage secondary school pupils to engage with learning and reciting literature.

Our goal is to encourage children to discover the joys of learning and reciting literature, whatever their ‘performance’ level: it’s not about ‘putting on a show’ but about discovering and celebrating the richness of the spoken word, of allowing literature to speak and bringing children’s creative energies to the words of great writers.

The texts

Children can work on any texts for the classroom-based activities but here there’s a list of them that can be used (we’ve selected short fragments from all of them):

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Literary fragments to be used

AMERICAN DREAM

Edward Albee

When you get old, you can't talk to people because people snap at you. That's why you become deaf, so you won't be able to hear people talking to you that way That's why old people die, eventually. People talk to them that way.

BLESS ME, ULTIMA

Rudolfo A. Anaya

I bless you in the name of all that is good and strong and beautiful, Antonio. Always have the strength to live. Love life, and if despair enters your heart, look for me in the evenings when the wind is gentle and the owls sing in the hills. I shall be with you—

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

Lewis Carroll

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after‑time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child‑life, and the happy summer days.

CATHEDRAL

Raymond Carver

And then I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved.

THE BIG SLEEP

Raymond Chandler

I was wearing my powder-blue suit... I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

THE AWAKENING

Kate Chopin

“The years that are gone seem like dreams—if one might go on sleeping and dreaming—but to wake up and find—oh! well! Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life.”

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

Agatha Christie

I have wanted . . . to commit a murder myself. I recognized this as the desire of the artist to express himself! . . . But—incongruous as it may seem to some—I was restrained and hampered by my innate sense of justice. The innocent must not suffer.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

Arthur C. Clarke

The spear, the bow, the gun, and finally the guided missile had given him weapons of infinite range and all but infinite power. Without those weapons, often though he had used them against himself, Man would never have conquered his world. Into them he had put his heart and soul, and for ages they had served him well. But now, as long as they existed, he was living on borrowed time.

Catching Fire

Suzanne Collins

“The bird, the pin, the song, the berries, the watch, the cracker, the dress that burst into flames. I am the mockingjay. The one that survived despite the Capitol's plans. The symbol of the rebellion.”

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

Roald Dahl

“I insist upon my rooms being beautiful! I can’t abide ugliness in factories! In we go, then! But do be careful, my dear children! Don’t lose your heads! Don’t get overexcited! Keep very calm!”

BREATH, EYES, MEMORY

Edwidge Danticat

The female street vendors called to one another as they came down the road. When one merchant dropped her heavy basket, another called out of concern, "Ou libèrè?" Are you free from your heavy load? The woman with the load would answer yes, if she had unloaded her freight without hurting herself.

BLEAK HOUSE

Charles Dickens

It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn thunder, and to see the lightning; and while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are, and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage, which seemed to make creation new again.

ADAM BEDE

George Eliot

See the difference between the impression a man makes on you when you walk by his side in familiar talk, or look at him in his home, and the figure he makes when seen from a lofty historical level, or even in the eyes of a critical neighbor who thinks of him as an embodied system or opinion rather than as a man.

AS I LAY DYING

William Faulkner

[W]ords dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. . . . [M]otherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not.

THE BIRTHMARK

Nathaniel Hawthorne

“[H]ere is a powerful cosmetic. With a few drops of this in a vase of water, freckles may be washed away. . . . A stronger infusion would take the blood out of the cheek, and leave the rosiest beauty a pale ghost. . . . Your case demands a remedy that shall go deeper.”

ACROSS FIVE APRILS

Irene Hunt

It was the saddest and most cruel April of the five. It had held out an almost unbelievable joy and had then struck out in fury at those whose hands were outstretched.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Aldous Huxley

And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.

THE AMERICAN

Henry James

"There's something in your situation that rubs me up. You're the first man about whom I've ever found myself saying 'Oh, if I were he—!' ... It's a sort of air you have of being imperturbably, being irremovably and indestructibly (that's the thing) at home in the world. When I was a boy my father assured me it was by just such an air that people recognized a Bellegarde. He called my attention to it. He didn't advise me to cultivate it; he said that as we grew up it always came of itself. I supposed it had come to me because I think I've always had the feeling it represents. My place in life had been made for me and it seemed easy to occupy.

ANIMAL DREAMS

Barbara Kingsolver

I am the sister who didn't go to war. I can only tell you my side of the story. Hallie is the one who went south, with her pickup truck and her crop-disease books and her heart dead set on a new world.

THE BEAN TREES

Barbara Kingsolver

The whole Tucson Valley lay in front of us, resting in its cradle of mountains. The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.

ANGELS IN AMERICA

Tony Kushne

Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions. So when we think we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.

BIRD BY BIRD

Anne Lamott

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal, but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be part of the solution, to understand a little about life and pass it on.

ARROWSMITH

Sinclair Lewis

Nonsense! That attitude is old-fashioned. This is no longer an age of parochialism but of competition, in art and science just as much as in commerce….

THE CALL OF THE WILD

Jack London

He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it. That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to the reign of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway. The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect and, while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused.

THE ASSISTANT

Bernard Malamud

"She pictured him in nice clothes, his hair cut shorter, maybe his nose straightened, speaking a more careful English, interested in music and literature, learning about politics, psychology, philosophy; wanting to know more the more he knew, in this way growing in value to himself and others."

ANGELA’S ASHES

Frank McCourt

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

BILLY BUDD, SAILOR

Herman Melville

Habitually living with the elements and knowing little more of the land than as a beach, or rather, that portion . . . set apart for dance-houses, doxies, and tapsters, in short what sailors call a “fiddler’s green,” his simple nature remained unsophisticated by those moral obliquities which are not in every case incompatible with that manufacturable thing known as respectability. But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers’ greens, without vices?

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

L. M. Montgomery

“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive—it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?”

BELOVED

Toni Morrison

White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way . . . they were right. . . . But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place. . . . It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread . . . until it invaded the whites who had made it.

THE BLUEST EYE

Toni Morrison

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.

THE BLACK PRINCE

Iris Murdoch

"Of course we argue sometimes. Marriage is a long journey in close quarters. Of course nerves get frayed. Every married person is a Jekyll and Hyde, they've got to be."

1984

George Orwel

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

BEL CANTO

Ann Patchett

“If someone loves you for what you can do then it’s flattering, but why do they love you? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.”

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA

Katherine Paterson

"Jess drew the way some people drank whiskey. The peace would start at the top of his muddled brain and seep down through his tired and tensed-up body. Lord, he loved to draw. Animals, mostly. Not regular animals like Miss Bessie and the chickens, but crazy animals with problems—for some reason he liked to put his beasts into impossible fixes… He would like to show his drawings to his dad, but he didn't dare. When he was in first grade, he told his father than he wanted to be an artist when he grew up. He'd thought he would be pleased. He wasn't. 'What are they teaching in that damn school?' he had asked. 'Bunch of old ladies turning my son into some kind of a—' He had stopped on the word, but Jess had gotten the message. It was one you didn't forget, even after four years."

THE BELL JAR

Sylvia Plath

When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.

ANTHEM

Ayn Rand

There was no pain in their eyes and no knowledge of the agony of their body. There was only joy in them, and pride, a pride holier than it is fit for human pride to be.

ATLAS SHRUGGED

Ayn Rand

Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

J. D. Salinger

“Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.”
“Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.”
Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right—I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.

BABYLON REVISITED

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Again the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare. . . The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

William Shakespeare

Upon her landing Antony sent to her,
Invited her to supper. She replied
It should be better he became her guest,
Which she entreated. Our courteous Antony,
Whom ne’er the word of ‘No’ woman heard speak,
Being barbered ten times o’er, goes to the feast,
And for his ordinary pays his heart
For what his eyes eat only.

ARCADIA

Tom Stoppard

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so cleaver to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

BLESS THE BEASTS AND CHILDREN

Glendon Swarthout

For a moment, or moments, it was as it had been in the beginning, before fear, before evil, before death, at the time of the creation, when the earth was new and living things flourished therein, where the earth was fair and all living things dwelt together as kindred. For a moment, or moments, beasts and children were friends, there in the sweetness and silence of the night, there in the calm and lovely fields of the Lord.

THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Mark Twain

The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.

THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER

Mark Twain.

Tom was a glittering hero once more—the pet of the old, the envy of the young. His name even went into immortal print, for the village paper magnified him. There were some that believed he would be President, yet, if he escaped hanging.

A&P

John Updike

His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

Tennessee Williams

You been passing the buck. This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself. You!—you dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it!—before you'd face the truth with him!

THE CAINE MUTINY

Herman Wouk

You've grown up. You know everything I can tell you. If you're still seeking out May, she must have qualities I've never had a chance to observe…I wouldn't want to be shut out of your life, whatever you do. I'm rather short on sons.

BLACK BOY

Richard Wright

My life as a Negro in America had led me to feel . . . that the problem of human unity was more important than bread, more important than physical living itself; for I felt that without a common bond uniting men . . . there could be no living worthy of being called human.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X

Malcolm X & Alex Haley

I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda.…I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.

BREAD GIVERS

Anzia Yezierska

This door was life. It was air. The bottom starting-point of becoming a person. I simply must have this room with the shut door.

THE BOOK THIEF

Markus Zusak

“I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.”

Sunday, 25 October 2015

Young Book People: some teaching ideas for the class

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