Reading List 2010-2011

Readers Advanced 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 2010-2011 (suggestions)

1. Life of Pi is a 2001 fantasy adventure novel written by Yann Martel. After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orangutan - and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary and best-loved works of fiction in recent years. 348 pages.

2. The Brooklyn Follies is a 2005 novel by Paul Auster. The 60-year-old Nathan Glass returns to Brooklyn after his wife has left him. He is recovering from lung cancer and is looking for "a quiet place to die". In Brooklyn he meets his nephew, Tom, whom he has not seen in several years. Tom has seemingly given up on life and has resigned himself to a string of meaningless jobs as he waits for his life to change. They develop a close friendship, entertaining each other in their misery, as they both try to avoid taking part in life. 320 pages

3. 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.

4. Disgrace is a 1999 Booker Prize-winning novel by South African-born author J. M. Coetzee who won the Nobel Prize in Literature four years after its publication. David Lurie is a South African professor of English who loses everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his good looks, his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect his own daughter. He is twice-divorced and dissatisfied with his job as a Communications professor, teaching one specialized class in Romantic literature at a technical university in Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa. His "disgrace" comes when he seduces one of his students and he does nothing to protect himself from its consequences. 220 pages.

5. The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed all civilization and, apparently, almost all life on earth. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 256 pages.