The Literate Teacher's Manifesto

How do I love Jane Eyre ?  Let me count the ways. Because even in the darkest moments of the novel: at the school when the children were told not to talk to Jane, living with the hateful Reeds, being lost and almost starving on the moors, living in the terrible understanding that Rochester was going to marry Miss Ingram, in trying to please St. John and live up to his completely unreasonable expectations, Jane never loses her utter "Jane-ness".  She never loses sight of herself and who she is, and she never wavers in her faith in herself.    Because the love story between Rochester and Jane is almost purely intellectual.  She never seeks to hide her thoughts and feelings from him behind the wall of femininity, and in doing that, she inspires all women to be truly feminist.  Jane speaks her mind and tells the truth, and Rochester loves her all the more because of it.   Because Jane is more beautiful in my head because she sees herself as plai...

The prompt for this posting was "A book turned into a movie and completely desecrated."  I'll be honest and say that I'm having a really difficult time thinking of any books turned movies that I really loved or really hated.  They generally don't have that much of an effect on me.  Certainly there have been a great many movies made from books that do not in any way do justice to the plot.  There are many movies I've seen that are great in their own right, even though they really departed from the book ( To Kill a Mockingbird  and The Book Thief  come to mind).  I guess the only truly abysmal book-turned-movie that  I can think of would have to be The Da Vinci Code . So, yes, I am outing myself that I have read and enjoyed Dan Brown novels.  In fact, when my hubby and I visited Italy, we took the Angels and Demons  tour in Rome.  (An entertaining and informative tour, FYI!)  I know that Brown is a bit of a pattern writer, and ...

Les Miserables  is the longest book I've read in entirety, weighing in at a hefty 1,463 pages.  And yes, I read it before the movie came out.  I've actually read it all the way through twice.  The first time I read it, I was a sophomore in college.  My American Lit professor saw me carrying it around and accused me of "just trying to look smarter."  He bet me that I'd never get through it.  Well, I am and have always been a stubborn old poop, so when he told me I couldn't do it he provided me with the incentive I needed to muddle through it. It is also by far the most difficult lengthy book I've read.   It, by Stephen King, Gone With the Wind , by Margaret Mitchell, and the North and South  trilogy by John Jakes are all of comparable length to Les Mis , but definitely much more lightweight on the readability scale.  I reread Les Mis  over the summer last year.  It was even better the second time around.  I can't s...

It's very difficult to choose just one secondary character for this post.  It would be my first instinct to choose from classic literature, but I've decided that I want to stick to reading I've done recently to complete this challenge.  I narrowed it down to two finalists: Haymitch, from The Hunger Games , and Thomas, from Being Henry David .  And the winner is... ( drum roll please )... I read Being Henry David, by Cal Armistead, over the summer.  (You can read my review of it  here. )  It was a decent read, but one of the things that really added to my experience was how gifted the author is at characterization.  The characters are some of the most memorable from any novel I have ever read.  Even characters we only meet for a page or two are incredibly well-crafted and interesting.  And Thomas bookwormed his way into my head and into my heart as one of my favorite characters ever. Not to give too much away, but the premise of the ...

You never forget your first time.  Oh, the magic, and the excitement, and the WONDER of it all.  I will never get over the Harry Potter  series.  I have students who have told me in the past few weeks (as they have been selecting their first independent reading books) that they made it through two or three, but they never finished the series, and I. Am. Horrified.  How anyone could stop in the middle is just beyond me!  JK Rowling's story arcs in the series are just so inspiring and creative, taking all of the best bits of the hero's journey and completing them for not just one character, not just two characters, but COUNTLESS characters in varying degrees.   When the series was released, and the hubbub and the furor over the books began in earnest, I was in college. I told myself that clearly this was a gimmick, and I would never read those silly books.  A boy wizard? Why does anyone even care?  However, fate and my Mythology profes...

As of this posting, our country has narrowly avoided the dreaded "fiscal cliff," but I still feel very nervous that our lifestyles may not remain as comfortable as they have been for the past several years.  In keeping with that nervousness, I am attempting to cut corners in some areas, one of which is my book-buying habit (trying to balance out my boot-buying habit, which is a topic for another post...). I have a bad habit of buying interesting books from bargain tables, rummage sales, discards at the library, Goodwill, etc, as well as from the shelves at Barnes and Noble or Books A Million, and never actually getting around to reading them.  I believe that I am probably not the only book-lover who does this, so one of my new year's ideas is to start a "Resolution Book Club".  I want to have read everything on my bookshelves at least once.  I went through them today and chose found enough unread titles to last me through the year (probably). I am aware that...

I am so over series novels. I blame JK Rowling for this phenomenon. It used to be possible to go to the library, pick up a novel, read it, get to the end, and be done. Now, it feels like every time I pick up a new book, it's making a lifetime commitment!  Booksellers: Do you promise to love, cherish, and buy every book in the series as long as you and the author both shall live?  Me: Ermmm, maybe? I'm not about contract reading. So a few years ago, I decided I was NOT committing to any other series novels. If it had a sequel, I was not buying. Then they got tricksy (OOoohhh, tricksy authorses!) The first one to fool me was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Which was followed a year or so later by Dawn of the Dreadfuls .  A sequel?  To Pride and Prejudice ?  Are you kidding me?  This was shortly followed by Neal Shusterman.  His novel Unwind  is absolutely phenomenal.  I loved the ending.  No further closure necessary, Mr. Shu...

Some books are guilty pleasures; the kind you don't want anyone else to see you reading.  Now, I'd probably never take any of these out in public (unless they were on my Kindle), but I've read them all several times. The North and South  series by John Jakes.  I read these after I watched the awesome miniseries from the 80s featuring Patrick Swayze and Leslie-Anne Down, and out of this list these are probably the least guilty of the guilty pleasures. I learned a lot about history and the Civil War from reading these books, but some parts of them are just.... well, trashy. The Harry Potter series, which I always come back to when I need entertaining reading that I don't have to focus on so much.  I reread HP after I finished Les Miserables , after reading The Greatest Show on Earth , etc.  And they are great books.  But I can't help but feel that maybe I'm too old to be rereading them again (for the 16th time--not an exaggeration). The Tithe  serie...

If you were hosting a party and you could invite any 5 literary characters, who would you invite? I would invite Atticus Finch, from To Kill a Mockingbird , because I would love to hear his opinion of the travesty that has become our political and justice system, and maybe some thoughts on  how to fix it.  I would have Gregor Samsa, from Kafka's Metamorphosis , because I have always been fascinated by his somewhat lackadaisical, unperturbed reaction to his startling change into an insect.  I would invite Jo March, from Little Women , because I love female characters who are strong, smart, and capable of conversing about books (can she bring the Professor with her, but only count as one guest?)  I have to choose Albus Dumbledore, for his conversational ability and his infinite capacity for putting people at ease.  My final guest would be Death, as he appears in The Book Thief .  My absolute favorite narrator of all time: witty, sarcastic, dry, but with a c...

1. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje 2. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 4. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo 5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte 6. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton 7. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll 8. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott 9. The Life of Johnson by Boswell 10. The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak What's your top ten list?