Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Reading

Reclaiming readers will rejuvenate the spirit of a society that's run ragged, stressed out, overconnected, intellectually complacent, and emotionally dissatisfied.

That's from a book called "Reviving Reading" by Alison M.G. Follos.

I've been reading lots of fiction for my Teen Lit class. Most weeks, we have to read two novels. So I spend hours every week with my nose in these books, barely coming up for air. It's been good for me. It feels like I'm recovering my mind, from some mothy old place I left it. Story after story after story, I can almost feel new neural connections forming, I swear.

4 comments:

  1. my daughter, willa, would agree with that quote, simone. but i think it's just not how much we read, but what we read.

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  2. i'm curious, simone. what are teens reading as literature these days? mostly new stuff? classics? i'm interested to know.

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  3. I believe you--you ARE experiencing new neural connections! I like the way you put that. I, too, am interested to know what teens are reading. Please expound. Danke, my Volga River friend :)

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  4. Well, I suppose teens are reading all kinds of things. But this class is focused on recent books that has been published in the last year or so. Fantasy is big, as in the Twilight vampire series. No, I haven't read that book, and am not really interested in reading it. Graphic novels are also popular. I wasn't sure what I thought about graphic novels, but then I read a couple of them, and really enjoyed them. One was about a group of teen boys that had a garage band, and the illustrations were done partly with watercolors and were really good. Right now I'm reading a fantastic book called "Going Bovine," which is creative and funny.

    Young adult is the term for books for teens --these are books geared for high school kids, though many of them gain crossover adult audiences. These books acknowledge the hardships of being a teen in many ways, and many of them deal with the real problems that teens have. I think there is a lot of honesty in these books, because they show the ways that teens and the adults around them have a hard time connecting. But not all teen books are of the realistic genre. As I said, fantasy and sci fi are big. Apparently, there are two books that are hot right now--"Hunger games" and "Catching fire", which I haven't read.

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