Read at least ten pages each week.
Read as much as you want.
Draw on these books for full credit in your writing assignments.
FIRST SEMESTER: read to deepen your understanding of the eras we're studying. Read deeply in one era, or spread out your experience.
1. Native American Literature
2. Puritan era:
3. Realism, Naturalism, the Civil War
4. Modernism
5. Harlem Renaissance
SECOND SEMESTER: We will study The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. You may write reading logs about them. In addition, however, try to get deeply into one great American author by reading at least at least two of his/her books.
Edward Abbey, Sherman Alexie, Ray Bradbury, Truman Capote, Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison,
William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jonathan Franzen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joseph Heller, Zora Neale Hurston,
Ernest Hemingway, John Irving, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London,
Norman Mailer, Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Tim O'Brien,
Flannery O'Connor, Eugene O'Neill, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, John Steinbeck,
Mark Twain, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace,
Eudora Welty, Edith Wharton, Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder
These are all writers whose work contains
important insight into the American experience,
as well as genuine literary merit.
I encourage you to argue for additions to the list.
Here is a list of great American novels...
Here's a page that claims to list the 100 greatest American books of all time.
Give me some evidence that you are thinking or dreaming deeply about something that has to do with literature. Choose any of the following, or write something commensurate. 250 words, at least. Be sure the document is in your "Reading Log" folder by the due date. Always suggest and define a few cool vocabulary words somehow in the process.
Possibilities:
1. Recommend something you've read to me or to someone else. Get very specific: what is particular about the text? why would it appeal to me, or to whoever you're writing this to. Pay attention to audience. Share it with that person, too.
2. Respond to a reading recommendation someone else has shared with you. Make some sort of intelligent commentary on his/her ideas. Relate it to other text(s).
3. Do a traditional reading log, as detailed below.
4. Go on a rant about anything to do with the author's words, work, or life.
5. Relate any literature you're reading to any event out in public or in your own experience. Examine what's deep about it.
6. Write some fanfic: use an author's characters or plot elements and create more.
7. Comment on the fanfic you wrote last time, or on the fanfic a friend shares with you. How'd it go? How's it compare to the original?
8. Write a journal entry or a letter in the voice of a character from a book you're reading.
9. Comment on your own or a friend's #8.
10. Make a piece of visual art about something you're reading. Scan it, or photograph it... get it into your "Reading Log" folder with a paragraph of explanation.
Feel free to suggest other possibilities!
Traditional Reading Log:
Respond to your reading with an entry in our shared folder, as the calendar indicates:
Your entry must be shared with me in GoogleDrive on or before the due date.
Sample entry:
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, pages 3-18.
This first chapter of the novel introduces Sasha, who is describing her first and last date with Alex. It opens in the women’s bathroom of a hotel where Alex and Sasha have gone for drinks. Sasha sees a purse and decides to steal the wallet. She and Alex run into the frantic victim of the theft, and, pretending to search the bathroom, Sasha returns the wallet. Later, she steals a personal note from Alex’s wallet. Throughout, we keep returning to Sasha’s therapy session, where Coz, the psychologist, presses her to accept responsibility and empathy in relation to her many thefts. The chapter ends in silence: we feel that Sasha has no real intention to heal.
Sasha has been completely bored by her date. “Postwallet, however, the scene tingled with mirthful possibility” (4). I love that sentence, especially the made-up word that begins it, as if the wallet were a moment in time. She is suddenly excited… and by what? Her secret crime. Maybe we’ve all experienced that, the adrenaline of getting away with something. But stealing functions for her exactly like a narcotic: the same short-term buzz and euphoria, making everything, even her boring date, momentarily rosy; the same addictive, self-destructive consequence, long-term self-loathing. In this sentence, Egan shows us that high so quickly! Of course it will lead to despair.
The chapter is about good intentions, about the urge to turn one’s life around without the will to do it. Sasha dream of being a record producer, of living a life that means something to her, but she keeps falling short and hating herself for it. Do we all struggle with the temptation not to follow through on the work it takes to make our life great? I worked out this morning, but left after fewer sprints than I wanted to hold myself to. I want to write the experience of the theater company I directed, and never quite get around to starting. Well, I justify, there are all these other projects: teaching, taking care of family, and so on… Is the lack of time excuse simply self-indulgence like Sasha’s?
Doesn't it seem as though "the pursuit of happiness" in America is all tied up in ownership, possessions, material wealth? Sasha doesn't know why she steals, but her addiction to theft has only partly to do with the adrenaline of the action. It's things. In her apartment, we see the pile of stuff she's lifted from people. Not that she uses any of it. It sits there. How strange to think about how much time we spend accumulating things--shopping, browsing, gifting, lusting after--things that sit on shelves or under the bed or in a basement, things that we so easily could live without. How strange to think about the hoarding disorder people develop in our culture: stuff. Free stuff, if possible, or at least cheap. Or even expensive stuff: we don't just want a car that gets us from point A to B, but a symbol of our wealth, position, accomplishment. What emptiness are we trying to fill with this urge to acquire stuff? And this is the American Dream, right? success equals stuff: a nice house, nice car(s), our children leading a life of even more stuff than we had. Egan must despise that view.
Tergiversate: to go back and forth between two options
Fugacious: hot, humid, and sweaty in atmosphere
Tenuous: flimsy, weak, slender
Mirthful: Full good humor, laughter
sesquipedalian: one who uses/enjoys long words
Grading scale:
•20 points for 80+ pages of reading AND awesome insights into the book—and life. Vocab done.
•18 points for 60+ pages of reading AND 4+ strong thoughtful paragraphs. Vocab done.
•16 points for 40+ pages of reading AND solid thought in four paragraphs. Vocab done.
•14 points for 20+ pages of reading AND four coherent paragraphs. Vocab done.
•12 points for 10+ pages of reading AND some comments. Vocab done?
•0 points for no reading and/or no entry