We are now getting started with our book clubs. I have reproduced the assignment sheet below. You will also find brief comments on the texts, along with links to etexts of those novels that are in the public domain.
AP
Book Club #1:
(Mostly) Medium-Length
Novels
For the next several weeks, you will
use your time in English class to meet with your book club. This club will consist of three to five students who are all
reading and discussing the same novel.
·
Each club must keep a work journal of
its daily activities. For each day you
meet, you must keep track of the following:
o
Group members who are present
o
What you accomplished during the
meeting
o
Your goals for the next meeting.
o
Additionally, it is recommended that
you rotate the role of recording secretary.
·
Your first act as a group should be to
determine each day’s reading assignment.
You may devote some class time to reading, but it must not exceed twenty minutes per period.
·
Each day, you will discuss your
reading. Take special note of how the
author draws attention to what is significant.
You will receive a Notice and Note bookmark; please allow this to influence some of your discussion topics.
·
Please keep a daily journal of your
reading, observations, ideas, conversations, and questions. This will be handed in at the conclusion of
this project.
·
You will find several assignment
topics below. Each student must write
one of these assignments. Please make
sure that each student in a group completes a different task.
·
Please choose one of the following
assignments. Your response should be two
to three pages long, typed, and double-spaced:
1.
Choose a symbol from your novel (an
object, a place, an idea) and analyze it.
Do not choose a symbol referenced on Sparknotes or any other online
cheating site.
2.
Choose a short passage—no more than a
page long—from your novel and perform a close reading of it. Analyze its connection to the novel’s themes.
3.
Write an essay in which you discuss
how the title relates to the book as a whole.
4.
Find a scholarly article devoted to
your novel. Write an essay in which you
discuss the scholar’s thesis and provide your own alternative reading of the
text. ProQuest is an excellent source
for scholarly articles. You can access
this database through the AHS library website. You could also use Google
Scholar to find legitimate sources.
5.
Write about the significance of a minor
character in your novel.
6.
Trace the use of a particular word
throughout your novel. In what contexts
does it appear? How does it relate to a
theme of the book? The easiest way to
find individual words is to search an etext of your novel.
7.
Choose your own topic.
·
All assignments are due on Tuesday,
December 16th. This will also be the
last day you meet in your clubs. Please
hand in:
o
Your club’s work journal
o
Your Notice and Note bookmark
o
Your daily reading journal
o
Your essay
Here are the books:
Beneath the Wheel, Hesse: A bildungsroman in which the wheel is the
educational system and the student is, well, beneath it.
The Color Purple, Walker: An epistolary novel set in
the American South. It is frequently
challenged, but it is undoubtedly a canonical text.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn:
One day in a Soviet gulag. That’s all
that needs to be said.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce: An
important bildungsroman that is what the title says. Brilliant stream-of-consciousness abounds.
Pride and Prejudice, Austen: 19th Century
novel of manners; one of the most famous, beloved, and respected novels in
English
The Red Badge of Courage, Crane: It might be the
greatest novel set during the U.S. Civil War.
The Road, McCarthy: A father and son try to survive
in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It closes
the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction.
The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut: A science fiction
novel that has a plot revolving around a chrono-synclastic infundibulum. You’ll just have to read it.
The Things They Carried, O’Brien: Postmodern novel set
(mostly) during the Vietnam war. O’Brien
makes himself into a character who may or may not have experienced many bad
things.
