February 17, 2011
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Books Books Books.
Two Days Late and Half Off.
[our trivia name last night]
The bf gave me The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy last night as my Valentine's gift (among chocolates, etc.)...
that got us/me thinking of other "classics" I'd like to read:
The Grapes of Wrath
A Wrinkle in Time
Lord of the Flies
War of the Worlds
Slaughterhouse 5
Him = The 3rd Policeman
I told him that I'll start on Hitchhiker's once I wrap up David's book.
Then I may have to read Klosterman's other fictional piece - Eating the Dinosaur.
p.s. We talked about the TV show Lost and how they used a lot of stuff from Alice In Wonderland; that got me thinking = what if I assigned that book in English 110. Students could dig into the pop culture pieces that use that book?
Comments (3)
The problem with having students read Alice in Wonderland is that they almost always interpret it as a drug-trip. It's actually one long inside joke between Dodgson and some family friends (particularly the Liddell daughters), with some math jokes for his own amusement. When I think of what the uninitiated would think of my inside jokes with my college friends, I'm sure they would interpret me as a druggie, too!
If your goal is just to have them see how Alice has influenced other works, then maybe understanding the jokes is not necessary. However, if you want them to at least understand that the story makes some sense when you know the jokes, you might encourage/require the use the very excellent edition called The Annotated Alice, with annotations by Martin Gardner, who is a champion at making mathematics accessible to other disciplines. Gardner also has some fun books on cryptography for lay people available for cheap at Dover books.
I'm not a fan or anything.
@sonnetjoy - Thank you for the feedback & ideas. It was just a passing thought when he was talking about Lost, etc. I like bringing in odd literature for students (reason #17 why I use George Carlin's Brain Droppings) because they associate Reading = Classics by Dead White Guys, and I like showing them they can read other stuff.
Again, thanks... and if I decide to use it, I'll track you down for more ideas.
)
It's true that there are an awful lot of Dead White Guys! My world lit class had a ten-second riot on Tuesday when I said that we don't know really know what St. Augustine looked like, but that he was probably a brownish color because his mom was a Berber. Their argument was he probably was white, because he was tedious.
Even when I was writing my comment, I thought, "This is probably way more depth than Sybil was thinking of," but by then I was already preparing footnotes for my comment, and a bibliography was in the works. I scaled it back for you.
Wait until the day you casually mention the subject of my thesis. I don't think I'll be able to stem that tide.