Back to Blog
Pet akwaeke emezi review5/22/2023 ![]() ![]() But when a frightening creature comes to life from one of her mother’s paintings, it tells Jam that it has come to hunt a monster after doing some research Jam learns that monsters can look like any one of us and hide in plain sight. ![]() Following a major revolution, it is now a peaceful place where everyone is treated equally, safety is a certainty, and monsters no longer exist. In the novel, Jam lives in a futuristic city called Lucille. I’d like to put some books on your radar that might have slipped by you, including Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, a prize-nominated MG/YA future-set fantasy book. ![]() One of the things I’m doing to try to show my support and (hopefully) affect a change is to increase the number of Black authors whose work I’m buying, reading, and promoting through my book accounts. Black lives matter! If you haven’t yet, check out this post where I’ve rounded up and explained a number of ways to help the movement, or just go straight here to do your part. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Back to Blog
Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor5/21/2023 ![]() A stroke of genius., Ghost Light is a tender and compassionate love story, and a fine stepping stone to the majesty of Synge., Ghost Light is a spirited novel. One of the novel's great achievements is not just to display imaginative power but also to show how the imagination works. It is a great love story, with extras: a virtuoso display of literary talent, a tribute to the Hiberno-English heritage of lore and lyricism and an interpretation of the Irish literary revival as the fruit of settler and native, Protestant and Catholic. It is a profoundly sad story, but triumphant., Joseph O'Connor's seventh novel, Ghost Light, will give days of pleasure to tens and tens of thousands of readers. ![]() Ghost Light stands up to scrutiny on its own terms. ![]() Admirers of his writing will take pleasure not only in the ambitious range of Ghost Light and its depth of feeling but also in the nods in the direction of the author's immediately preceding novels, Redemption Falls, and, before that, Star of the Sea. O'Connor has fashioned a deeply moving, beautifully written story. ![]()
Back to Blog
Hot, Sweet And Blue by Jack Baird5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() Jack Baird's professional affiliations included being named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1969 he was also named a member of the Newcomen Society in North America in 1970 and a member of the National Society of Professional Engineers' industry advisory group in 1981. ![]() Jack Baird brought good judgment and good sense to the practice of systems engineering, thus paving the way for modern-day data networking and the computers it links. Far ahead of his time, he implemented the necessary combination of operations research, technical planning, and technology assessment so AT&T and other organizations could cope with the demands of large, complex electronic communications systems serving both civilian and military purposes. telecommunications network-died May 23, 1986, of a coronary occlusion at the age of sixty-four. Jack Anthony Baird, who, during more than ten years of his career at AT&T and Bell Laboratories, guided the planning of engineering for the world's largest computing system-the U.S. ![]()
Back to Blog
A voyage in the dark5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The voice of Sacha rings out in a BBC radio play of Good Morning, Midnight many years after its publication, bringing Rhys into the spotlight. The women in her novels feel it too: Anna adrift in London in Voyage in the Dark, Julia leaving Paris in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Antoinette bound for Mr Rochester’s attic in Wide Sargasso Sea. This feeling lingers, whether she is living in squalid London, on Paris’s Left Bank or in rural Devon. We begin in the Caribbean with Smile Please, Rhys’s unfinished autobiography of her early years, where we meet a white creole girl who feels like an outsider. ![]() But her most important role was that of a writer. And she did play many roles over the years: raconteur, recluse, wife (three times), grieving mother, enthusiastic drinker. Born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams on the island of Dominica, she dreamed of being an actress. Miranda Seymour, author of the definitive Jean Rhys biography I Used to Live Here Once, joins the Slightly Foxed team to follow Rhys’s often rackety life and shine light on her writing. ![]()
Back to Blog
On the beach nevil shute review5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Nor could any novel make such provocative creative use of our distance from the rest of the world: as the last habitable continent, Australia is suddenly the most important place on Earth, at the very moment of its greatest impotence and ignorance, awaiting dooming winds from an incomprehensible war in the northern hemisphere.Īustralians were shocked to see themselves so cast. ![]() But no novel could be more explicitly Australian than On the Beach, set in his new home town of Melbourne. Shute was the first genuinely popular mainstream novelist to envision apocalypse, and one of only a handful to see the horrific mission through by leaving no survivors - just a silent irradiated planet, adrift in space. On the Beach, the story of humankind's thermonuclear extinction, sold more than 4 million copies. Yet 50 years ago this month, Shute published arguably Australia's most important novel - important in the sense of confronting a mass international audience with the defining issue of the age. "For he had more literature in his little finger than I have in my whole body." Nevil Shute Norway dispensed with his surname for his writing, fearful that "hard-bitten professional engineers might consider such a man not a serious person". "If Fred had lived we might have had some real books one day, not the sort of stuff that I turn out," said Nevil. His brother, Fred: now there was a writer. How the end of the world came to Melbourne ![]()
Back to Blog
![]() ![]() I’ve done this activity for years, but it’s also one that Jan Richardson mentions frequently in The Next Step in Guided Reading. ![]() Note: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. Many of the materials featured in today’s post can be found in my FREE guided reading toolkit, which you can sign up to receive here by clicking here: So in today’s post, I’ll share 10 examples of quick, meaningful “follow-up” activities that you can use at the end of your guided reading lessons. However, when you do have time to include phonics, word study, vocabulary study, or writing into your guided reading lessons, you’ll want your activities to be brief, engaging, and powerful. ![]() I teach word study at other times of the day, in small groups, so I don’t always have to include it during guided reading.The main purpose of guided reading is to get kids READING real texts!.But we may not always have time for them.Īnd really, I do think that this is okay. Word study, phonics instruction, vocabulary, writing, and other follow-up activities can be extremely valuable components of a guided reading lesson. It can be a real challenge to find time for word study or writing. Can you relate? ![]() However, my groups often spend a long time reading the book during guided reading. This makes guided reading a great time for a little word study or writing, since students are usually grouped by their reading levels! Most of the time, a student’s phonics development corresponds to his or her guided reading level. ![]()
Back to Blog
Faces in the Fire by Donnita L. Rogers5/21/2023 ![]() Retirement in 2001 was followed by 10 years of library research into pre-Viking history and extensive travel throughout Scandinavia. Rogers’ interest in Beowulf was piqued while introducing teenagers to the epic and wishing she knew more about the lives of the characters in the story – especially the women. Her teaching career included two years at the University of Houston, 18 years at Kingwood High School and 10 years at Lone Star College, all in Texas, while raising a family of four adopted children.ĭr. ![]() Raised as a farm girl, she set her sights on higher education, earning a BA in English from Earlham College (a Quaker school in Indiana) followed by an MA and PhD in English from the University of Minnesota with a minor in art history. Rogers was born in a small Midwestern town during the Great Depression. ![]()
Back to Blog
The outsider book series5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() Here's What's Coming to Hulu in January 2020.Per Esquire, this helps the show fix an inconsistency in the plot of the novel-why Anderson, usually a professional, by-the-book kind of detective, decided to arrest Maitland in front of the entire town, creating a public scandal that leads to a series of whispers and vile speculation about him that eventually leads Maitland himself to be murdered. However, in the book, he is away at summer camp, while the HBO show made the more dramatic decision to have him die of cancer before the events of the series, with Anderson grieving his death at the start of the show. In The Outsider, Anderson has a child, Derek, who was formerly a player in the Little League team that prime suspect Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman) coaches. Though the main plot of the novel survives intact in the HBO series, the first episode has already changed some of the backstories of the characters so as to make the motivations of the central characters clearer. ![]() ![]() WARNING: The following contains spoilers for the first two episodes of The Outsider The latest Stephen King novel to be made into a TV series is The Outsider, based on the 2018 detective horror novel that sees police detective Ralph Anderson (played in the HBO series by Ben Mendelsohn) investigating a grisly rape and murder of a child where the potential culprit seems to have been in two places at once. ![]()
Back to Blog
![]() ![]() The afflatus mode was vindicated by the post-apocalyptic horrors of the material. McCarthy’s novel “ The Road” (2006) can be seen as both the fulfillment and the transformation of this profligately gifted stylist, because in it the two styles justified themselves and came together to make a third style, of punishing and limpid beauty. ![]() ![]() The words stagger around their meanings, intoxicated by the grandiloquence of their gesturing: “God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest.” McCarthy’s deflatus mode is a rival rhetoric of mute exhaustion, as if all words, hungover from the intoxication, can hold on only to habit and familiar things: “He made himself a sandwich and spread some mustard over it and he poured a glass of milk.” “He put his toothbrush back in his shavingkit and got a towel out of his bag and went down to the bathroom and showered in one of the steel stalls and shaved and brushed his teeth and came back and put on a fresh shirt.” McCarthy in afflatus mode is magnificent, vatic, wasteful, hammy. ![]() There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose-roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them. ![]()
Back to Blog
Who are shudras by ambedkar pdf5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() Ambedkar, Phule (or Fule) was the “Greatest Shudra of Modern India,” of course, “because he made the lower classes of Hindus conscious of their slavery to the higher classes” but more specifically because he “preached the gospel that for India social democracy was more vital than independence from foreign rule.”īabsaheb had already set forth this argument in his book from the 1930s, Annihilation of Caste (AoC), wherein he had stressed on the need for social reform to precede political reform. His book, Who were the Shudras? How they came to be the Fourth Varna in the Indo-Aryan Society written in 1946, was dedicated to Mahatma Phule (or Fule): “Inscribed to the Memory of MAHATMA JOTIBA FULE,” runs the dedicatory line in the book.įor Dr. ![]() Babasaheb Ambedkar’s prefaces to his works were often as penetrating and incisive as the main body of the work that followed. ![]() |