le plus loin le plus serré

le plus loin le plus serré
mourning art

in memoriam

"yet I tell you, from the sad knowledge of my older experience, that to every one of you a day will most likely come when sunshine, hope, presents and pleasure will be worth nothing to you in comparison with the unattainable gift of your mother's kiss." (Christina Rossetti, "Speaking Likenesses," 1873)

Monday, May 30, 2011

Books about books - notes for potential syllabus

It occurs to me that a general lit class about books about books (and/or reading, with a little writing thrown in) would be a pretty cool one to teach. Titles keep popping into my head, and I've decided to write them here, rather than on tiny scraps of paper which I will inevitably lose, or which some cat will puke on.

  • The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (because manuscripts don't burn)
  • People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
  • The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  • Matilda by Roald Dahl (because Dahl's description of Matilda's reading is probably the best description of what reading does that I have ever encountered)
  • The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
  • Misery by Stephen King
  • The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (or one of its sequels, Lost in a Good Book or The Well of Lost Plots, which last is my favorite Fforde book)
  • "The Composition" short story by Antonio Skármeta
  • "Umney's Last Case" short story by Stephen King
What others am I forgetting? There are tons of books about books, or writing or reading - these are just the ones that come immediately to my mind. What other children's or YA books need to go on the list? And can I count Un Lun Dun as a book about a book?
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1 comment:

Jen said...

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Inherit the Wind, Lawrence & Lee
The Shadow of the Wind, Ruiz Zafón
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
Possession, A.S. Byatt
The Book of Lost Things: A Novel, John Connolly
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
84, Charing Cross Road, Helen Hanff
Five Quarters of the Orange, Joanne Harris
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Katherine Howe
The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus, Joshua Kendall
The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova
The Bookman's Tale by Charlie Lovett
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl
Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, Julie Powell
The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Shaffer and Barrows

3:05 PM

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