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?

1 comment:

  1. 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

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