Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Curled up with a Good Book

Having a love for reading is a key to language and literacy development. It doesn't really matter what you read -- fiction or nonfiction, novels or newspapers, stories or blogs. It is just essential to want to read and to read a lot. What fiction do you love? What are your favorite novels, plays, and stories? I have listed my favorite novels below. Have you read any of them? When did you last curl up with your favorite reading?

My Top Twenty Novels (in alphabetical order)

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) by Franz Kafka

Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

Faust by Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

L’Etranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus

Lord of the Rings by Tolkien

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte



Vocabulary

fiction -- (noun) writing that is not true

nonfiction -- (noun) writing that is true, such as a newspaper report

novel -- (noun) a long book that is not true, such as a short story

blog -- (noun) web log, a journal on the internet

essential -- (adjective) important, necessary

curl up -- (verb) lie down in a circular position, often to read

Exercise:

1. To earn money it is ___________________ to work hard.

2. She love writing on the internet and has her own __________.

3. The little girl _________________ on the couch with her favorite book.

4. He reads newspapers online all day because he likes_____________________ better than _______________.

5. When I retire, I want to write a _______________ about people from another planet.

Grammar Point:

Interrogatives are questions. What do you notice about the form of a question in English? Write 3 questions of your own about reading.