READING FOR PLEASURE ORAL PRESENTATION

After reading a novel, nonfiction work or biography, prepare a 5-7 minute speech that includes the following:

1. Introduction – attention-getter
2. Oral reading - one or two-page reading from your book including introductory or concluding explanation of context.
3. Author background - include reference to at least one critical source or review.
4. Conflict Analysis - refer to specific examples from your novel.
5. Theme - "Sometimes in life . . ."
6. Use quotes from your book, its author and reviewers to illustrate conflict and theme.
7. Your personal reaction/opinion/response to the novel.
8. Topic outline – submitted to Turnitin.com

PRESENTATION RUBRIC

___ Introduction of selection (5)
___ Reading - Vocal Energy/Articulation/Posture/Gestures (10)
___ Author Information (10)
___ Discussion of conflicts and themes (10)
___ Personal Reaction (10)
___ Use of quotations from book, author or reviewer (5)
___ TOTAL (50)

See also:
Contemporary American Novels Summaries
The Big Read
Other Recommended Reading Lists
My Reading Life - Mrs. Lackey's Reading Blog
Other Book Lists

Reader's Bill of Rights

1. The right not to read.
2. The right to skip pages.
3. The right to not finish.
4. The right to reread.
5. The right to read anything.
6. The right to escapism.
7. The right to read anywhere.
8. The right to browse.
9. The right to read out loud.
10. The right to not defend your tastes.

From Better Than Life, 1999, Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers

Stranger Than Fiction: Dustin Hoffman Interview

Kurt Vonnegut in Defense of Reading

Prepping Children for the 9 to 5
A new generation brings with it different ideas of what a job should be.
By LISA BELKIN, April 17, 2008, NYTimes

What do idlers do while they idle? A provisional list can be found in these pages. Idlers contemplate, meditate, appreciate, imagine, feel a sense of peace and calm, follow their dreams, go fishing (Izaak Walton is the star of the 7 p.m. chapter), smoke tobacco, stare at the ceiling and gaze at the stars. . . . They may work for themselves or engage in meditative tasks like chopping vegetables for dinner -- but they do not work at jobs. Jobs are a relatively recent invention, a creation of the Industrial Revolution, Hodgkinson writes, relying on E. P. Thompson's pioneering work, ''The Making of the English Working Class'' (1963), and Bertrand Russell's essay ''In Praise of Idleness'' (1932). (If you check it out in the O.E.D., you'll find that things are somewhat more ambiguous. Before the 1920's, the word ''job'' generally meant a small, discrete piece of work, what jazz musicians would call a gig.

Which reminds me of the book Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs. Written after the fashion of Studs Terkle's Working, Gig is a contemporary compendium of interviews with working people about their "jobs" and work. Here's a list of job titles included in Gig.

Book Summary and excerpts - Supermodel Heidi Klum and Neal Smither, president and owner of Crime Scene Cleaners

Salon review of Gig

Steve Jobs' Stanford University Commencement Address: "You've Got to Find What You Love"

Excerpt from Barbara Erenreich's Nickle and Dimed

General Motors provided this yearly intrusion as an opportunity for the kin of the work force to funnel in and view their fathers, husbands, uncles and granddads as they toiled away on the assembly line. If nothing else, this annual peepshow lent a whole world of credence to our father's daily grumble. The assembly line did indeed stink. The noise was very close to intolerable. The heat was one complete bastard. Little wonder the old man's socks always smelled like liverwurst bleached for a week in the desert sun. -

The Unknown Citizen by W. H. Auden
Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Richard Cory by Paul Simon
Working Class Hero by John Lennon
Random quotes about work and working.

LRA Photography - Faces of American Workers

LRA Photography is a new project of the Labor Research Association dedicated to photographing the lives and labor of working people. Through this work, LRA Photography is seeking to create a diverse visual record of working people during a time of rapid economic and global change.

Featuring Ray McNiece

The Hollow Man
By JOHN DARNTON
As I watch Robert Mugabe tighten his 28-year-old stranglehold on Zimbabwe, I can’t help thinking back to a conversation he and I once tried to have about T. S. Eliot."

With Books as a Catalyst, Minneapolis Neighborhood Revives
By LISA CHAMBERLAIN
Three nonprofit groups opened Open Book, a literary and arts center, in May 2000, and a neighborhood renaissance flowered.

Turn your anthology into Poems In Your Pocket using this Stapleless Book Tool.

Read more about Ray McNiece, internationally performing and leading American poet, performer, educator.

Spoon River Anthology to memorize.
(Alternate source: Spoon River Anthology on Bartleby.com).

- My Tribe . . .

- Copy-Change

- Abstract nouns

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
Biographical notes on T.S. Eliot

Hypertext and Audio of Eliot's The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

Fragmentation in The Waste Land: Why T.S. Eliot Tears Down London Bridge
By Emily Hilligoss

Hypertext version of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at The Prufrock Papers

"I hate to see that evening sun go down."
T. S. Eliot is said the best line of iambic pentameter in English was not in Shakespeare but in W. C. Handy's St. Louis Blues

Much of T.S. Eliot's poetry brings to mind the poems of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg

Wired for Books Interview with Allen Ginsberg

Howl: The Poem That Changed America

NPR : Revisiting Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' at 50

Allen Ginsberg - NYTimes Featured Author

States of Altering Consciousness
Ginsberg's COLLECTED POEMS 1947-1980 reviewed

Ginsberg's Tennis Shoes

Photographs from the Allen Ginsberg Trust

Read a poem a day selected by Billy Collins at Poetry 180

Knopf Poem-a-Day

Today's Poem from Poetry Daily

"Poetry" By Marianne Moore

"This is Just to Say" By William Carlos Williams

Poetry Finder Tool

Poetry in Motion

Current Poet Laureate, Charles Simic - Poetry (Library of Congress)

Magnetic Poetry Online

Poem Starters

It is difficult
to get the news from poems,
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
- W.C.Williams

Spoon River Anthology to memorize.
(Alternate source: Spoon River Anthology on Bartleby.com).

Make a Dadaist poem at CHANCE WORDS from MoMA.org's Red Studio

The eight-year global outburst known as Dada gets a landmark show in New York. MoMA's installation is another matter.
By Christopher Knight
LATimes Staff Writer
June 28, 2006
PDF version