Group discussion

Pair work. Discussing books and authors involves exchanging opinions and expressing agreement and disagreement. Team up with another student to talk on the following topics (Use expressions of agreement and disagreement (pp.290).

A) Turn the above passages into dialogues and act them out.

C) Do library research and reproduce a talk with an important writer.

5. Read the following extract and observe the way literary criticism is written:

Jane Austen saw life in a clear, dry light. She was not with­out deep human sympathies, but she had a quick eye for vani­ty, selfishness, but vulgarity, and she perceived the frequent in­congruities between the way people talked and the realities of a situation. Her style is quiet and level. She never exaggerates, she never as it were, raises her voice to shout or scream. She is neither pompous, nor sentimental, nor flippant, but always gravely polite, and her writing contains a delicate but sharp-edged irony.

L.P. Hartley is one of the most distinguished of modern novelists; and one of the most original. For the world of his cre­ation is composed of such diverse elements. On the one hand he is a keen and accurate observer of the process of human thought and feeling; he is also a sharp-eyed chronicler of the social scene. But his picture of both is transformed by the light of a Gothic, imagination that reveals itself now in fanciful rever­ie, now in the mingled dark and gleam of a mysterious light and a mysterious darkness... Such is the vision of- life presented in his novels.

Martin Amis is the most important novelist of his genera­tion and probably the most influential prose stylist in Britain to­day. The son of Kingsley Amis, considered Britain's best novel­ist of the 1950s, at the age of 24 Martin won the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel The Rachel Papers (his father had won the same prize 20 years earlier). Since 1973 he has published seven more novels, plus three books of journal­ism and one of short stories. Each work has been well received, in particular Money (1984), which was described as "a key novel of the decade." His latest book is The Information (1995). It has been said of Amis that he has enjoyed a career more like that of a pop star than a writer.

b) Choose an author, not necessarily one of the greats, you'd like to talk about. Note down a few pieces of factual information about his life and work. Your fellow-students will ask you questions to find out what you know about your subject.

"A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good."

(Samuel Johnson)

"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."

(Mark Twain)

"There's an old saying that all the world loves a lover. It doesn't. What all the world loves is a scrap. It wants to see two lovers struggling for the hand of one woman."

(Anonymous)

"No furniture is so charming as books, even if you never open them and read a single word."

(Sydney Smith)

"Books and friends should be few but good."

(a proverb)

Despite the increase in TV watching, reading still is an im­portant leisure activity in Britain. More than 5,000 titles were nominated in a national survey conducted in 1996. The public was invited to suggest up to five books. It was later suggested that the votes either came from English literary students or from people who were showing off. What do you think? Can you point out a few important names that failed to make it into the top 100 list?

1. The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien

2. 1984 George Orwell

3. Animal Farm George Orwell

4. Ulysses James Joyce

5. Catch-22 Joseph Heller

6. The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger

7. To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee

8. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez

9. The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck

10. Trainspotting Irvine Welsh

11. Wild Swans Jung Chang

12. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

13. Lord of the Flies William Golding

14. On the Road Jack Kerouac

15. Brave New World Aldous Huxley

16. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame

17. Winnie-the-Pooh A. A, Milne

18. TheCotor Purple Alice Walker

19. The Hobbit J. R. R. Tolkien

20. The Outsider Albert Camus

21. The lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe C. S. Lewis

22. The Trial Franz Kafka

23. Gone with the Wind Margaret Michell

24. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams

25. Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie

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