teaching, again

The fall semester is upon us, and I'm teaching two sections of a class I'm really excited about: Twice-Told Tales, Fairy Tales in Literary and Popular Culture. I'm just focusing on one fairy tale (Cinderella), and I've had a terrible time narrowing down the syllabus. What I've got still feels like a work in progress, but classes start Monday so it's as done as it's going to be for now.

The biggest experiment in this class will be the use of freewriting and focused freewriting, which we'll do (almost) every day. I took a fantastic workshop at Bard's Institute for Writing and Thinking which introduced me to this technique, and consultants from IWT came and worked with our faculty on it (and other things) over the summer, as we all prepare for teaching our first-year seminars for the first time. I don't know if anyone else has converted as fully as I have, but I'm really looking forward to the experiment.

a couple of lines

from Here, There Be Dragons...

"Astraues," Aven called out. "God of the four winds and friend to sailors. Say a little prayer when you look at him, so he will give us what we need to keep on our course."

"A little prayer?" said Jack. "To a constellation?"

"To what it represents," said Aven.

"But I don't believe in what it represents," said Jack.

"Prayers aren't for the deity," said Aven. "They're for you, to recommit yourself to what you believe."

"Can't you do that without praying to a dead Greek god?"

"Sure," said Aven. "But how often would anyone do that, if not in prayer?" (p. 218)

"The Summer Country is a land greater than any in the Archipelago of Dreams, because it has within it everything to be found in the Archipelago, and more. But where someone like Ordo Maas could find it anywhere, the Winter King would never find it at all. Because to him, it is always just out of his reach--when, in truth, he had it in reach all along."

"It sounds," John said, "as if you're talking about our world."

"Yes," said Bert. "Your world is the Summer Country." (p. 310)

The Finish Line

Here's the summary of my 48-hour book challenge efforts:

I read 7 books, including all four (to date) in The Alchemyst series, and the first in "The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica," Here, There Be Dragons. I can't wait to read some more in that series! All the books I read were fantasy (not a big surprise). I'm particularly intrigued by the overlaps in the two latter series--I want to think more about that, maybe after I read the rest of the Imaginarium Geographica books.

I read a total of 2778 pages.

I put in 16.75 reading hours, and 3 hours of social networking, for a total of 19.75 hours.

Thanks, MotherReader, for putting this together again! It was a weekend well spent!

and one more...

The last book I read for the 48 hour book challenge is another series book, Here There Be Dragons, by James A. Owen. What a great way to end! It's a terrific quest story, with a similar mix of characters and motifs as the Alchemyst books has, but put to entirely different effect--more comic, and more directly intertextual. There's great pleasure to be had in trying to puzzle out the references and connections, some of which come as quite a surprise at the end--though, really, they shouldn't, now that I know what they are. And there are three more books in the series, so I have plenty of fun to come...

(Nick told me I'd enjoy this one. Why is he always right?)

is this it?

OK, I've finished my 6th book in the challenge, and put in 2 more hours and 389 more pages. So here are the updated totals:

2454 pages

14.75 reading hours

2.5 blogging/networking hours

6 novels

And now I've caught up in The Alchemyst series and I'm seriously annoyed that The Warlock is not yet available for me to read. The little teaser at the end of The Necromancer is pretty tantalizing...

There are other books on my TBR stack so I may pick up another one, but I have to say, I'm pretty close to done. And I'm still kind of stuck in The Alchemyst's world--and liking it--so I'm not sure I'm ready to break that spell. On the other hand, there's still plenty of reading time left this evening. I don't expect to do much tomorrow morning--my time is up at 10:30 and I'm headed to church at about 8:45. So this may be it. But I'll check in again tomorrow morning to confirm the totals, one way or the other.

48 Hour Book Challenge Update

Whew! I'm surprising myself by how much I've read. The quick totals, 28 hours in:

12.75 hours of reading

let's call it 2 hours of social networking, blogging, reading updates, etc.

2065 pages

5 novels

The last three I've read are the first three books in Michael Scott's Alchemyst series; we have one more in the house and that's the next up. This is one appealing series: gods, demigods, and monsters from all kinds of mythology, a nice mix of the historical and the present-day, and all kinds of ambiguity about who's on whose side. I'm only sorry that the fifth novel isn't out yet--I'll finish the weekend without closure, but at least caught up on a series I'm enjoying.

But now I really need to get out of the house. I hit the farmer's market this morning and now it's time to get to Trader Joe's.

Starlighter

First in a series, Byron Davis's Starlighter gives us two planets, linked by tales that each has told of the other. Jason, our human hero, is a warrior in training who isn't sure whether to believe the stories his family tells of humans abducted by dragons, and a world beyond his own. On the other planet, children slave in mines and memorize a story that may be their salvation. Storytelling is key to this novel--Keron, the Starlighter of the title, weaves stories of amazing power that hypnotize their listeners and reveal hidden truths, even to her. The story is fast-paced and the characters--especially Jason and Keron, but also Arxad (the "most human" of the dragons)--are compelling. I'll be on the lookout for the next in this series.

[I received a copy of this book from the publicist and then handed it off to Nick and only just rediscovered it. Book 2 in the 48-hour book challenge.]