how reading changed my life

How Reading Changed My LifeAnna Quindlen

R einforcementT ext Analysis

How Reading Changed My Life

B ackgroundW arming up

Unit 2

Questions/Activities

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Objectives

Warming up

How Reading Changed My Life

Unit 2

Warming up Questions/Activities

1. Has your life ever been significantly changed by any particular book?

2. What does reading mean to you?

Warming up Questions/Activities

3. How has the Internet changed people’s way of reading?

4. How do you account for such changes?

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Please define the following words in their respective context.

1. …a small but satisfying spread of center-hall colonials… (para.1)

2. …all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama… (para.2)

3. America is also a nation that prizes sociability and community… (para.11)

4. …a kind of careerism in the United States that sanctioned reading… (para.12)

Warming up

Check-on Preview

What do you know about the following novels?

Warming up

Middlemarch

A Little Princess

Anna Karenina

Gone with the Wind

Rebecca

Jane Eyre

A Tale of Two Cities

Moby-Dick

Pride and Prejudice

Kill a Mockingbird

Objectives

1. Understand in which ways reading has changed the author’s life.

2. Discuss the meaning of reading.

3. Identify the problems facing reading and work on possible solutions.

Warming up

Background

Author

How Reading Changed My Life

Unit 2

Background Author

Anna Marie Quindlen

Anna Quindlen the Journalist• The New York Times columnist until

1994• Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992• Newsweek columnist 1999-2009

Anna Quindlen the Novelist

• Full-time novelist since 1995• Author of five best-selling novels, three

of which made into movies

Her L

ife

BackgroundHe

r Wor

ksAuthor

A critic of the fast-paced and increasingly materialistic nature of modern American life

Some quotes:

• If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.

• You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

DetailedAnalysis

Structure

Theme

Text Analysis

How Reading Changed My Life

Unit 2

Text Analysis Theme

Questions for thinking:

1. What does reading mean to the author?

2. What kind of attitudes toward reading bother the author?

3. What kind of attitude does the author advocate?

Text Analysis Structure

1

Paras. 1-9

Reading has been an important part of my life.

2

Paras. 10-15

A crisis faced by reading.

3

Paras. 16-18

There is still hope for reading.

1. Where did the author spend her childhood?

2. Why did the author always feel that she ought to be somewhere else?

3. Why was it “a stiff and awkward lunch”? What did this show about the author?

4. How should the author have benefited from reading the six novels in Paragraph 2?

5. What did reading mean to the author when she was young?

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part I: Discussion

6. What were the features of Victorian England?

peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and self-confidence

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part I: Discussion

7. Why does the author mention these three novels?

8. What are the common features of these three novels?

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part I: Discussion

9. Why did the author prefer reading to playing?

• Traveled across the physical world;• Traveled into my own spiritual world: identity, aspiration,

morality →Books are my perfect island!

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part I: Discussion

10. Why does the author read?

• Trips to other worlds;• Journey into my own world; • Perfect island (alone to not alone);• Home, sustenance, great invincible companion• Simply because she loves reading! Why do you read? Do you ever read simply because you love reading?

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part I: Discussion

1. Perhaps restlessness is a necessary corollary of devoted literacy. (para.5)

Questions for thinking:

• In what ways was the author restless?• Do you agree with this statement? • How do you understand Mark Twain’s saying, “Almost all

of the writers are ‘addicts.’”?

Part I: Paraphrase

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

2. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. (para. 7)

Questions for thinking:

Why did the author parallel waking, sleeping and reading?

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part I: Paraphrase

• wander the world

• commit sth to memory He committed the notes of that meeting to memory and then burned them.

• aspire to sth; aspire to do sth Different people aspire to different things. Mary is ambitious enough to aspire to conversational fluency

in Chinese in two months. We aspire to be the best within our field.

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part I: Words & Expressions (1)

Word-formation: undersung

underestimated underdeveloped underdone

underfunded undermanned undernourished

unerpaid underpopulated underused

under- + past participle: not enough

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part I: Words & Expressions (2)

Fill in the blanks.

In one corner of the living room______ a club chair. I used to _______ on it, reading with my skinny legs ___________one ofits arms. Of course, I had clear memories of normal childhood, ______ the rocks in the creek that ____________ Naylor’s Run to _______ for crayfish and laying pennies on the tracks of the trolley and running to _____ them when the trolley

___________.

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part I: Exercise

satsprawl slung over

lifting trickled through

search fetch had passed

1. What bias do people have against those who read much?

• Lazy, Aimless dreamer, Loner, Arrogant

2. What is the something in the American character that is hostile to the act of aimless reading?

• Reading is nothing more than a tool for advancement• Sociability and community• Go-out-and-get-going ethos• Admiration of men of action

Pragmatic tradition in America character →Pragmatism

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part II: Discussion

Pragmatism

Key tenets of pragmatism

• Primacy of practice• Concrete thinking rather than conceptualization• Naturalism• Scientific methods• Skepticism

Prominent figures

Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

3. Why can an executive learn far more from Moby-Dick?

4. What do you think of books on success?

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part II: Discussion

5. What are literary professionals’ opinions of reading?

• Read to address problems• Good and worthy reading vs. bad and trivial reading

What is the author’s attitude?→ Careerism vs. Reading

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part II: Discussion

Careerism

• Read only if there is some point to it

• Philosophy or English majors can’t do much with what they learn

• Read for purpose and dogged self-improvement

Reading

• Read for the fun of reading itself

• Intellectual pursuits for their own sake

• Read for pleasure, spurred on by interior compulsion

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

6. What are the traits of the real clan of the book?

• Read not to judge the reading of others but to take the measure of ourselves

• Love reading for reading’s own sake

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part II: Discussion

pay lip service to People pay lip service to their dreams of freedom, but many

feel frightened by it.

see to it that We should see to it that all work done conforms to high standards.

Part II: Words & Expressions (1)

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

suspect v. (para.10) • suspect sb of It is perfectly all right, because the police had not suspected him of robbery.

suspect adj. (para. 12) Delegates evacuated the building when a suspect package was found.

be suspicious of (para. 11) Two officers on patrol became suspicious of two men in a car.

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Part II: Words & Expressions (2)

1. What is the “lively subculture of characters”?

2. What does the author mean by quoting “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”?

3. What is the author’s attitude toward literary criticism?

• The truth of reading is to be found in its people rather than its pundits and professionals.

Part III: Discussion

Text Analysis Detailed Analysis

Reinforcement

SummarySummary

Discussion

How Reading Changed My Life

Unit 2

Reinforcement Summary

Writing Techniques 1. symbol

• e.g. the club chair, the girl

2. comparison and contrast

• e.g. Reading for pleasure, spurred on by some interior compulsion, became as suspect as getting on the subway to ride aimlessly from place to place. (para. 12)

• e.g. I vs. others

3. simile and metaphor

• e.g. My perfect island.

Structure of the Text 1. Between paragraphs • By the time I became an adult, I realized that while my satisfaction in the sheer act of reading had not abated in the least, the world was often as hostile, or as blind, to that joy… (para. 10) A transitional sentence: summary of the previous part + leading to new

idea2. Within paragraph• my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion→• most undersung, at least publicly→• I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning.

Reinforcement Summary

The orthodox “history” of reading

1. Exclusively for the literati and the intellectually worthy

2. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press: reading as a source of information for the many

3. Conclusion of critics and scholars: literature plummeting into intellectual bargain basement

4. Movies, television

…What about today?

Reinforcement Summary

Reinforcement Discussion

1. If you have a choice, would you prefer to read a book or read on screen?

2. What do you think of the trend of micro-reading today?

3. What impacts do you think technological development has on reading?

4. How should we adjust to these changes?