For Wednesday's discussion group, we will be reading to page 200 of One Hundred Years of Solitude, rather than the whole book. I hope to see a lot of you there.
Select a news topic from the list below, then select a news article to read.
If you are one of the people reading One Hundred Years of Solitude this summer, you might be interested in this article by Ilan Stavans, about the importance of OHYOS and the influence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
García Márquez, however, is its acknowledged fountainhead, and for good reason. At the beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Macondo is a small, nondescript town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia
(modeled after García Márquez's birthplace, Aracataca which, 40 years
after the novel's debut, is still a dusty place without running water).
In 20 symmetrical chapters, each made of approximately 20 dense pages,
a third-person narrator — is it Melquíades the Gypsy? — chronicles,
with frightening precision, the town's rise and fall, exploring its
geographical, temporal, ideological, and cultural dimensions. In spite
of the title, the narrative time spans more than a century.
The New York Times has an interesting article about high school rigor today:
Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, another Washington-based group that advocates standard-setting, said that as she traveled around the country, she found many schools not offering challenging work.
“When you look at the assignments these kids get, it is just appalling,” she said. “A course may be labeled college-preparatory English. But if the kids get more than three-paragraph-long assignments, it is unusual. Or they’ll be asked to color a poster. We say ‘How about doing analysis?’ and they look at us like we are demented.”
“It's easy not to rebel. It's easy not to protest. The middling lives are so rich in comforts; the poorer lives so abundant in hardships. It's easier not to sing out. Yet history is littered with radicals of thought and deed; swimmers against the currents of their day, trying to keep their heads above the water; not drowning, but waving to others, if not to follow, then at least take notice of their struggle."—Warwick McFayden
You can find notes on Catcher in the Rye, Huck Finn, and The Grapes of Wrath here :