Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Summer Reading

This Summer I spent my days hiking through Tilden Park, going geocaching, and mastering board games. I also read two books by John Steinbeck, Cannery Row and Log from the Sea of Cortez.

I chose to read two books by Steinbeck because I have found myself to enjoy all of his books that I read. I started with him with Of Mice and Men in ninth grade, and I read The Pastures of Heaven and The Winter of Our Discontent in tenth grade. Steinbeck's work has a style that flows well despite going off on tangents to explain important minutia. His plots are engaging and the themes and literary devices he uses an eleventh grade can relate to. His writing is straightforward to read and easy to understand.

Of the two books I read this summer in particular, Cannery Row is more appropriate to add to eleventh grade curriculum because it is shorter to read and therefore more time can be spent on analyzing it. Also, as fiction it is easier to understand the themes because it has been fully created by Steinbeck, rather than the non-fiction of Log from the Sea of Cortez, whose themes are harder to understand because Steinbeck can only more subtly suggest ideas.

Overall, I would recommend both books I read over the Summer for the eleventh grade curriculum if you feel that students need to read more of Steinbeck's work than Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath, if you want to teach books with themes relating to human morality, and if you want students to like reading the books you assign.