Posts by Jolisa
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Philipmatthews' LUQs from the other thread, by the way:
My own LUQ:
-- How many unshipped warehouse copies were there for Witi to buy back?
-- How many copies were returned to Penguin by bookstores?Given that the novel has been a bestseller week after week, my hunch -- and it's just a hunch -- is few in both cases. After all, why would a bookstore willingly return one of their bestselling items?
One other LUQ:
-- How many people will want to buy the book a second time? I doubt there are many desperate Witi readers holding off until the newer, better version is published.
The whole episode still feels shabby and unresolved to me -- not dissimilar, in a funny way, to Niki Caro and Joan Scheckel's unsatisfying explanations of their mangling of The Vintner's Luck in their recent film. In both cases, a sense that we'll know more in the fullness of time but best to put it behind us now.
-
Possibly they struck a chord because they are both written about the area I grew up in. Not at all sure what the 'popular opinion' is on Maurice Shadbolt, but [Season of the Jew] spoke volumes to me.
I've been meaning to reread that one. I read it in Japan and remember finishing it with tears pouring over the pages. No book had done that to me since Charlotte's Web, and I certainly didn't expect that one to. But it did.
'Novel about my wife' is another fantastic recent NZ novel set in contemporary times
Brilliantly written and impossible to put down. Although, and I think I said this in a review at the time, the relentless misanthropy got to me after a while, and the "reveal" struck me as both too lurid and too tame. But yes, excellent novel of modern manners.
-
PS: I think "wracked our brains" should be "racked our brains"
Well spotted. Not sure how that one slipped through. As you know, I am a stickler :-) I've fixed it. There I go again, editing Penguin for free...
I loved The 10pm Question too, although I agree with the reviewer who said it was more for parents of sensitive pre-teens (or people who remember being sensitive pre-teens) than for the actual pre-teens themselves.
And on the question of 20-something-year-old BA chicks, I think it was Fay Weldon who said she'd happily never read another first novel about "how I bonked my flatmate" ever again.
I remember thinking at the time, surely she means " that I bonked my flatmate"? Because (not to tread on Emma's turf or anything) " how I bonked my flatmate" could actually be an excellent premise for a certain kind of book, if you were able to keep it up for 200 pp.
Not that there's anything wrong with "I bonked my flatmate" literature. Emily Perkins' Not Her Real Name (great title) was a decent example of the genre, albeit short stories rather than a novel, and I really liked it at the time.
And Eleanor Catton puts the boot into any clichés about 20-something BA chicks. She could write a book of shopping lists and I'd buy it, just to see how she'd done it.
-
Of course the fact that once a week I spend half a day each week helping petunias have sex helps my identification skills.
The pansies, however, need no assistance? (My guess: they're always up for a spot of cottage-gardening).
-
Heh, thanks sis. In a bed of petunias. </threadmerge>
And thanks, Ben - kind of you to say so.
Yes, Raymond. Lunch mob: we need more of them.
Rich, you need to read more Chad Taylor, but then everyone needs to read more Chad Taylor. I also think Paula Morris would be right up your alley.
Perhaps we can help you out with a few more suggestions in the GOOD books thread, coming to a Public Address near you... right after I have a cuppa tea and a lie down.
-
I'm sure we've talked about this before, but I've always been tickled by 'guide her in the nations' van'
I know of someone who always wondered where this Bonza Club was that we were all going to meet up at. They reckon it sounded excellent. Bonza in fact.
-
Ta, Giovanni. I've enabled comments at the other one now, so you can pop over and say nice things there too :-)
-
"Revolutionary Petunia" by Alice Walker
The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom.
Rebellious. Living.
Against the Elemental Crush.
A Song of Color
Blooming
For Deserving Eyes.
Blooming Gloriously
For its Self.(Bad poem, great sentiment, especially in this context. May a thousand disreputable youths bloom.)
-
Main problem for me is that it will label the kids as failures when it is really the system that is failing them.
Exactly. And there are so many ways to fail these sorts of tests. A standard feature on the reading comprehension test over here is "What was the most interesting part of this story?" occasionally phrased as "What did you learn about x from reading this story?"
You can fail that question by not being able to read the question, or by not being able to express yourself in writing well, or even by being at a tangent from the rest of the world in what you find interesting. Or, like our poor lad, you could "fail" by taking the question at face value. He used to sit and weep because there was quite literally nothing he could write that would be both true and "correct." Like George Washington, he could not tell a lie.
A cunning and flexible teacher, using an open-ended assessment apparatus aimed at finding a way for every child to express their knowledge and desire for it, would of course be able to run with this: "What did you want to know more about?" or "What would make this story more interesting?" But standardised tests simply don't have that flexibility. They fail children because they fail children.
-
Great link, Carol. And it confirms what we anecdotally observed when we crunched the numbers for School #1 over the last several years. Which is that while you can occasionally observe improvements in single subjects (reading, writing, OR math), you pretty much never saw across-the-board improvement. AND, signally, the harder you drilled the younger kids, the worse they did: their scores tended to drop year by year.
Of course the larger irony was that the scores were pretty much steady; on the whole they fluctuate by the margin of error every year, but a borderline school stays borderline, and a high-achieving school stays high-achieving. No surprises there.
Occasionally you will find a very, very low-achieving school that has a sudden leap in test scores on account of a gung-ho new principal or some school-wide initiative. Which is wonderful, and presumably what the whole apparatus is aimed at. It's also the exception rather than the rule.
I would love to be encouraging about this -- any improvement in literacy is surely a good thing -- but it's hard to get super-thrilled about kids who've learned to read only in order to pass reading tests that are perplexing, deterministic, or patronising, and sometimes all three at once. That's not the kind of literacy we're after.