Usually, I track professional reading or reading I'm doing for my students on this blog, but today, I wanted to discuss the book I just finished for fun. When I was younger, I was obsessed with Stephen King's novels, in fact I have read almost every one. Don't get me wrong, not all of them lived up to my expectations, but those I did not enjoy were few and far between. One of my all-time favorites was The Shining. Most people think of the Kubrick movie and the iconic scene when Jack Nicholson breaks through the apartment door exclaiming "Heeeerrreeee's Jonny!" But the book was so much more--just like I discussed in my last post, somethings just don't translate to screen. So when I stumbled across Dr. Sleep--the unexpected sequel thirty-six years later, I took a two day break from school books, and read the entire thing. Although I am still particular to physical books, I was impatient, so I downloaded the book to my ipad, and this is when I had a revelation...
I know many people consider the horror and sci-fi novels published by King to be less than scholarly, but he is an extremely talented writer. His skillful use of figurative language, expansive knowledge of literature and wide vocabulary often has me using the reading strategies I teach my students--I want to tell them "See, even when adults read for fun, we must use context clues to understand unfamiliar vocabulary!" Reading this book on the ipad was a little different. For example, when the main character, Dan Torrance, reflects on the horrors he experienced as a child at the Overlook Hotel, he mentions his father assaulting his mother with a "roque" mallet, I understood (through the use on context clues) that it was similar to a croquet mallet--but because I was reading on my ipad, I went farther, zipping over to the internet, to see an actual picture and read a brief explanation of the game. This greatly increased my visualization of the book, and it took all of five minutes! I could also see passages that other readers highlighted because they found them significant, look up other fans' artistic renditions of characters-- their visualization, and see how they compared to mine. I even looked up words spoken in another language to see if they were real or created by King (they were created).
This train of thought led me to go back to a YA trilogy I read earlier this summer: Neil Shusterman's Unwind Dystology. In it, Shusterman creates a very different version of our world, a dystopian society where doctors are almost unnecessary because unwanted children can be "unwound" for parts after the age of 13. It sounds incredibly fanciful, but he adds an alarming note of realism by interspersing the novel with snippets of legitimate scientific articles detailing real advances in medicine that could become a slippery slope to the exact world he depicted--he even includes references to the full articles, but I didn't take the time to read them. When I returned to these novels (now downloaded on my ipad), my hopes were confirmed--attached to the bit of each article he places in the book, is a direct link to it in its entirety--right there on the page!
I dug a little deeper, and discovered that some authors are now taking this even further, creating interactive novels for young adults to immerse them in their literary worlds. I have often thought of myself as a traditionalist, bemoaning the replacement of the physical book with digital print, but now, I acknowledge that there are some interesting possibilities I had not considered, and I look forward to exploring them :)
I know many people consider the horror and sci-fi novels published by King to be less than scholarly, but he is an extremely talented writer. His skillful use of figurative language, expansive knowledge of literature and wide vocabulary often has me using the reading strategies I teach my students--I want to tell them "See, even when adults read for fun, we must use context clues to understand unfamiliar vocabulary!" Reading this book on the ipad was a little different. For example, when the main character, Dan Torrance, reflects on the horrors he experienced as a child at the Overlook Hotel, he mentions his father assaulting his mother with a "roque" mallet, I understood (through the use on context clues) that it was similar to a croquet mallet--but because I was reading on my ipad, I went farther, zipping over to the internet, to see an actual picture and read a brief explanation of the game. This greatly increased my visualization of the book, and it took all of five minutes! I could also see passages that other readers highlighted because they found them significant, look up other fans' artistic renditions of characters-- their visualization, and see how they compared to mine. I even looked up words spoken in another language to see if they were real or created by King (they were created).
This train of thought led me to go back to a YA trilogy I read earlier this summer: Neil Shusterman's Unwind Dystology. In it, Shusterman creates a very different version of our world, a dystopian society where doctors are almost unnecessary because unwanted children can be "unwound" for parts after the age of 13. It sounds incredibly fanciful, but he adds an alarming note of realism by interspersing the novel with snippets of legitimate scientific articles detailing real advances in medicine that could become a slippery slope to the exact world he depicted--he even includes references to the full articles, but I didn't take the time to read them. When I returned to these novels (now downloaded on my ipad), my hopes were confirmed--attached to the bit of each article he places in the book, is a direct link to it in its entirety--right there on the page!
I dug a little deeper, and discovered that some authors are now taking this even further, creating interactive novels for young adults to immerse them in their literary worlds. I have often thought of myself as a traditionalist, bemoaning the replacement of the physical book with digital print, but now, I acknowledge that there are some interesting possibilities I had not considered, and I look forward to exploring them :)