Susan Waterworth's List: Literature & Reading

Lit Crit site puit together by consortium of iSchools. Good, vetted sites.

Ed vid site with 1000s of ed related videos searchable by category and age group. The first few searches I did yielded mostly You Tube videos I could have found faster just going to YT, but it is worth having in the toolbelt.

Another UK based reading advocacy organization with lots of suggestions and resources.

Reading Connects: UK reading advocacy website and resources.

Adults enjoying YA Lit.

Nancy Pearl's pearls

"Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Perfection of God’s Justice

Dante creates an imaginative correspondence between a soul’s sin on Earth and the punishment he or she receives in Hell. The Sullen choke on mud, the Wrathful attack one another, the Gluttonous are forced to eat excrement, and so on. This simple idea provides many of Inferno’s moments of spectacular imagery and symbolic power, but also serves to illuminate one of Dante’s major themes: the perfection of God’s justice. The inscription over the gates of Hell in Canto III explicitly states that God was moved to create Hell by Justice (III.7). Hell exists to punish sin, and the suitability of Hell’s specific punishments testify to the divine perfection that all sin violates.

This notion of the suitability of God’s punishments figures significantly in Dante’s larger moral messages and structures Dante’s Hell. To modern readers, the torments Dante and Virgil behold may seem shockingly harsh: homosexuals must endure an eternity of walking on hot sand; those who charge interest on loans sit beneath a rain of fire. However, when we view the poem as a whole, it becomes clear that the guiding principle of these punishments is one of balance. Sinners suffer punishment to a degree befitting the gravity of their sin, in a manner matching that sin’s nature. The design of the poem serves to reinforce this correspondence: in its plot it progresses from minor sins to major ones (a matter of degree); and in the geographical structure it posits, the various regions of Hell correspond to types of sin (a matter of kind). Because this notion of balance informs all of God’s chosen punishments, His justice emerges as rigidly objective, mechanical, and impersonal; there are no extenuating circumstances in Hell, and punishment becomes a matter of nearly scientific formula.

Early in Inferno, , Dante builds a great deal of tension between the objective impersonality of God’s justice and the character Dante’s human

Alexie Lessons

New Media Literacy Project lessons to integrate new media via literature.

Websites chosen by librarians as reliable on everything to do with literature and loving books including detective, book stores, study guides, YA Lit.

Essays by or about intersting authors like Malcolm Gladwell, Mark Twain . .

Links to academic databanks like ERIC; links to academic journals; oodles of research links.

Decent free teacher guides for Random House novels.

Many people worry that reading is turning into a lost art. Technology may now be stepping in to help - with online sites for readers.

Avid reader Georgia says, "It's so easy to find information about the book and so easy to find other people are who talking about the book."