About me
I love to read all kinds of texts. Sharing my passion for words and ideas makes teaching English my dream job.
The aim of this website is to provide a space to store, publish and share students' work and course information.
The aim of this website is to provide a space to store, publish and share students' work and course information.
Two trucks loaded with thousands of copies of Roget's Thesaurus collided as they left a New York publishing house last Thursday, according to the Associated Press.
Witnesses were aghast, amazed, astonished, astounded, bemused, benumbed, bewildered, confounded, confused, dazed, dazzled, disconcerted, disoriented, dumbstruck, electrified, flabbergasted, horrified, immobilized, incredulous, nonplussed, overwhelmed, paralyzed, perplexed, scared, shocked, startled, stunned, stupified, surprised, taken aback, traumatized, upset. . . .
Witnesses were aghast, amazed, astonished, astounded, bemused, benumbed, bewildered, confounded, confused, dazed, dazzled, disconcerted, disoriented, dumbstruck, electrified, flabbergasted, horrified, immobilized, incredulous, nonplussed, overwhelmed, paralyzed, perplexed, scared, shocked, startled, stunned, stupified, surprised, taken aback, traumatized, upset. . . .
Mashing up visual and verbal language features
I admire this example from the visual.ly website
Ten writers' reasons for reading
Click here to see what writers say about the reasons why we read.
recently read
This was a funny and intriguing novel. The first part involves walking backwards and a very funny tale of learning to drive for the first time in rural Portugal in 1905. The second part had hints of links to the first, but I could not put the pieces together. It was a very strange story about an autopsy. I was bemused by the links between Agatha Christie's detective novels and the Bible! By part three I was ready for it all to come together but it wasn't until after I had finished reading that the connections between the three bereaved men entered my head. Quirky and entertaining.
|
Some of my best student readers have recommended this book to me and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a great adventure story with a hero to like. Although some parts might seem too good (or bad) to be true, I just suspended disbelief and enjoyed it for the work of fiction that it is. Sometimes I find fantasy or science fiction hard to follow with strange place names and jargon but this novel did not trouble me. A great holiday read, this story had many of the elements that made The Hunger Games and Divergent and Ender's Game so popular.
Kate Atkinson never lets me down. I enjoyed the looping diversions in the narrative and the switches, links and quilting of the structure through the changing narrators. Teddy is a wonderful character - so patient and stoic and intelligent. The plot twist at the end was so cleverly slipped in between the lines yet it made me go back over every part of the story and think about it all again. Marvelous.
|
This was a fantastic holiday read. I enjoyed the large cast of characters and the twisting yarn. The sentence constructions were marvellous in the way they lured me into the world my imagination conjured in response. I was intrigued by the notion of honour held by the various characters and how they lived according to their sense of it.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson is a fabulous novel. I really enjoyed the way it engaged my imagination by playing with patterns and repetition. I liked the way the story asks 'what if...' and then follows the consequences of those changes. By commencing with a possible ending, Atkinson teases the reader with the idea that you think you can guess how it will all turn out... but you never quite know for sure. I would very much like to discuss the different ways the ending can be interpreted with someone so please get a copy from the Ashburton library and read it!
Gone by Michael Grant - I have been trying to get this out of the Ashburton
library for over a year but it has always been out - until now. Its popularity is obvious from the first page when the teacher simply disappears from history class in the middle of the lesson. It turns out that everyone over the age of 15 has simply vanished! An interesting assortment of characters provides conflict and drama that kept the pages turning quickly. |