On Thursday, May 10, the ETS4U Literature Class hosted an evening of “Sharing Good Reads” in the Ellen Knox Library. Almost 30 members of the community attended including students, Old Girls, parents, faculty and staff.
Over the course of two hours, we followed The Book of Negroes freeborn narrator’s journey from West Africa into slavery in South Carolina and New York to freedom in Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone and London; visited two circuses in Night Circus and Water for Elephants; found ourselves in the oil conflict in the Nigeria Delta in Little Bee; met a burned man, his Canadian nurse, a Canadian-Italian thief, and an Indian soldier in the British Army living out the end of World War II in an Italian villa in The English Patient; followed Siddhartha’s spiritual journey during the time of the Buddha; met a sixteen-year-old cancer patient forced by her parents to attend a support group, where she meets and falls in love with a seventeen-year-old amputee in The Fault is in Our Stars; heard about stories of loneliness and marriage, and hunger and love in the collection A Stranger to Myself; met five-year-old Jack, whose entire world is the room where he is kept prisoner with his mother in Room; experienced the best and worst of times in London and Paris during the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities; heard about forty possible afterlives in Sum (as in Latin for Cogito ergo sum); learned a great comeback to being called a troll from Tina Fey in her memoir Bossy Pants; and celebrated the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth by hearing about her anonymous kindness to Henry James and discussing The House of Mirth’s manners and conventions in 1890s New York City.
These are just a mere selection of the titles recommended for summer reading. Thank you to everyone who came out to support this event. The list of recommended reads will be published on our website, and you can mark the date for next year’s evening, Thursday, May 9, 2013, in your calendar.
