Jazz Up Your Lesson
Book, books, books… Although this might seem a not particularly exciting topic for modern students, I still dare to state that we, as teachers, can reverse it. It just takes a little bit more time, love and imagination =)
Here you see an activity aimed at guessing the book, which is included in the list of 50 must-reads in world literature. The students are provided with a brief description of a book and make their guesses.
Options:
• The students might work individually or in teams.
• You may prefer to give or not to give the variants of answers and the hints, depending on the students’ cultural awareness.
• They must name the title and the author.
Book Descriptions:
1. This 2,700-year-old epic, the oldest surviving piece of Western literature, is the work from which the poetic tradition arose.
Hint:
This is an epic written by a famous Greek poet, dating probably from the 8th century BC and it is considered the first artfully shaped creation in Western literature.
2. This 1852 novel, depicting the suffering of slaves in the southern United States, is credited with hastening the arrival of the American Civil War.
Hint:
Published when public opinion about slavery was divided in the free states, this book turned the tide against the South’s “peculiar institution”. When President Lincoln met the author of the book he said: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”
3. This debut 1962 novel transformed an unknown Russian mathematics teacher into an international symbol of dissent.
Hint:
It is a story of an average day in a Siberian forced-labour camp based on the author’s experience. This short novel profoundly affected the Russian people, serving as the first step in opening their repressive society.
4. This definitive anthology, published in 1623, enabled the work of the world’s most widely read playwright to survive in perpetuity.
Hint:
This book was published shortly after the author’s death by his friends who gathered all the versions in the original. Known also as the First Folio, it contained 18 unpublished works and the 17 plays, comedies and tragedies.
5. Published in 1900 by a Viennese psychologist, this monumental study has been credited as “the founding document of a new scientific movement”.
Hint:
The significance of this book is summed up in the author’s first sentence: “I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the appreciation of this technique, every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure…”
6. This 1916 publication on theoretical physics set forth the most profound scientific discovery since Isaac Newton’s treatise on gravitation and rivaled any similar findings in world’s history.
Hint:
This study changed the way physics thought about gravitation, space, time, mass, velocity, and energy. It upset Newton’s applecart, which had prevailed for 200 years.
Books Themselves:
1. Iliad (Homer)
2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
3. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
4. Mr. William Shakespeare Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (John Heminge and Henry Condell)
5. The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud)
6. Relativity: The Special and General Theory (Albert Einstein)
Options:
• the book titles may be given in a random order
• in case the students do not know the answer, you may provide them with the title of the book only, letting them search for the author.
NOTE:
This task can be used both as a class activity during the lesson with the immediate checking afterwards or individually by students at home if you want to encourage a deeper research on their part.
You can also initiate a post-activity, asking the students to make a book-description similar to the one, given in the task above, and let the other students guess what book they are describing.
Have you ever given enough consideration to the books that truly shook the world? The masterpieces here surely did. Written at different times, on different topics they made a huge impact on people’s minds – the effect that is difficult to overestimate. Try guessing what books are meant and remember the authors’ names as well.
Options:
• The students might work individually or in teams.
• You may prefer to give or not to give the variants of answers and the hints, depending on the students’ cultural awareness.
Book descriptions:
1. Among the greatest travel narratives ever written, this 13th century memoir put the wanderlust in Christopher Columbus, among many others.
Hint:
This book is written by one of the world’s great explorers, travelers, and chroniclers. Born in Venice he started his journeys together with his father and uncle – he accompanied them in the year 1271 on a 4-year journey to China. He was taken captive during a fight on the sea and dictated his account of his adventures while imprisoned in Genoa in 1298.
2. This 1903 memoir opened a window into the world of the handicapped and gave hope to those who suffered from what had been considered hopeless afflictions.
Hint:
This book was written by a person who became blind, deaf and speechless at the age of 19 months as a result of an illness. As she wrote: “My limitations were turned into beautiful privileges, and enabled me to walk serene and happy in the shadow cast by my deprivation.”
3. This 1925 memoir and polemic – and the author’s public appearances trumpeting the thoughts expressed therein – led to a lust for global domination that brought misery to much of the world and ruin to his own people.
Hint:
During the author’s lifetime the book sold 9 million copies. Through personal charisma and crowd hysteria, the author was able to translate into action the turgid and delusional thoughts he expressed in his book.
4. Putting a believable face on totalitarianism, this 1949 dystopian novel offered the world a warning that still rings resoundingly clear.
Hint:
By imagining a totalitarian state based on the political realities of his time, the author wrote one of history’s most powerful cautionary portraits of ideology run amok.
5. This 1848 political tract raised a compelling cry for revolution and provided a program with which to accomplish it; the rumbles it caused are still felt around the world.
Hint:
The program of the author included confiscating land, abolishing inheritance, and fomenting a “forcible overthrow of the whole extant social order. This text ends powerfully: “Let the ruling classes tremble at the prospect of the communist revolution. Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all lands, unite!”
6. Publication of this 1859 scientific study, more than 20 years in the making and written mostly in secret, turned the biological, theological, and philosophical worlds upside down.
Hint:
This book did not just shake up the scientific world; it ended the reliance on the Book of Genesis as the Creation story and shattered Platonic ideas. The gist of the theory, which has been accepted in some form by all scientists, is that plants and animals evolve, and they also go extinct.
Books themselves:
1. The Book of Marco Polo (Marco Polo as dictated to Rusticiano of Pisa)
2. The Story of My Life (Helen Keller)
3. Mein Kampf or My Struggle in English (Adolf Hitler)
4. 1984 (George Orwell)
5. The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)
6. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (Charles Darwin)
Options:
• the book titles may be given in a random order;
• in case the students do not know the answer, you may provide them with the title of the book only, letting them search for the author.
NOTE: This task can be used both as a class activity during the lesson with the immediate checking afterwards or individually by students at home if you want to encourage a deeper research on their part.
You can also initiate a post-activity, asking the students to make a book-description similar to the ones, given in the task above, and let the other students guess what book they meant.