Mittwoch, 2. März 2011

Pre-Reading-Exercise

We’ll talk about Lois Lowry’s novel “The Giver” and because of that we have to think about what the book could be about.
There are some questions you can ask, if you want to know, what the book is telling us. “The Giver” is not a definite title. It does not help you to know who acts, what happens. Is it just about someone who likes to give other people things? Or is it not so easy and it is a more complicated story?
I guess in our ‘Lernstand’ we had an excerpt of the novel in German language. “Der Hüter der Erinnerungen” was about a perfect world, which is controlled by some men and so I think the novel is. But why is it named “The Giver”? If you want to save memories you do not give anything, don’t you?
The cover shows two people, a young and an old man.  The young boy wears a white nightdress and has blond hair. He raises his hands to the old man. Even the old man raises his hands to the boy. He wears a black suit and seams to be very old, because he has white hair and his skin-color is nearly white, too. The two people have no face -that means no eyes, mouth, nose and so on. Although the old man must be larger than the young boy, they have almost the same height. I don’t think the cover tells us a lot about the content and I would not focus on it for our pre-reading-exercise.
All in all the fact that we will read it as a schoolwork signifies the novel has an ulterior motive and some philosophy. So maybe it shows that a perfect world is not so perfect how it seams.

2 Kommentare:

  1. I like the philosophical part of your comment. Hopefully, we'll find out more about the "perfect world".

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  2. By the way: cool background picture to the blog!

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