3 books - Jayne

The Fault in Our Stars is an extremely popular book amongst teens. During the time I was contract teaching, the book had made several rounds of the different classes I teach, and is often quoted atop the faded sepia photographs my students post on Instagram and Tumblr. Having read the novel, I see why it appeals to them: mopey teens completely and utterly in love with each other, though with a sinister “til-death-do-us-part” hanging over them. The protagonists both have cancer, and help each other through their struggles. However, I did not particularly enjoy the book even though I had set out with the intention to. John Green’s writing, I feel, is far too presumptuous and cloying, as though he had set out to (and in fact has succeeded in) have legions of teenagers quoting single lines of his stuff on social media. Furthermore, the events that unfold in the story are simply unrealistic, like a perfect soap opera. Even though it deals with issues of love, illness, and death, they are not dealt with completely satisfactorily, and the illnesses only serve to put pressure on the love relationship. That is why I would not recommend this book for study in a literature classroom.

The MOE recommended text I have chosen is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I taught this novel to my three Secondary One Literature classes during my contract teaching. It is a simple enough read, even the lower-achieving students had no trouble reading through it and understanding the plot. It still was a challenge to get them to read deeply enough to understand the themes. The story is told mostly from the point of view of Bruno, a nine-year-old boy who makes friends with a Jewish boy his age, across the fence of a concentration camp near his home. I really enjoyed the movie that was adapted from this novel as I had a good, cathartic cry at the ending. I would have to say that it did take quite some effort on my part to make the issues and themes explored in the book relevant to my mostly Singaporean students who did not have much prior knowledge of the second World War, but I thought it made a good introduction for them to what some of the effects of the War were on a micro-level. Although I personally disliked the overly simplistic language that John Boyne used to designate the thoughts as coming from a nine-year-old, it was very moving and deals sharply with different perspectives that were taken by the various groups of people who were directly involved in the War. This book does serve one of the most important aims of Literature study: to tune students to an awareness of the Other, so I would recommend this text for lower achieving students, but push high achieving students to study texts that have more depth in the language.

A book I may not typically read is Fasting, Feasting, but once I started reading it, I could not put it down. I enjoyed reading through the perspective of an unmarriageable Indian woman, whom Anita Desai crafted very vividly. Uma is an unwed, quirky, but kind woman who lives with her parents, and her brother Arun is lonely in America where he attends university. The story sensitized me to life as a woman other than that of my own privileged circumstances as an educated Singaporean. This is definitely a book appropriate for O level Literature students to read, with plenty to learn not just about gender roles, but also race in the second part of the book.