So what happens now for the IP4 Litterateurs?

So exams are over, and how many people still read the blog?

I hope that taking lit as a subject has somewhat developed your understanding of how language works or how ideas might be presented and how they might be influenced by the historical-social context of the time, or at the very least, helped you to develop your essay writing skills more just by the sheer amount of practice that you would have done.

Some people might be asking yourselves, 'what now'? You have every right to do whatever you want -- you could throw away your lit texts forever, or re-read them again, or, move on to other books.

Some suggestions (from myself and some other teachers, after casual discussion):

- Tons and tons of "The Onion" for funny stuff; "The Far Side Gallery"
- "On the Road" - Jack Kerouac
- For something more contemporary: "Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Coer, or "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers
- anything by Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino (for something more abstract and magical)
- Just in time for the movie adaptations: "Love in the Time of Cholera" - Gabriel Garcia Marquez; "Atonement" - Ian McEwan
- "The Name of the Rose" (or "Foucault's Pendulum", if you can last that long)
- Serious stuff: any Graham Greene novel
- "Lolita" - Vladimir Nabokov
- "A Prayer for Owen Meany"/ "The World According to Garp" - John Irving - quirky, gentle and moving
- "A Clockwork Orange"/ "Brave New World"
- Neal Stephenson's latest or "Snow Crash"
- any one of Nick Hornby's books ("High Fidelity", "About a Boy")
- any one of Arturo Perez-Reverte's mysteries - Spanish fun
- More philosophical, existentialist stuff : "Unbearable Lightness of Being" - Milan Kundera, "Siddharta" - Herman Hesse
- "V for Vendetta"/ "From Hell"/ "The Watchmen"/ "Cerebus"/ Frank Miller's stuff
- "Dave Barry Goes To Japan" or any Dave Barry book for stupid entertaining humour
- "Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Universe" (the series)
- Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"/ William Gibson's "Neuromancer"/ "Pattern Recognition"
- Thomas Pynchon's "Vineland"
- (For something disturbing in modern dystopian way) "The Concrete Island" - J.G. Ballard
- David Mitchell's "No. 9 Dream"/"Cloud Atlas"
- Haruki Murakami
- "Good Omens" (Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett) - hilarious!!
- anything by Oliver Sacks - non-fiction, but really fascinating anyway
- Barabbas (Par Lagerkvist) - "I can quite safely say that this book changed my life when i was 19..."
- "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" (Mark Haddon)
- The entire 'Narnia' series, "cos it's great to be a kid again after all that angsting"
- anything by Pico Iyer - for a glimpse of the world beyond singapore
- Lonely Planet guide to any country they want to visit during their uni holidays - with a highlighter and those little coloured tags that you use to mark out pages :)
- any good cookbook, because messing around in the kitchen is fun
- "A Suitable Boy" (Vikram Seth)
- Maurice" (EM Forster)
- "Circle of Friends" (Mave Binchy)
- Ibsen's plays
- The Temeraire series (Naomi Novik)
- 'fugitive pieces', by anne michaels: "it reads like poetry. though it isn't for everyone - pple who are not into lush luxuriant language may not like it much."

For a meta-textual movie, try watching "Adaptation".

If anyone has reviews or opinions, feel free to share them. :)