This academic year, Yeovil College Learning Resource Centre encouraged our students and staff to take part in the Six Book Challenge (now renamed Reading Ahead ).
A dynamic reading and literacy initiative created by the Reading Agency, this challenged participants to read six things - from whole books to short stories and poems, magazines and journal articles, and even website articles and digital games. Our challengers read widely, filling in details and thoughts about their reading in a reading diary, which encouraged analysis and evaluation of texts and proved a popular way for even seasoned readers to find new ways to expand their horizons and challenge themselves to try new genres and books.
We asked some of our Challengers to report back on what they enjoyed about the challenge and why, and in the coming weeks, we'll be sharing what they told us, in a bid to demonstrate exactly why it's such a great idea.
Today, our Academic Resource Centre Co-Ordinator, Chris Canning, talks us through what he found interesting about the Challenge, and why you should definitely read some sci-fi/ fantasy fiction.
Ramblings of a Six Book Challenger…
‘It’s not with many mediums or types of reading that you actually sit
back and really think about the information that you’ve just absorbed. I
normally find the only time that this really happens is when you’re researching
or reading fiction. However, this is only such a small part of what we read on
a day to day basis. We read in our work, our play, and everyday over and over
again. But do we really think about
the small things that we read?
The Six Book
Challenge requires you to look back on the items you have selected and review
your thoughts. A key aspect of the challenge is that you can choose any form of
reading that you like. I saw this as an opportunity to steer away from
reviewing six straight novels from the sci-fi/fantasy genre (yes, geek- but
hey, that’s fashionable nowadays right?!). Though of course I still had to
include three, along with a web article, a film review and a graphic novel.
It’s two of these fantasy novels that I will be focusing on below.
The most
interesting aspect of the experience is that you’re not just reviewing an item
as a single entity. Comparing and contrasting the different writing styles of
books rooted in the same genre is something that I have never particularly done
before. One focuses on the epic scale of multiple characters and story arcs
spread across the fictional landscape, with each story slowly building to a
crescendo, while the other focuses purely on a single character, with constant
skirmishes and implicating moral decisions being made every few chapters.
The length
and descriptive narrative are completely different; yet both novels focus on
flawed fantasy worlds that are not dissimilar to our own. Corrupt political
systems where the protagonists that you’re rooting for are making the wrong
choices. Are the bad guys really bad? Or they just overtly selfish by looking
after their own interests? So
similar, yet so different- and yet not at all different from our story on this
little blue planet. Just a few swords and a handful of dragons to make it more
interesting!"
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