Winner of the 2000 Giller Prize, David Adams Richards weaves an intense story of love and honesty, an exploration of how humanity faces inhumanity, how lies and disappointments cannot and will never destroy truth and human greatness. At the age of twelve, Sydney Henderson pushes his friend Connie Devlin from the church roof. Looking down on Connie’s motionless body, Sydney believes he is dead. Let Connie live and I will ever harm another soul, Sydney vows to God. At that moment, Connie stands up, wipes his bloody nose and with a laugh walks away. In the years that follow, the self-educated, brilliant and now almost pathologically gently Sydney holds true to his promise.
the curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Mark Haddon currently has an interesting blog, is a writer and illustrator of numerous children’s books and teaches creative writing for the Avron Foundation, living in Oxford, England. He has worked with autistic individuals as a young man.
Christopher Boone, the autistic 15-year-old narrator of this revelatory novel, relaxes by groaning and doing math problems in his head, eats red-but not yellow or brown-foods and screams when he is touched. Strange as he may seem, other people are far more of a conundrum to him, for he lacks the intuitive “theory of mind” by which most of us sense what’s going on in other people’s heads. When his neighbor’s poodle is killed and Christopher is falsely accused of the crime, he decides that he will take a page from Sherlock Holmes (one of his favorite characters) and track down the killer.
Question: Prove the following result: A triangle with sides that can be written in the form n³ + 1, n²-1 and 2n (where n>1) is right angled. Show by means of a counterexample, that the converse is false.
The English Patient
Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.
Ten Thousand Lovers
Edeet Ravel was born on an Israeli kibbutz and now lives in Canada. Lily is a young emigrant student exploring the wonders and terrors of her new land when she meets the man of her dreams. Ami, a former actor, is handsome, intelligent and exciting – but, like his beautiful, disintegrating country, he has a terrible flaw – he is an army interrogator.
Exerpt: “Fashila is an Arabic word meaning to fail, lose courage, despair, be disappointed, act in a cowardly way. In Hebrew slang, fashla means mess-up, snafu, an embarrassing or disastrous or humiliating mistake. You can use it for small things, like forgetting you had to meet someone, or you can use it for big things like the Yom Kippur War. A box-cell is a cell that is five feet by five feet by two and a half feet. The person can’t stand up or stretch out. You find box-cells in most Israeli prisons: they’re punishment cells, and nobody lasts very long in them – people start going mad fast and they don’t want to go back in once they’ve been let out.”
Telling Your Story
Stories are an ancient form of communication that has been around as long as man has been on this earth. Stories are told for instructional purposes, for handing down traditions, for historical legacy, for entertainment, for learning how to live in this world. Stories were first spoken, then with the advent of written language came the printed page. We have moved to the virtual page and this is the step we will take with sharing our stories.
Writing is a challenge. It calls us to gather all of our strength, determination and imagination. It will take hard work to make a good story. A historical fiction demands even more of us – attention to accurate detail – the landscape, the culture, the emotion.
Authenticity. Excitement. Engagement. Suspense. Surprise. Delight. We want our readers to start with the first word and be so enthralled they read furiously through the night. So muster up your courage and get that first word down on virtual paper – start your first blog post. We will use this blog to engage in the process of writing, invite feedback and generate ideas.
Digitizeme 