Advice on books and culture

[Mod.]

Firstly, this shouldn't be a big problem for you. I need an advice for a book I can read before the end of the month. What books would you recommend? I'm not big into historical books, or any non-fiction really. Possibly something that might be useful for the AP English test, but isn't boring. Can't really give much more info than that.

 

Secondly, I need an Interesting non-western culture to write a 15-ish page research paper on. The paper must be a single topic about the culture, marriage rituals for example. I don't want to do marriage rituals though, maybe something like government system maybe? Anyway, could anyone give out any interesting cultures along with what topic makes them interesting? This would be very helpful because I have no time on my hands at all and don't have time to look at a bunch of cultures.

[Callie]

The AP English test isn't based on literature, so there aren't really any books that would help with it. If you've ever read Brave New World that's a book that's both interesting and easy to write about.

 

Does the culture have to be a present-day culture or can it be an ancient one?

[Alorael at Large]

There are two AP English tests. One is language, and one is literature. The latter is necessarily based on a (large) set list of classics of English literature. (And, oddly, a few non-English books in in translation.)

 

What kinds of novels do you like? Of the AP list, I'd highly recommend The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Middlemarch (but it's a huge doorstopper), All Quiet on the Western Front, Lucky Jim, or Crime and Punishment (also not light reading). If memory serves, Lucky Jim is probably the quickest and easiest read. It's a fun story, but it's very much a product of a time (the 50's) and a place (Britain).

 

—Alorael, who needs a little bit more for cultures. Modern cultures? Ancient cultures? What aspects of cultures interest you? Would looking into the Chinese civil service and imperial bureaucracy be interesting? How about traditional Indian music? The Iroquois Grand Council? Indigenous African religions in modern African life?

[keira]

My AP English teacher is making us paraphrase the intro to Swift's Tale of a Tub. Which is truly horrid, on so many different levels.

 

Anyway, for books, I dunno. Most of the literature brought up around here is completely foreign to me, so I'm not much help there. As for a culture, I always thought the Middle-Eastern area was pretty interesting.

[Goldengirl]

Originally Posted By: Sylae

Anyway, for books, I dunno. Most of the literature brought up around here is completely foreign to me, so I'm not much help there. As for a culture, I always thought the Middle-Eastern area was pretty interesting.

A culture that always interested me from the ancient Middle East was the Phoenicians, modern day Lebanese and founders of Carthage. The Kurds and Turks are fascinating to me in a more modern way, especially since, via the PKK and Turkish state action, they have been fighting each other.

[Enraged Slith]

Do a research on strange Japanese fetishes. Easily 15 pages worth of material right there.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: PDN Conspiracy

There are two AP English tests. One is language, and one is literature. The latter is necessarily based on a (large) set list of classics of English literature. (And, oddly, a few non-English books in in translation.)

Are you sure that there are officially books in translation? My AP Lit teacher always repeats that there are "no works in translation" - particularly in the context that early and middle English are considered to be works in translation.

In that vein, I wouldn't recommend Crime and Punishment. All Quiet on the Western Front, though, is a very good war novel as I remember. Actually, most war novels that I've read are pretty good. The only one that I can readily think of as unpleasant is The Red Badge of Courage.

[Rowen]

Two words. Don Quixote

[Callie]

Don Quixote is an awesome book but it's also really long, so maybe not the best choice if you're busy.

[Alorael at Large]

Foreign writing is listed by the College Board, so yes, I'm pretty sure. That list doesn't include Remarque, but it does have Dostoyevsky, Chaucer, and others.

 

—Alorael, who liked the Red Badge of Courage when he was a young teenager. He hasn't read it since. It may have lost something in the interim.

[Triumph]

Both Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front are decent; I thought both were moderately interesting but not amazing. I recall AQotWF as having more compelling imagery and message, though. I also recall RBoC as being shorter.

 

For something different (and also relatively short), you could try The Old Man and The Sea. I'm not a big Hemingway fan, but I think it's worth reading something by him, and Old Man/Sea is tolerable.

[Dantius]

The book that fits your criteria to a T is Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, parts I and II. It's got several things going for it- it's short, I finished my copy on a two-hour plane ride, it's held in high regard in the English canon, usually placed on the rung just below Shakespeare, it has an ambiguous enough theme that- so long as the words "Renaissance humanism" appear somewhere in your essay- you can get away with arguing it means just about anything, and above all else it's entertaining.

 

The last point can't really be overstated, the book is just flat-out awesome. At it's heart it's the tale of a dude conquering, raping, and pillaging the hell out of Asia because he has nothing better to do and the stars said he could get away with it, and it never strays unbearably far from that. Furthermore, it's pretty clear that the audience is supposed to (and does!) get a visceral pleasure out of watching him lock the Sultan of Turkey in a cage and only take him out to use as his footstool because he can.

 

In terms of absolute quality, it's inferior to Doctor Faustus, but that play is longer, less engaging, and has a more clear-cut message, which makes it harder to argue it any way you please like you can with Tamburlaine.

[Aoslare]

Have these criteria for the AP Lit test changed? I took it in 2000, but I was encouraged to prepare works in translation if I wanted to -- and the teacher who encouraged this also worked for the college board, grading AP Lit exams.

 

I ended up preparing only one work, Goethe's Faust, because I couldn't come up with a single essay question that I couldn't answer with reference to Faust. I didn't end up using it, though; I decided to write about Arcadia instead, because oscillating time-shifting seemed like a good example of something.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

I didn't end up using it, though; I decided to write about Arcadia instead, because oscillating time-shifting seemed like a good example of something.

Damn, I never had to work with differential equations modelling simple harmonic motions in my English lit exams. Maybe I would have done better in your class...

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Alorael's link

Some works in translation may also be included (e .g ., Greek tragedies, Russian or
Latin American fiction) .
Represented Authors:
Poetry: Geoffrey Chaucer
Dramas: Sophocles
Fiction: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Alrighty then, I'll chalk this up to my teacher being, in addition to a complete bore, a poor teacher. She has mentioned Chaucer multiple times as an example of an author who will not be on the exam.

[Randomizer]

Poor reading comprehension of the instructions? Don't rely on a poor teacher's advice since if they were better they wouldn't be teaching.

[Harehunter]

In my English lit class, we had to read several passages from Chauser. I found it fascinating just how the English language had changed from Middle English to modern English. Even more interesting is that there are many words from the Middle English still in current usage in Scottish dialect. I had the opportunity to talk with someone from Glasgow, and when he mentioned the climate as 'dreich', I actually understood him.

I guess I was lucky in that my teacher had actually made several trips to England and Scotland and had studied the language quite thoroughly. Did you know that at one time all the letters in the word knight were actually pronounced?

[Alorael at Large]

And back when it was cniht it meant servant or young man, not military equestrian.

 

—Alorael, who finds it interesting how the original spelling lacked the g but had a fricative sound, the g was inserted, and the sound was then lost.

[Aoslare]

Yeah, I'm not sure that all the letters in "knight" were ever pronounced while it was spelled "knight."

[Trenton.]

Night maybe, but Knight has the silent K at the beginning.

[Aoslare]

Language changes drastically over time, including pronounciations.

[Trenton.]

So back then they actually said the k along with the night

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Trenton Uchiha, shaper servile.

So back then they actually said the k along with the night[?]

 

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

Did you know that at one time all the letters in the word knight were actually pronounced?

[Micawber]

I do wonder how it is that we know what pronunciations were like 500 years ago. It's not like there were tape recorders around then.

[keira]

People with horrid spelling who could only write phonetically?

 

I always assume every other word from the 1700-1800's England was emphasized, just because of the Capitalizations they used in their Lettering. It seemed like they were capitalizing random Words in ways that would Further the Cause of their Point being Made.

[Dintiradan]

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

Did you know that at one time all the letters in the word knight were actually pronounced?

I only discovered this when I read Chaucer during an English class in university. It's amusing how a non-English speaker who only knew how to pronounce individual English letters would have an easier time pronouncing Chaucer's work than something published today.

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Micawber

I do wonder how it is that we know what pronunciations were like 500 years ago. It's not like there were tape recorders around then.

Historical pronounciations are slowly reconstructed, based on what linguists know about

(1) the pronounciation of related languages, and

(2) how pronounciation tends to change over time in general, and even better

(3) written evidence of pronounciation, including commentary on elocution, transliterations, dictionaries, etc.

Also, it is pretty unusual to have an alphabetic language whose written form is as irregularly related to its pronounciation as is the case in English. On the other hand, historical forms of English tend to have far more surviving writing than for many other dead or evolved languages.

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

a non-English speaker who only knew how to pronounce individual English letters

This is an impossibility; pretty much all English letters have different pronounciations depending on context and, frequently, idiom.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Trenton Uchiha, shaper servile.

So back then they actually said the k along with the night

Actually, they said the c along with the nihta originally. In the transition to Middle English the word was spelled variously with a C or K, then "ni" (although sometimes with an extra vowel between the first consonant and the N), and then with various combinations of h, c, g. Sometimes there were vowels. Sometimes things were stranger.

While I don't have a chronology to go with my Middle English dictionary, I'd guess that spellings like cnect, knigt, and the like reflected an early MIddle English pronunciation, while later spellings of knith, knit, and kneit reflect loss of the fricative. The leading C or K never seems to have been lost even when the pronunciation of it was, and I'm not sure if it was a late Middle or early Modern change.

A fair amount of the emphasis is probably German-influenced. German capitalizes all nouns. But yes, it was also used for emphasis on non-nouns.

—Alorael, who agrees that older forms of orthography probably reflected pronunciation better. Middle English and Old English were much closer to having simple and general rules for pronunciation. Silent letters were more unusual; most are an artifact of previous versions of English and borrowing from foreign languages. And, of course, before standardized spelling writers were just more likely to spell it the way they liked to say it.

[Harehunter]

And to think, good old Gutenberg helped to proliferate the old spellings and thereby locked them into place, even as the pronunciations evolved. No wonder English is so hard to learn.

[Cairo Jim]

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

I guess I was lucky in that my teacher had actually made several trips to England and Scotland and had studied the language quite thoroughly. Did you know that at one time all the letters in the word knight were actually pronounced?

I was watching this little quick show on tv a few months back on the English language, and it was quite interesting. It was this guy who come in with a few questions from viewers for this lady who I'm assuming is an English professor. Long story short, words like laugh, rough and the like had all the same basic pronunciation, but with a hard "gh" at the end, and it wasn't until Shakespeare's era where they started being pronounced as they do today.

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

And to think, good old Gutenberg helped to proliferate the old spellings and thereby locked them into place, even as the pronunciations evolved. No wonder English is so hard to learn.

You can't blame Gutenberg at all, considering that most European languages -- exposed just as much to printing -- have totally straightforward, regular pronounciation.

However, spelling and pronounciation are not really what makes English so hard to learn; it's the subtleties of its grammar. Spelling and pronounciation just take memorization and practice, and if you use any language regularly it won't take long to develop proficiency with the sorts of words you are likely to encounter on a daily basis.

[Harehunter]

Does anyone teach the old line diagrams that are used to parse the syntactic structure of sentences any more? Once I saw those, I became hooked onto the history of how languages developed.

[Karoka]

Just because we not are speaking of the good?!

[Alorael at Large]

Sentence diagramming is alive, but I don't think it's well. It's taught in some schools by some teachers, but I don't think it's standard curriculum for testing, and therefore it goes overlooked in many school systems.

 

—Alorael, who was never taught diagramming. He was later assumed to have learned it, and found sentences on sticks much more confusing than sentences with arrows and circles and labels.

[A less presumptuous name.]

I learned sentences on sticks in 8th grade when I moved to Maryland. It had been part of the regular curriculum, so I was two years behind. After a month or two I was one of the best in the class. It actually helped (along with having a teacher who actually taught grammar) me to learn how sentences work and what is and is not correct.

[ĐªгŦĦ Єяŋϊε]

you be good learner