Responding Better to Literary Reading

flickr-CaptPiper (creative commons licensed)

My students found little of interest and much at fault in the book I recently assigned to them, Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. This has caused me to reflect upon what I might have done better to prep them for a more productive read.

On the other hand, I expect my English major students to be more sophisticated about their reading strategies, and I'd like to call them out on that point. By and large, what my students wrote about Rainbows End has been uninteresting and perfunctory. Their blog posts about the book are mostly personal reactions to their reading experience combined with brief criticism of the book's literary failings. These are not unreasonable responses, just not that useful. I want them to respond better to literary reading.

Now, to be fair, I am encouraging my students to be personal in their blogging style, and I also want them to feel comfortable posting informally -- especially about their reading. And if they post a review from to their Goodreads account, it seems perfectly reasonable that they write a short, candid, personally-oriented response to a novel, with a dollop of aesthetic critique for good measure.

But I had hoped for so much more.

Connecting with Books in the Digital Age

Today I taught my students about nontraditional (non-scholarly) ways of looking up information about books -- especially ways that connect them socially with other people. Here's a recap of some of these sources:

1. Goodreads
   Goodreads has reviews of books, lists of books (via Listopia), and a variety of ways of connecting with other readers through its social network. 
2. Amazon
   Amazon provides not just a way to buy books, but to find books, get recommendations based on similar books, find or post reviews, and to create wishlists that can be public and thematically related.
3. Google Books
   Google Books provides a way to search inside of books, find reviews of books, find related books, etc. One can also add books to one's Google library (essentially bookmarking books). Of course, you can also buy books through this service.
4. Google Blog Search / Icerocket / Technorati
   These are three different blog search engines to find out who is talking about specific books within the blogosphere.
5. Diigo
   One can also find discussion about books by searching social bookmarking systems like Diigo. Diigo also has a groups community, allowing one to join communities who are actively researching and bookmarking on a desired topic.
6. Slideshare / Prezi
   These are both presentation archives with social components. It's a good place to find recent and current presentations people have prepared on all kinds of topics, including books.
7. Open Educational Resources: OER Commons / MIT OpenCourseWare / Connexions
   There are amazing, freely available collections of online courses or course syllabi. These are often great ways to find out a context in which certain books are being discussed or used, especially currently or recently.
8. Twitter Search
   Find current comments about books or authors through straight searches or hashtag searches