C) Do library research and reproduce a talk with an important writer.

5. Read the following extract and observe the way literary criticism is written:

Jane Austensaw life in a clear, dry light. She was not with­out deep human sympathies, but she had a quick eye for vani­ty, selfishness, but vulgarity, and she perceived the frequent in­congruities between the way people talked and the realities of a situation. Her style is quiet and level. She never exaggerates, she never as it were, raises her voice to shout or scream. She is neither pompous, nor sentimental, nor flippant, but always gravely polite, and her writing contains a delicate but sharp-edged irony.

L.P. Hartleyis one of the most distinguished of modern novelists; and one of the most original. For the world of his cre­ation is composed of such diverse elements. On the one hand he is a keen and accurate observer of the process of human thought and feeling; he is also a sharp-eyed chronicler of the social scene. But his picture of both is transformed by the light of a Gothic, imagination that reveals itself now in fanciful rever­ie, now in the mingled dark and gleam of a mysterious light and a mysterious darkness... Such is the vision of- life presented in his novels.

Martin Amisis the most important novelist of his genera­tion and probably the most influential prose stylist in Britain to­day. The son of Kingsley Amis, considered Britain's best novel­ist of the 1950s, at the age of 24 Martin won the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel The Rachel Papers (his father had won the same prize 20 years earlier). Since 1973 he has published seven more novels, plus three books of journal­ism and one of short stories. Each work has been well received, in particular Money (1984), which was described as "a key novel of the decade." His latest book is The Information (1995). It has been said of Amis that he has enjoyed a career more like that of a pop star than a writer.

A) Turn the above passages into dialogues and act them out.

b) Choose an author, not necessarily one of the greats, you'd like to talk about. Note down a few pieces of factual information about his life and work. Your fellow-students will ask you questions to find out what you know about your subject.

Pair work. Discussing books and authors involves exchanging opinions and expressing agreement and disagreement. Team up with another student to talk on the following topics (Use expressions of agreement and disagreement (pp.290).

"A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good."

(Samuel Johnson)

"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."

(Mark Twain)

"There's an old saying that all the world loves a lover. It doesn't. What all the world loves is a scrap. It wants to see two lovers struggling for the hand of one woman."

(Anonymous)

"No furniture is so charming as books, even if you never open them and read a single word."

(Sydney Smith)

"Books and friends should be few but good."

(a proverb)

Group discussion.

Despite the increase in TV watching, reading still is an im­portant leisure activity in Britain. More than 5,000 titles were nominated in a national survey conducted in 1996. The public was invited to suggest up to five books. It was later suggested that the votes either came from English literary students or from people who were showing off. What do you think? Can you point out a few important names that failed to make it into the top 100 list?

1.The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien

2.1984George Orwell

3. Animal Farm George Orwell

4. UlyssesJames Joyce

5. Catch-22Joseph Heller

6. The Catcher in the RyeJ.D. Salinger

7. To Kill a MockingbirdHarper Lee

8. One Hundred Years of SolitudeGabriel Garcia Marquez

9. The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck

10. TrainspottingIrvine Welsh

11. Wild SwansJung Chang

12. The Great GatsbyF. Scott Fitzgerald

13. Lord of theFlies William Golding

14. On the RoadJack Kerouac

15. Brave New World Aldous Huxley

16.The Wind in the WillowsKenneth Grahame

17. Winnie-the-PoohA. A, Milne

18. TheCotor PurpleAlice Walker

19. The HobbitJ. R. R. Tolkien

20. The OutsiderAlbert Camus

21. The lion, the Witch and the WardrobeC. S. Lewis

22. The TrialFranz Kafka

23. Gone with the Wind Margaret Michell

24. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyDouglas Adams

25. Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie

The Diary of Anne Frank

27. A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess

28.Sons and LoversD.S. Lawrence

29. To the LighthouseVirginia Woolf

30. If this isa ManPrimo Levi

31. LolitaVladimir Nabokov

32. The Wasp FactoryIain Banks

33. Remembrance of Things PastMarcel Proust

34. Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryRoald Dahl

35. Of Mice and MenJohn Steinbeck

36. BelovedToni Morrison

37. PossessionA. S. Byatt

38. Heart of DarknessJoseph Conrad

39. A Passage to IndiaE. M. Forster

40. Watership DownRichard Adams

41.Sophie's WorldJostein Gaarder

42. The Name of the RoseUmberto Eco

43. Love in the Time of CholeraGabriel Garcia Marquez

44. RebeccaDaphne du Maurier

45. The Remains of the DayKazuo Ishiguro

46. The Unbearable Lightness of BeingMilan Kundera

47. BirdsongSebastian Faulks

48. Howards EndE. M. Forster

49. Brideshead RevisitedEvelyn Waugh

50. A Suitable BoyVikram Seth

51. DuneFrank Herbert

52. A Prayer for Owen MeanyJohn Irving

53. PerfumePatrick Susskind

54. Doctor ZhivagoBoris Pasternak

55. The Gormenghast TrilogyMervyn Peake

56. Cider with RosieLaurie Lee

57. The BellJar Sylvia Plath

58. The Handmaid's TaleMargaret Atwood

59. Testament Of YouthVera Brittain

60. The MagusJohn Fowles

61. Brighton RockGraham Greene

62. The Ragged Trousered Phi­lanthropistRobert Tressell

63. The Master and MargaritaMikhail Bulgakov

64. Tales of the CityArmistead Maupin

65. The French lieutenant's WomanJohn Fowles

66. Captain Corelli's MandolinLouis de Bernieres

67. Slaughterhouse 5Kurt Vbnhegut

68. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle MaintenanceRobert Pirsig

69. A Room with aView E.M. Forster

70. Lucky JimKingsley Amis

71. If Stephen King

72. The Power and the GloryGraham Greene

73. The StandStephen King

74. All Quiet on the Western FrontErich Maria Remarque

75. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha HaRoddy Doyle

76. MatildaRoald Dahl

77.American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis

78. Fear and Loathiflg in Las Vegas Hunter S. Thompson

79. A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking

80. James and the Giant Peach Roald Dahl

81. Lady Chatterley's Lover D. H. Lawrence

82. The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe

83. The Complete Cookery Course Delia Smith

84. An Evil Cradling Brian Keenan

85. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence

86. Down and out in Paris and London George Orwell

87. 2001 — A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke

88. The Tin Drum Gunther Grass

89. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Alexander Solzhenitsyn

90. Long Walk to Freedom Nelson Mandela

91. The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkifts

92. Jurassic Park Michael Crichtdn

93. The Alexandria Quartet Lawrence Durrell

94. Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton

95. High Fidelity Nick Hornby

96. The Van Roddy Doyle

97. The BFG Roald Dahl

98. Earthly Powers Anthony Burgess

99. I, Claudius Robert Graves

100. The Horse Whisperer Nicholas Evans

8. Compile your own list "Favourite Books of the Century."

9. Alexander Herzen called public libraries "a feast of ideas to which all are invited”. Read the text below and say how the modem libraries differ from those of the old days. Use the topical vocabulary.

MY FAVOURITE LIBRARY

There are many libraries which I use regularly in London, some to borrow books from, some as quiet places to work in, but the Westminster Central Reference Library is unique, in a small street just off Leicester Square, it is run by the London borough of Westminster. You don't need a ticket to get in, and it is available to foreign visitors just the same as to local resi­dents. You simply walk in, and there, on three floors, you can consult about 138,000 reference books and they include some very remarkable and useful items.

As you come in, the first alcove on the right contains tele­phone directories of almost every country in the world — Ar­gentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, and so on, besides direc­tories of important addresses in each country. There is also a street directory of every British town of any size, with the streets in alphabetical order, and the residents' names, as a rule, against their number in the street, while in another section the residents themselves are listed in alphabetical order.

Next there are technical dictionaries in all the principal languages. I counted 60 specialised technical dictionaries for Russian alone. Then there is a section which, besides the best world atlases, contains individual atlases of a great many countries, some of them almost too heavy to lift. Seven hundred periodicals, mostly technical, are taken by the library, and the latest issues are put out on racks nearby. By asking at the enquiry desk you can see maps of the whole of Britain on the scale of 1/60,000 and 1/24,000, and smaller-scale maps of nearly every other country in Europe.

Around the walls, on this floor and the floor above, are reference books on every possible subject, including, for instance, standard works of English literature and criticism. Foreign literature, however, is represented mainly by antho­logies.

Finally, on the top floor of all, is a wonderful art library, where you can take down from the shelves all those expensive, heavy, illustrated editions that you could never really afford yourself. The librarian at the desk can direct you to answers for

almost any query you may have about the plastic alts. There is in fact a busy enquiry desk on each floor, and the last time I was there they had just received a letter from a distinguished medical man. He had written to ask for information about sword-swallowing.He was very interested in the anatomy of sword-swallowers, and had failed to find anything either in medical libraries or in the British Museum Library! (Anglia, 1972)