Job Discussion Forums

[Truman]

So, what do TEFL teachers like to read?

Novels? Classics? Contemporary? Non-fiction? Just the newspaper? Mainly English? Or other languages too? I'm going to guess there are a few sci-fi fans here.

Which authors? Which titles?

Just curious ...

[ntropy]

I have just discovered Walter Mosley and I can't believe I haven't heard buzz about him before. Not just the Easy Rawlins books which do make lists. The Man in the Basement may be the best book I've ever read.

[anthyp]

I try to read a lot but mostly stick to the "classics."

My two favorite authors are Samuel Beckett and W.B. Yeats. I consider Beckett and Yeats the foremost writers in their respective genres (drama and poetry) of the last century. I have read as much of their stuff as I can find - pretty much everything they ever wrote.

Hey, I was an English major in college. It's what we do.

I am also a big fan of Marcel Proust, but quite honestly, I can never get very far into A la recherche du temps perdu. Another one of my favorite books is Cien Anos de Soledad, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The only modern author I really read a lot of is David Sedaris, an absolutely hilarious writer with great insight into the world of the "artist."

That's not to say I shy away from modern fiction! I still read as much as I can, but find myself going back to the old favorites time and time again.

[denise]

Favorite? Dunno. Authors I have enjoyed in the past:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Dumas, J.K. Rowling (yay!), Armistead Maupin... and others.

d

[Roger]

Just finished one more Hammond Innes ; a prolific writer back in the 1980s, probably Canadian; his novels are always set somewhere in the wilderness and often are about crime against the natura lenvironment. Most novels by Hinnes depict greedy white business types with interests in the Arabian world.
Now I am into DRINNEN VOR DER TUER (German), a report written by a German Mao admirer and sinologist who studied and lived in Peking from 1974-76.
It's a very hands-on, experience type of report, with lots of insights into the China that existed before Deng's liberalisation. People still lived communally in danweis, spying on each other and also showing more solidarity and personal interest in each other's wellbeing. The CHinese he depicts are in stark contrast to those we rub shoulders with - in those days, paying a bribe of 400 to get your child off the list of kids to be sent for labour in the country side represented the sacrificing of half a year's income of the average worker!

I also read Milan Kundera, THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING at the moment. Another good read on "socialism" as it existed in the 1960s...

[cimarch]

I'm a Fantasy buff, my favourite authors include; Terry Pratchett, David & Leigh Eddings, Robert Jordan, Jean M. Auel, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, James Herriot and Gerald Durrell (I know they're not all Fantasy). I get boxes of books sent out every 3 months so my scope has enlarged somewhat, my parents are trying to 'improve' me.

[Joachim]

Margaret Atwood! (especially her latest "Oryx & Crake" - WOW!)

Michael Cunningham ("A Home At The Edge Of The World"

Sue Townsend ("The Queen And I")

Ira Levin ("The Boys From Brazil")

Amy Tan ("The Kitchen God's Wife")

Armistead Maupin ("The Night Listener")

Banana Yoshimoto ("Goodbye Tsugumi")

Hanif Kureshi ("The Buddha Of Suburbia")

and so much more

[Atlas]

I'm one of those science fiction fans you mentioned.

William Gibson is my favorite writer, particularly his old short stories before we pigeonholed his universe. He wrote a story called "The Winter Market" that really spoke to me as a writer and artist. http://textz.gnutenberg.net/textz/gibson_william_the_winter_market.txt "Burning Chrome" and "Dogfight" left a haunting inhumanity sizzling in their wake. Of course the novel Neuromancer resuscitated the genre itself in 1984 and set the bar higher for all SF writers. A must read. Gibson has a way with grounding his futures in the worst possible present, and his world thrums with verisimilitude, detail and vibrant overpopulation.

A while ago my favorite author was Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, I even saw him lecture. He got caught up with a magnum opus that he could never finish properly (Timequake). It published, but I never read it.

You can't read science fiction without reading Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and a lesser known Russian writer named Yevgeny Zamyatin, who was jailed for his books and so was denied wider reknown. His novel We is on par with 1984 and Brave New World.

Oh dear I forgot to mention Doyle's Sherlock Holmes! I never tire of that chap!

[delian]

My favourite writers are

Haruki Murakami - especially 'Windup Bird Chronicles' and 'A Wild Sheep's Chase'

Salman Rushdie - I can read 'The Moor's Last Sigh' over & over.

Margaret Atwood - her short stories especially. 'Oryx and Crake' didn't do it for me, actually.

David Sedaris - he is hilarious.

Kobe Abe's 'Woman in the Dunes'

DBC Pierre - 'Vernon Godlittle' (a funny/sad 'commentary' on America and its trailer trash by yet another British writer. I read it in a day - it's good)

Michael Ondaatje - almost anything he writes, I like.

I'm plugging away through Jacques Derrida's 'Of Grammatology' right now - a bit of nonfiction.

[inmexico]

My favourite authors are primarily Canadian ( Michael Ondaatje, Morely Callaghan, Robert Kroetch, Sinclair Ross) but there are two novels that will always be at the top of my list - Peter Carey's "Jack Maggs" and Robin Minstrey's "Such a Long Journey".

[Aramas]

I quite like sci-fi and fantasy. I went through a pretentious phase in my early twenties and read lots of Wilde, GBS, Conrad, Greene etc. I always loved Orwell, Huxley, Wells and Wyndam, but old stuff does tend to be rather naive.

As a child my favourite author was RM Ballantyne. I can't imagine how many times I've read Coral Island.

Currently my favourite authors are Cecilia Dart-Thornton, JV Jones, Robin Hobb, Julian May, Ian M Banks, Ken MacLeod etc.

I also enjoy Gibson, but cyberpunk really has been done to death.

The only 'serious' fiction I've enjoyed recently was Umberto Eco.

The most annoying authors I've read are David Eddings and Robert Heinlein. I can't bear their puerile attempts at cutesy banter.

[garbotara]

[garbotara]

[gtidey]

good topic.

ive just read The Old Man and the Sea by earnest hemmingway and it's fantastic. i cant recommend it enough, it's absoloutley perfect, everything about it is spot on.

before that i read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, which is also amazing.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggars is awesome. not only does it have an impossbly cool title but its sad, clever and fuuuunnnyy. laugh? i thought my pants would never dry.

then theres bill bryson. but dont get his new history one; its tripe.

[biffinbridge]

Anything by Primo Levi.