teenage reading

[Melissa Frazier]

Dear Seelangers,

I want to thank everyone who responded to my query re: teenage reading. 
Thank you!  I also had a request to post my responses.  Some people
responded to the list, but some people wrote to me directly, and I've
pasted in their recommendations below.

Thanks again to everyone,

Melissa Frazier


³Pokhoronite menia za plintusom² Pavla Sanaeva. If
she likes David Sedaris, she might like Sanaev¹s book. She can download it
from the Internet (
http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/sanaev_pavel/sanaev_pavel_pohoronite_menya_za
_plintusom).

1) Translated fiction (Harry Potter's adventures, books by Lemony
Snickett,
Jacques Brian, Philip Pullman, C. S. Lewis, etc.)
2) Bilingual editions, books with parallel texts (M. Twain, C. Dickens, F.
Baum, etc.)
3) Popular Russian stories by Beliaev, Zheleznikov, Nosov, Zoshchenko,
Shvarts, Lagin, etc.

I suggest Pelevin's "The Life of Insects" (Zhizn' nasekomykh). My 
students both Americans and the so-called heritage students love
it. As strange as it may seem, some heritage students (including
my own daughter, who is a scientist and is not an avid reader)
like reading Lermontov's "Geroi nashego vremeni." If your student  likes
reading detective stories, she might like reading any novel  by Dontsova
or Ustinova. They are written in very plain
contemporary Russian and have intricate plots. Many of them have
been  adapted for the screen (I like watching them myslef. Again
my daughter loves them as well).

If she likes Sedaris, she might like Vladimir Kunin. It's not exactly   in
the same vein, but he is also very funny and ironic. The funniest   of his
books was "Ivanov i Rabinovich ili I go to Haifa" http://
lib.rin.ru/doc/i/8357p.html
but also "Kysja" http://www.ladoshki.com/8012-books-%D0%BA%D0%BD%D0% 
B8%D0%B3%D0%B0-%D0%9A%D1%8B%D1%81%D1%8F.htm (not to be confused with  
"Kys'")

You can check out old "Soviet" favorites which still read very well today:
Vladislav
Krapivin, Anatolii Aleksin, Veniamin Kaverin, Kir Bulychev, Lev Kassil',
Valentina
Oseeva, Aleksandr Beliaev, Ivan Efremov.
Unfortunately, it is a policy at many libraries not to buy children's
literature.
Luckily, some of the writers that I mentioned are considered not
exclusively
"children's" writers, and you can find them at American libraries.


_________________________________
Melissa Frazier
Russian Language and Literature
Sarah Lawrence College
1 Mead Way
Bronxville, NY  10708

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