While on Practicum, I happened to glance at the list of “Most Challenged / Banned Books” list up on one of the bulletin boards and was surprised to see the one in my hand, The Kite Runner, on the list.  I enjoyed using the book as my silent reading time text so much more knowing that it was probably going to be loaded with controversial subject matter.  What a brilliant way of getting kids to read good literature; put it up on a board as part of a list of books that parents don’t want their kids to read!

More seriously though, I decided to look more into the reasons for the challenge of this particular text.  What I found was that the text had been widely challenged, mainly in the US back in 2008, due to one particular scene where one young boy is raped; not due to the violence in the text, where a man is beat until his aggressor has his eye gouged out by a sling shot, and not due to a vivid and violent stoning scene, but due to the child-on-child rape scene.  The text was “released” as part of the University of Victoria’s Freedom To Read Week, celebrated across Canada, just this past Feb 2010.

The Kite Runner has quickly become one of my favourite books; the writing is vivid, beautiful… the voice is strong… it tackles issues of integrity, honesty, loyalty, understanding, forgiveness and compassion.  I realize that the text has more moments that are moving, thoughtful and difficult than not, that there are challenging moments and that teaching this text invites a tremendous amount of processing and discussion time… but I can’t think of another text I’ve read that tackles all of these literary elements and relevant sociological and political issues so meaningfully.  I think it would be important to balance out the text with additional information to ensure that students don’t walk away from the text assuming any sweeping generalizations about Afghanistan, Afghanis or Muslims in general, but to that end there are several resources online, such as one put out by Amnesty International (http://www.amnestyusa.org/education/pdf/kiterunnerhigh.pdf), which focuses more on the film adaptation of the text, but is complete with lesson plans and a foreword by Khaled Hosseini, and tackles discussion topics around the human rights issues and political situation in Afghanistan during the period the novel (and film) are set in.

This is one of several online resources I found with some additional material that you might find helpful in terms of accessing additional background information and teaching resources/ideas – enjoy.

I just wanted to begin by saying that I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone’s responses to and approaches into Life of Pi.

This is my second time reading this particular text and I’m stuck, again, by the same reaction as I was the first time around.  Like all of you my undergrad was in English Lit, and as you all know, there wasn’t a great deal of time for personal reading in the midst of an English Lit degree, but when I did find the time I would myself drawn towards texts that fit into the genre known as “magic realism.”  So I read quite a bit of Tom Robbins where characters such as a tin can and a spoon head off together on an adventure with each other and are completely animate beings.  When I read Life of Pi I am equally struck by the magical realism aspects of the text.

The exercise we did last class, where we drew our visualization of a particular image from the text… I really personally struggled with that because as soon as I find myself drawn into a world where tigers live on boats with boys and trees have fruit with teeth, I suspend all “rational” thought and allow myself to blur the lines between what is possible and what is not.  I don’t know if many of you do the same (suspend analysis or preconceived notions of what is real or possible) or have had a similar experience?

Depending on the level at which I was teaching this text, I think I would like to move in that direction… to discuss magic realism and whether the text could be considered within that genre or framework and also to argue why it is not.  Martel does manage to shake some of the magic realism label during the novel’s conclusion (I won’t give it away for those who haven’t finished the text yet!) so it could be an interesting argument to get the class involved in.  Some techniques might be to split the room in two and have each side argue one or the other point.  This would manage to expose the students to the text, teach them about the genre of magic realism (hopefully spurning them on to pick up more texts like that for their own pleasure reading by simply learning that more like those exist, if they enjoyed it), as well as formulate their understanding of presenting a thesis or argument and being able to support it, or see the flip side and argue for that as well.