Reading Assigment for the 2nd Semester B.

Hello guys at the Bilingual Administarve Program, 2nd semester B. This is an example of what you have to do for your reading assignment.

1. Prepare a short oral presentation on your reading. Then record it on video (a one-minute long talk should be sufficient), upload it to You Tube, and post it to blog.

Everybody should have his / her own video posted on their blogs. You can use your imagination to record your video any way you like, but don't get complicated. Uploading videos to You Tube is very easy to do. You just need an account.

2. Write a short review on the text you read. It woul be nice if you could write different post mentioning different aspects of the book for each member of your group. below you can find an example of a short review for The Reader, a novel by Bernhard Schlink.

My short review on The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

The reader is a beautiful novel by German lawyer Bernard Schlink, published in 1995 in Germany, and then translated into many languages. It was released this year again because it was adapted to a movie last year. Kate Winslet, who played Hanna Schmitz, won the Oscar for her performance, by the way.

I like this novel because it is an interesting view of the Nazi holocaust. It’s the story of a 15 year old boy (Michael Berg) who fell in love with an older woman (Hanna Schmitz). She helped him once when he fainted on the street on his way home after school: this was a symptom of hepatitis.

When Michael recovered from his sickness, he visited Hanna with some flowers to thank her for her help. After a couple of visits, he saw her taking a shower, she seduced him, and they made love. They had a strange romance for some months, and then Hanna disappeared. Every time, before they made love, Hanna asked Michael to read passages of books to her, but he never understood why.

Many years later Michael became a lawyer and he participated in a trial to a group women from the SS (Adolf Hitler’s police), when World War II ended, for killing a group of Jewish women. Michael was shocked when he saw Hanna in the group of accused women. Hanna was sentenced to life in prison, but their secret was never revealed. Hanna had another secret Michael learned in the trial: she didn’t know how to read and write. So he later sent Hanna recordings of books with his voice when she was in prison.

In my opinion this a great novel that makes us think about the importance of love, compassion, and learning from our mistakes. I recommend it to everybody.