Monday, June 15, 2009

DailyLit (and Sherlock Holmes)

So if you've got kidlets paying attention, they may have twigged to the arrival at the end of 2009 of a new film version of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law (as Watson) and larded with explosions, smart dialogue, mystery, intrigue and other stuff likely to be enjoyable Boxing Day cinematic fare.
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And do you have a copy of the book in your library?  A nice copy?  And even then, is it too big or offputting for a Young Person to enjoy?
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Fear not, because you can offer them the chance to read it in bite sized pieces.  Delivered free, direct to their email, in 131 instalments.  Really.  It's what DailyLit does.  They're building their library of copyright material, and will charge you for that, but they also have a bunch of public domain material too (Pride and Prejudice? Romeo and Juliet? Yes, and yes again).  Five minutes a day, or less.  Achievable.  Amusing? Fun? Different? Worth trying?
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I think so.
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Thanks to Wonderbooks for alerting me to DailyLit (and for the lovely entry mentioning how a Skerricks idea had been useful, too!)
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Cheers, Ruth
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PS. I will be going to see the Sherlock Holmes film for assorted reasons, one idionsyncratic one being that it includes the actor William Hope.  Who?  He and Laurel Lefkow are the readers on the unabridged audio version of Audrey Niffenegger's novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, one of my favourite books ever ever ever (on the wrong side of the bonking line for a school library, though) and probably my favourite audio book.  The best audiobook readers may well be those who you don't know so well, so you don't get distracted by your preconceptions of them from elsewhere.  But Hope and Lefkow do the most brilliant job with TTTW as Claire and Henry.  I don't know how I'm going to cope when later this year the film of TTTW comes out, and Eric Bana becomes Henry (and, curiously, Rachel McAdams who is in the Sherlock Holmes film, is Claire in TTTW film).   If you want to listen to TTTW unabridged audio (note the unabridged, there is an abridged version with different readers), it's obtainable on CD from Amazon etc, or to download from audible.com - even in Australia, which is not always the case.
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But enough about me.  Try DailyLit.  Let your students know about it.

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