READING: favourite leisure time activity for many people, first books were handwritten = manuscripts, before there was only the Holy Bible, only rich people had books, many people were illiterate (analfabet), in 16th century Johann Gutenberg invented book-printing, books available to almost everyone.
Pros: opportunity to learn something, improving of communication skills, challenges imagination, pleasure to life, reading possible everywhere (travelling, breaks at school, on holiday)… Nowadays big assortment of books, but too expensive, only a few people read books, favourite – DVD, TV, cinema, internet, less time to read as well. At school – some books are obligatory to read, not favourite among students.
LITERATURE: 2 categories: non-fiction, fiction books. Non-fiction (for information – textbooks, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, self-help books, travel/history/art books, cookery books…), fiction (about imaginary people or events, 2 types – poetry and prose: poems, read tales, short stories, novellas, romances, crime/spy novels, mysteries, science fiction, westerns, thrillers, historical novels…).
BOOK: a story (set in a real/imaginary place & time in which characters live), the plot = zápletka (the series of events which form the story of a novel), the best books are usually read in one sitting, books can be interesting, boring, real, fancy = vymyslený, interest-holding = pútavý, dramatical... We can buy books in a bookshop, second-hand bookshop (antikvariát) or to borrow them from a library (registration fee for yearly membership, a library card).
MY FAVOURITE BOOK: some info about author, genre, name, characteristics of book, characteristics of main characters, the story (dej), why this book & author is my favourite?
The nobel prize for literature: awarded every year to writer whose work is considered to be a unique literary
achievement. Nobel Prize winners = W. Faulkner, J. Steinbeck, E. Hemingway...
BOOKS FOR CHILDREN: picture books
(already for small children, help them to learn names of animals and things, many times with text near to picture), fairy tales
(favourite among children, they love to listen to tales lying in a bed, they build fantasy, help to learn differences between the good and
evil, world wide known are fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Brothers Grimm), encyclopaedia…
BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE: adventure books, encyclopaedia, comics, still fairy tales, books with focus of animals, school books, grammar, dictionaries, obligatory literature (povinné čitanie)…
OTHER BOOKS: for free time – criminal novel, love story, cookery books, books about gardening, books with focus of science branches (vedné odbory), historical stories, science-fiction, bibliography (about famous people), religious literature – Bible, bibliography of saints (svätých), travel guides, atlas...
BRITISH AUTHORS: Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury tales), renaissance author from Stratford -upon-Avon William Shakespeare (tragedies Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth; histories Henry IV, V, VI, VIII; comedies The merry wives of Windsor, A midsummer’s night dream, Much ado about nothing), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Charles Dickens (The Pickwick papers, A Christmas carol, David Copperfield, The adventures of Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit), Robert Burns (national poet of Scotland, poem Auld lang syne – sung at Hogmanay = New Year), John Milton (Paradise lost), George Gordon Byron (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage), Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre), Emily Bronte (Wuthering heights), Oscar Wilde, James Joice, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)...
AMERICAN AUTHORS: Mark Twain (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), Ernest Hemingway (The old man and the sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun also rises), J.D. Salinger (The catcher in the rye), Beat generation (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac – On the road), John Updike (Rabbit, run), Joseph Heller (Catch 22)...