This is boring.

Is this a Monday morning?

One of the challenges that I face in my ELA classroom is the fact that it doesn't really matter what books I bring into class-- no one seems to really like them.  Even when students enjoy the classroom discussions and like the activities that we do for enrichment, it keeps coming up that the book was "boring."

Well.

I used to spend a lot of time trying to explain what I find so magical about reading, but it fell on deaf ears.  So then I started ignoring what students said about being bored, but I felt like I wasn't doing the right thing as an English teacher.  So my new goal is to find books that students of all skill levels might actually like.  After all, I don't like every book I read either, and I am a darn good reader.  The Board of Ed says so.

What appeals?

I am looking for books that have something different about them, something that makes them stand out from the other books students have read in the past.  It could be a difference in format or in content that draws students in, but that's my criteria.  I need to see a hook.

What am I reading now? 

Like this book or I'll eat your brains.

The first book I'd like to explore as a possibility is the book World War Z by Max Brooks.  It meets my criteria of having that hook, because, well, ZOMBIES!  It is a fantastic read.  I didn't see the movie because I heard it was terrible, but the book is really great.  

The concept is that the author is compiling a collection of survivor histories following World War Z, or the Zombie Wars.  In the world of the narrator, much of Earth has been decimated by an outbreak of Zombies who are mindlessly destroying the world's population, creating an atmosphere of fear, distrust, and desolation.  

Other than the whole OMG ZOMBIES thing, this particular novel has a lot going for it on a literary level.  There are multiple perspectives from many speakers, all of whom "speak" differently.  There is an opportunity for students to study the use of diction and syntax as a way of differentiating characters by class, education, and age.  The settings of the book are varied, and yet as each country deals with zombie crisis differently, it is clear to see the importance of setting on outcome.  And then there is the structure of the novel itself. The whole book is written as a dossier of documents that have to do with the outbreak, containment, and relative control over the zombie plague.  What I think is most compelling is that the whole story is structured as though the zombie advance is an illness.  This could be fascinating to connect to history in terms of real behaviors that followed outbreaks of the black plague, polio, tuberculosis and influenza and how these diseases were "fought" in similar and dissimilar fashions.

I think this book has the hook we are looking for.