My Science School

The Faraway Tree is a series of popular novels for children by British author Enid Blyton. The stories take place in an enchanted wood in which a gigantic magical tree grows – the eponymous 'Faraway Tree'. The tree is so tall that its topmost branches reach into the clouds and it is wide enough to contain small houses carved into its trunk. The wood and the tree are discovered by three children named Jo, Bessie and Fanny (later updated to Joe, Beth and Frannie), who move into a house nearby. They then go on adventures to the top of the tree.

In October 2014 it was announced there would be a big screen adaptation of The Magic Faraway Tree, to be made by Sam Mendes' production company Neal Street Productions. In November 2017, Simon Farnaby, who had previously written the screenplay for Paddington 2, confirmed that he was working on the project, a collaboration between Neal Street Productions and StudioCanal UK.

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A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, French Voyage au centre de la Terre, novel by prolific French author Jules Verne, published in 1864. It is the second book in his popular series Voyages extraordinaires (1863–1910), which contains novels that combine scientific facts with adventure fiction and laid the groundwork for science fiction.

The film also introduced the 4DX movie format, featuring "4D" motion effects in a specially designed cinema in Seoul, South Korea, using tilting seats to convey motion, wind, sprays of water and sharp air, probe lights to mimic lightning, fog, scents, and other theatrical special effects.

The film received mixed reviews from critics and earned $244.2 million against a $60 million budget.

An understanding of the time in which Verne was writing sheds light on the story line. Theories that the Earth was hollow were bandied about in Europe in the 19th century, and there was also public interest in the growing sciences of geology, paleontology, and evolution at the time. A Journey to the Centre of the Earth was enormously popular, and numerous, mostly bad, English translations appeared quickly. The most notable among the several film and television adaptations was Henry Levin’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959).

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Eoin Colfer is the author of the internationally bestselling Artemis Fowl, which was named the public’s favourite Puffin Classic of all time. The Artemis Fowl series has sold in excess of 25 million copies and translated into 40 languages.

Since then, Artemis Fowl, which was named the public’s favourite Puffin Modern Classic of all time, has sold in excess of 25 million copies and has been translated into 40 languages. There are eight books in the series, alongside numerous companion books, limited edition releases, audiobooks and digital releases. In 2019, a brand new spin-off series called The Fowl Twins was released by Disney Books (US) and HaprerCollins (UK). This new trilogy features Artemis Fowl’s younger brothers Myles and Beckett Fowl and follows their own exciting adventures as they outsmart their opponents, make contact with the Fairy world and get themselves into all sorts of trouble. An Artemis Fowl Movie has been adapted by Walt Disney Studios and was released on Disney+ in May 2020 due cinema closures globally during the coronavirus pandemic. It was directed by Sir Kenneth Branagh and stars Ferdia Shaw (Artemis Fowl), Lara McDonnell (Holly Short), Josh Gad (Mulch Diggums), Nonso Anozie (Domovoi Butler), Dame Judy Dench (Commander Root), Colin Farrell (Artemis Fowl Sr.) and more.

Other book titles include The Wish List, The Supernaturalist and the Legends series for younger readers. Eoin’s books have won numerous awards including The British Children’s Book of the Year, The Irish Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year and The German Children’s Book of the Year. The BBC made a hit series based on his book Half Moon Investigations.

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Sir Terence David John Pratchett, OBE was a British fantasy, Science fiction, and children's author. He was best known for his popular and long-running Discworld series of comic fantasy novels. Pratchett's first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971, and since his first Discworld novel (The Colour of Magic) was published in 1983, he has written two books a year on average. Pratchett was also known for close collaboration on adaptations of his books, and now has three of his books made into films.

Before he became a full-time writer, Pratchett had already had a thorough grounding in unbelievable and ridiculous situations. He was a press officer for a nuclear power station during the days of the Cold War, Chernobyl and the time the Hartlepool Power Station visitor centre was open every day apart from Christmas Day.

It was an experience that taught him the virtues of scepticism, which shines through in his writing. He said: “Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possibly go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.”

Every genre novelist needs his stock ‘end of the world’ scenario, and for Pratchett this was the Dungeon Dimensions. These parallel universes, filled with creatures that would give H.R. Geiger a headache, exist beyond the edge of reality. However, as a world forever on the cusp of unreality itself, the Discworld is always one major magical event away from the Dungeon Dimensions breaking through and wreaking havoc.

No early Discworld book is spared the threat of an invasion of these monsters, which can feel a little wearing if you’re binge reading the series. Thankfully though, Pratchett learned to vary his peril as the series went on. If you’re keen to see a Dungeon Dimension breakthrough especially well-handled though, consider his spoof of the movie business, Moving Pictures.

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The Merchant of Venice, comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written about 1596–97 and printed in a quarto edition in 1600 from an authorial manuscript or copy of one.

The date of composition of The Merchant of Venice is believed to be between 1596 and 1598. The play was mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598, so it must have been familiar on the stage by that date. The title page of the first edition in 1600 states that it had been performed "divers times" by that date. Salerino's reference to his ship the Andrew is thought to be an allusion to the Spanish ship St. Andrew, captured by the English at Cádiz in 1596. A date of 1596–97 is considered consistent with the play's style.

The play was entered in the Register of the Stationers Company, the method at that time of obtaining copyright for a new play, by James Roberts on 22 July 1598 under the title "the Marchaunt of Venyce or otherwise called the Jewe of Venyce." On 28 October 1600 Roberts transferred his right to the play to the stationer Thomas Heyes; Heyes published the first quarto before the end of the year. It was printed again in 1619, as part of William Jaggard's so-called False Folio. (Later, Thomas Heyes' son and heir Laurence Heyes asked for and was granted a confirmation of his right to the play, on 8 July 1619.) The 1600 edition is generally regarded as being accurate and reliable. It is the basis of the text published in the 1623 First Folio, which adds a number of stage directions, mainly musical cues.

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The Autobiography of a Horse, the only novel by Anna Sewell and the first major animal story in children’s literature. The author wrote it “to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses”; it was published in 1877, shortly before Sewell’s death.

Black Beauty, a handsome well-born, well-bred horse of the era before automobiles, narrates the story. He is initially owned by kind masters but is sold to successively crueler owners. Eventually he collapses from overwork and ill treatment, but in the end he is sold to another kind owner and recovers. Beauty is an ideal horse—obedient, willing, intelligent, and courageous. Sewell’s careful observation and extensive descriptions of equine behaviour lend verisimilitude to the novel.

Sewell's decision to write the book as an "animal autobiography" was quite novel in Victorian England, and the little green book with the sad-looking horse on the cover was released to great fanfare. Promoters in the U.S. brought a pirated edition of the book to America hoping it would do for animal rights what Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for slavery. Within two years, 1 million copies of Black Beauty were in circulation in the U.S., and animal rights activists regularly passed copies of the book to horse drivers and stable hands.

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Doctor Zhivago is a novel by Boris Pasternak, first published in 1957 in Italy. The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet, and takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and World War II.

The novel was made into a film by David Lean in 1965, and since then has twice been adapted for television, most recently as a miniseries for Russian TV in 2006. The novel Doctor Zhivago has been part of the Russian school curriculum since 2003, where it is read in 11th grade.

Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak’s alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks; wandering throughout Russia, he is unable to take control of his fate, and dies in utter poverty. The poems he leaves behind constitute some of the most beautiful writing in the novel.

 

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Invisible Man, novel by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952. Invisible Man won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Invisible Man 19th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005, calling it "the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century," rather than a "race novel, or even a bildungsroman." Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland recognize an existential vision with a "Kafka-like absurdity." According to The New York Times, Barack Obama modeled his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father on Ellison's novel.

Published in 1952, Invisible Man explores the theme of a person's search for their identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of the first-person narrator, an unnamed African American man, first in the Deep South and then in the New York City of the 1930s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters that are dispassionate, educated, articulate, and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is "invisible" in a figurative sense, in that "people refuse to see" him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation. The novel also contains taboo issues such as incest and the controversial subject of communism.

In 1975, Ellison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College's Langston Hughes Medal. In 1985, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 1986, his Going to the Territory was published; this is a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and Ellison's friend Richard Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America's national identity.

In 1992, Ellison was awarded a special achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards; his artistic achievements included work as a sculptor, musician, photographer, and college professor as well as his writing output. He taught at Bard College, Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, and New York University. Ellison was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

 

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In the final decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work. In his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott’s Magazine, 1890, and in book form, revised and expanded by six chapters, 1891), Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French decadent fiction. 

Though the novel is now revered as a great and classic work, at the time critics were outraged by the book's apparent lack of morality. Wilde vehemently defended himself in a preface to the novel, considered one of the great testaments to aestheticism, in which he wrote, "an ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style" and "vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art."

Wilde's first play, Lady Windermere's Fan, opened in February 1892 to widespread popularity and critical acclaim, encouraging Wilde to adopt playwriting as his primary literary form. Over the next few years, Wilde produced several great plays—witty, highly satirical comedies of manners that nevertheless contained dark and serious undertones. His most notable plays were A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play.

 

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The Bell Jar is the only novel written by the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath. Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963, the novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed. The book is often regarded as a roman à clef because the protagonist's descent into mental illness parallels Plath's own experiences with what may have been clinical depression or bipolar II disorder. Plath died by suicide a month after its first United Kingdom publication. The novel was published under Plath's name for the first time in 1967 and was not published in the United States until 1971, in accordance with the wishes of both Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, and her mother. The novel has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.

Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Plath was a gifted and troubled poet, known for the confessional style of her work. Her interest in writing emerged at an early age, and she started out by keeping a journal. After publishing a number of works, Plath won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950.

While she was a student, Plath spent time in New York City during the summer of 1953 working for Mademoiselle magazine as a guest editor. Soon after, Plath tried to kill herself by taking sleeping pills. She eventually recovered, having received treatment during a stay in a mental health facility. Plath returned to Smith and finished her degree in 1955.

After Hughes left her for another woman in 1962, Plath fell into a deep depression. Struggling with her mental illness, she wrote The Bell Jar (1963), her only novel, which was based on her life and deals with one young woman's mental breakdown. Plath published the novel under the pseudonym, Victoria Lucas. She also created the poems that would make up the collection Ariel (1965), which was released after her death. Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963.

 

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Arundhati Roy, full name Suzanna Arundhati Roy, Indian author, actress, and political activist who was best known for the award-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997) and for her involvement in environmental and human rights causes.

In 1997 Roy published her debut novel, The God of Small Things to wide acclaim. The semiautobiographical work departed from the conventional plots and light prose that had been typical among best-sellers. Composed in a lyrical language about South Asian themes and characters in a narrative that wandered through time, Roy’s novel became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author and won the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Roy’s subsequent literary output largely consisted of politically oriented nonfiction, much of it aimed at addressing the problems faced by her homeland in the age of global capitalism. Among her publications were Power Politics (2001), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002), War Talk (2003), Public Power in the Age of Empire (2004), Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), Broken Republic: Three Essays (2011), and Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014). In 2017 Roy published The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, her first novel in 20 years. The work blends personal stories with topical issues as it uses a large cast of characters, including a transgender woman and a resistance fighter in Kashmir, to explore contemporary India.

 

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Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel, published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936.

The same year she was married, Mitchell landed a job with the Atlanta Journal Sunday magazine, where she ended up writing nearly 130 articles. Mitchell would get married a second time during this period, wedding John Robert Marsh in 1925. As seemed to be the case in Mitchell’s life, though, yet another good thing was to come to an end too quickly, as her journalist career ended in 1926 due to complications from a broken ankle.

With her broken ankle keeping Mitchell off her feet, in 1926 she began writing Gone With the Wind. Perched at an old sewing table, and writing the last chapter first and the other chapters randomly, she finished most of the book by 1929. A novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction, Gone With the Wind is told from a Southern point of view, informed by Mitchell’s family and steeped in the history of the South and the tragedy of the war.

In July 1935, New York publisher Macmillan offered her a $500 advance and 10 percent royalty payments. Mitchell set to finalizing the manuscript, changing characters' names (Scarlett was Pansy in earlier drafts), cutting and rearranging chapters and finally naming the book Gone With the Wind, a phrase from “Cynara!, a favorite Ernest Dowson poem. Gone With the Wind was published in 1936 to huge success and took home the 1937 Pulitzer. Mitchell became an overnight celebrity, and the landmark film based on her novel came out just three years later and went on to become a classic, winning eight Oscars and two special Oscars.

 

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Emily Brontë, in full Emily Jane Brontë, pseudonym Ellis Bell, English novelist and poet who produced but one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a highly imaginative work of passion and hate set on the Yorkshire moors. Emily was perhaps the greatest of the three Brontë sisters, but the record of her life is extremely meagre, for she was silent and reserved and left no correspondence of interest, and her single novel darkens rather than solves the mystery of her spiritual existence.

Some of Emily's earliest known works involve a fictional world called Gondal, which she created with her sister Anne. She wrote both prose and poems about this imaginary place and its inhabitants. Emily also wrote other poems as well. Her sister Charlotte discovered some of Emily's poems and sought to publish them along with her own work and some by Anne. The three sisters used male pen names for their collection—Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Published in 1846, the book only sold a few copies and garnered little attention.

Again publishing as Ellis Bell, Brontë published her defining work, Wuthering Heights, in December 1847. The complex novel explores two families—the Earnshaws and the Lintons—across two generations and their stately homes, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff, an orphan taken in by the Earnshaws, is the driving force between the action in the book. He first motivated by his love for his Catherine Earnshaw, then by his desire for revenge against her for what he believed to be rejection.

 

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Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse is an 1877 novel by English author Anna Sewell. It was composed in the last years of her life, during which she remained in her house as an invalid. The novel became an immediate best-seller, with Sewell dying just five months after its publication, but having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success. With fifty million copies sold, Black Beauty is one of the best-selling books of all time.

Although Black Beauty is looked at as a children's novel, Sewell did not write the novel for children. She said that her purpose in writing the novel was "to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses"—an influence she attributed to an essay on animals she read earlier by Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) entitled "Essay on Animals". Her sympathetic portrayal of the plight of working animals led to a vast outpouring of concern for animal welfare and is said to have been instrumental in the abolition of the cruel practice of using the checkrein (or "bearing rein", a strap used to keep horses' heads high, fashionable in Victorian England but painful and damaging to a horse's neck). Black Beauty also mentions the use of blinkers on horses, concluding that this use is likely to cause accidents at night due to interference with "the full use of" a horse's ability to "see much better in the dark than men can."

Black Beauty is considered to be one of the first fictional animal autobiographies. Originally meant to be informative literature read by adults on the norms of horse cruelty and preventions of these unjust acts, Black Beauty is now seen as a children's book. A novel narrated by the main character, Black Beauty is now read by thousands of kids worldwide.

 

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To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in 1960 and was instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird has become a classic of modern American literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.

One character from the novel, Charles Baker (“Dill”) Harris, is based on Truman Capote, Lee’s childhood friend and next-door neighbour in Monroeville, Alabama. After the phenomenal success that followed the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, some suspected that Capote was the actual author of Lee’s work, a rumour put to rest when, in 2006, a 1959 letter from Capote to his aunt was found, stating that he had read and liked the draft of To Kill a Mockingbird that Lee had shown him but making no mention of any role in writing it.

The novel inspired numerous adaptations, the most notable of which was the classic 1962 film starring Gregory Peck as Atticus. His Academy Award-winning performance became an enduring part of cinema history. Other adaptations included a Broadway play that was adapted by Aaron Sorkin and debuted in 2018.

 

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