As I commence Long Service Leave today, this will be my final Literacy Links segment for 2021. I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy and Holy Christmas and a wonderful New Year. In keeping with the Mount Carmel Literacy mantra ‘Words Matter’, I pray that Jesus, the incarnate Word of God, bless and inspire us all to respect the words we use, and teach us to speak words of love, peace and forgiveness in 2022. 

This year has been such an unusual one. Whilst I hesitate to include the much-used word ‘unprecedented’, the expression does seem to capture the strange and unsettling COVID-19 world we have experienced. My hope for students over the holiday period is that they take the time to sit with a good book and in doing so, encounter other ideas, other people and other situations which will expand their worldview as well as their understanding of self. Stillness and quiet are so important in our busy, noisy and distracted world.

I will finish with my recommendations for holiday reading, for students as well as parents and staff, and once more remind us of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s message: ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world.’

Years 7 and 8
Once by Morris Gleitzman
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling 
Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Animal Farm – George Orwell

Years 9 and 10
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne 
Tomorrow When the War Began by John Marsden
So Much to Tell You by John Marsden
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Years 11 and 12
The Turning by Tim Winton
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Dubliners by James Joyce
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde 

Parents and Teachers
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton 
The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx 
Everyman by Philip Roth
The Orchard by Drusilla Modjeska
Middlemarch by George Eliot
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

Mrs Clare Murphy
English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach