Ray Moore's Blog, page 3

Ray Moore’s ‘Back to School’ TeachersPayTeachers Sale

Look out for the upcoming sale at Ray’s TeacherspayTeachers site. All his teacher resources will be on sale. This sale is for two days only Aug 4 and Aug 5, 2014- don’t miss out!

Click on the image below to go to his store. Sale starts on Monday!

Want a free copy of Sanditon Investigations of the Reverend Lyle Thorne

Ray is giving away a free signed copy of his latest book Sanditon Investigations of the Reverend Lyle Thorne. Go to the Goodreads site to enter to win.

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Sanditon Investigations of the Reverend Lyle Thorne
by Ray Moore

Giveaway ends August 10, 2014.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.com

Enter to win

The Reverend Lyle Thorne Mysteries for Sanditon

For those of you who have been following the Reverend Lyle Thorne mystery series you will be delighted to know that the fourth book in the series is now available from on-line print retailers. This book entitled ‘Sanditon Investigations of the Reverend Lyle Thorne’ keeps the story settings close to Sanditon, although Knowles does get to visit the British Library in London!

Another five stories again pose the challenge to the reader. Like all good mysteries the reader hopes to solve the puzzle before all is revealed. Careful perusal of the stories may enable you to do that…

Sanditon Investigations of the Reverend Lyle Thorne

The five mysteries involve…

A young girl disappears for the second time, this time from an enclosed garden …

A modern painter dies of a heart attack -a natural death until the coffin falls and breaks open at the burial …

A bishop generally considered the next in line to become Archbishop of Canterbury is poisoned in his own library …

Thorne’s curate encounters a young girl abandoned on the promenade …

The discovery of the body of a man stabbed to death more than two centuries ago sets Thorne the ultimate investigative challenge …

It may be 2015 before the next set of Reverend Lyle Thorne stories are published as Ray is busy on other projects but meanwhile enjoy these stories.

The Study Guide Series has more ebooks on the way

The Study Guides series, designed for teachers and students, which has proven so successful, is now also available in an alternative format to the guides already available on the TeachersPayTeachers website. New titles are being added regularly.

New additions for the ebook format will include

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Henry IV Part II by William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare   (AQA /OCR text 2013-15)
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Macbeth by William Shakespeare   (AQA /OCR text 2013-15)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell
Selected Poems by Sylvia Plath

Effective readers actively interact with the books that they read – they interrogate the text. As well as giving helpful commentaries, background information, and notes, the guides provide focused questions which point the reader to what is most important in each portion of the texts covered. The student is encouraged to go “narrow and deep.”

Look for them to be available from Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iTunes, Barnes and Noble,  etc this month.

 

TeacherspayTeachers sale

Look out for the upcoming sale at Ray’s Teacherspayteachers site. All his teacher resources will be on sale. The sale is only for two days May 6 and May 7, 2014- don’t miss out!

 

New Text and Critical Introduction Series

Great news.The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer has been published on Create Space and is available at Amazon. It has required several months of editing to create an interlinear translation of the text, but Ray hopes that readers will be able to develop a deeper understanding of the poem and appreciate it more fully through having everything the reader needs in one book!

Ray decided that his three medieval titles should form a new series…. the Text and Critical Introduction series:

The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer;
The Wife’s Prologue and Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

There is also a new cover design for these three books to make them easy to distinguish from his Critical Introduction series. Note the new two-color front cover for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The new cover for The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale will appear shortly!

All three books in the Text and Critical Introduction series contain not only a commentary on the text but also the original text with a modernized interlinear version.

The Critical Introduction series only contains a modernization of the original medieval text together with the commentary.

Hopefully the new covers will enable readers to make the correct choice for the book that best satisfies their needs. The General Prologue will exist in both series, hence the need for a new cover design!

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Critical Introduction

The latest Text and Critical Introduction book on the poem about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is available in print and will soon be available as an ebook.

The tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is set in the time of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round table. It is a medieval poem which encompasses romance, heroic quests and several tests of the knight’s chivalry. The Middle English text has an interlinear translation and there are other chapters on sources, theme, structure, etc. For anyone who wants to understand the themes and the style of writing of that time, this book is a must read.

Here is my favorite part. A gigantic man, all green, rides into Arthur’s court:

Whether hade he no helme ne hawbergh nauther,

Yet the knight wore no helmet, nor mail hauberk either,

Ne no pysan, ne no plate that pented to armes,

Nor throat-guard, nor plate armor to protect his arms,

Ne no schafte, ne no schelde, to schwve ne to smyte, (205)

Neither spear nor shield with which to thrust or to smite,

Bot in his on honde he hade a holyn bobbe,

But in one hand he had a holly bough,

That is grattest in grene, when greves ar bare,

That is at it greenest when other trees are bare,

And an ax in his other, a hoge and unmete,

And an axe in the other hand, huge and terrible,

A spetos sparthe to expoun in spelle, quo-so myght.

A brutal weapon to describe in words, whoever might try.

The hede of an elnserde the large lenkthe hade, (210)

The head of the axe was as great in length as an ell-yard

[Basically a cubit - the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger - 45 inches.]

The grayn al of grene stele and of golde hewen,

The grain of the metal forged of green steel and gold,

The bit burnyst bryght, wyth a brod egge,

The biting blade burnished bright with a broad edge,

As wel schapen to schere as scharp rasores.

As keenly honed to cut as a sharp razor.

The stele of a stif staf the sturne hit bi-grypte,

The steel was set into a strong staff and the hand-grip

That was wounden wyth yrn to the wandes ende, (215)

Was wound round with iron straps right to the end,

And al bigraven with grene, in gracios werkes.

And all exquisitely engraved with green designs.

A lace lapped aboute, that louked at the hede,

A leather thong was wound about the shaft that looped over the axe-head,

And so after the halme halched ful ofte,

And all above the handle its entire length

Wyth tryed tasseles therto tacched innoghe,

With many tied tassels attached to it,

On botouns of the bryght grene brayden ful ryche. (220)

Buttons of bright green were richly ornamented there.

This hathel heldes hym in, and the halle entres,

This intimidating man enters the hall in rush,

Drivande to the heghe dece, dut he no wothe.

Driving straight towards the dais, with no care for danger.

Haylsed he never one, bot heghe he over loked.

He hailed no one, but looked over their heads.

The fyrst word that he warp, “Wher is,” he sayd,

The first word he uttered, “Where is,” he asked,

“The governour of this gyng? Gladly I wolde (225)

“The leader of this company? I should be glad

Se that segg in syght, and with hymself speke

raysoun.”

To see that lord with my own eyes, and to him say

my piece.”

Latest Critical Introduction book

posted February 10th, 2014

I am wondering why I chose to do “Gawain and the Green Knight” because it is proving very hard. The anonymous author was around at the same time as Chaucer, but he writes a Northern dialect form of Middle English which is much harder to understand. On the other hand, I like a challenge. This one will take at least six months (one down already), but my aim is to produce the best entry-level text and critical introduction on the market. Well, that’s my aim anyway.

The latest non-fiction book is…

“The Great Gatsby: A Critical Introduction” is proving to be a tremendous challenge. So far I have 78,000 words, though I am within sight of completing the first draft. Here is the problem: Gatsby cannot be the central character because so much that we learn about him is simply imagined by Nick. Nick not only describes Gatsby’s dream, he actually creates it and appropriates it. I think we have to assume that Fitzgerald meant the reader to see this since it is so evident in the novel. So, the novel is really about Nick: a man who creates the Gatsby that he needs to believe in. Why? Because, unlike Gatsby, he knows that you cannot transcend the chronology of time; he knows that gravity wins in the end; he knows that idealized love cannot exist in the real world. Nick, a cynic, needs to believe that there are those who do aspire to the transcendent vision of which he is himself incapable. Thus, for Nick, Gatsby is a tragic hero, doomed to magnificent failure.
I think this is what Fitzgerald intended. However, working this thesis out in detail is very hard. One problem is that I have to look at parts of the text from different perspectives without repetition. My aim was (and remains) to write the best book on “Gatsby.” Still trying.

The book will be ready for publication sometime in December.

Lyle Thorne meets Jack the Ripper

Writing the Early Investigations of Lyle Thorne was great fun. I had to imagine Thorne’s childhood and background, so I set the first story in a small town like the one in which I grew up, Arnold. I then imagined a sixteen-year-old Thorne trying to solve a crime to save his father from being convicted of murder. Does he succeed?

Then, I had to account for how Thorne became a Detective Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police at a very young age, so he had to really impress his superiors by solving the case of the boy who disappears.  As Detective Sergeant Thorne, I came up with two puzzles: solving the perfectly planned murder, and finding out what happened to a kidnapped baby. When I started the series, I had the idea that Thorne was involved in the Jack the Ripper case and that something happened which made him resign from the police and become an ordained minister of the Church of England. The answer is on the last few lines of this new book – and it is shocking! I did my research on the Whitechapel murders and came up with a mystery for Thorne to solve. Did he actually uncover the true identity of Jack the Ripper?

You will just have to read Early Investigations of Lyle Thorne for yourself.