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There is a wonderful sense of closure, a few chapters before the book ends, that everyone gets what they had coming: Sophie a nice man, Dennis an attentive spouse, Tony a chance to grow and Diane a shot at something else - nuts to Bill and Clive who were both to big for their sitcom-sized britches. Gloria gets a sympathy from her once-was Barbara and Brian re-emerges as a pragmatic supporter. What could go wrong now?

It is fine that Ryan establishes rules for interactive narratives, she has done her homework and included the voice of Murray and Bolter for her support. What gets slightly repetitive, however, is the same observations on Storyspace semi-classics that have been picked apart by her contemporaries as a way forward digitally. This book, I must remind myself, came out before YouTube and Twitter, but makes a quantum note.

New beginnings for the bold, as Bill presses on with his autobiographical novel, yet troubled times for the weak at heart, such as Clive who is in the ironic position of carrying on an exotic extra-premarital affair with the woman pretending to be his marriage councillor. Barbara gets her chance to one-up her missing mum, and at the very least may have learnt something about unrequited love from ever-watchful Dennis.

Things start to go wrong with the creative team of Barbara (and Jim) when the comedy series should be reaching its peak; obviously the tip of the iceberg no matter how much praise they receive from fans, the press, supposedly even the prime minister. Bill is the first one attempting to break free of the middle class lowbrow humour, but it is Tony whose confidence in writing partnership begins to take a toll.

Support for adult language learners, whether they need to brush up on technical English to import home country skills or whether they want to enter the unenglish (perhaps überenglish?) academic environment, it is really up to the teachers they had along the way, many of whom have a disregard for new media technology despite the hopes of the recently included Chapter 8. A gap between language and literacy widen again.

Old media in a new light, Ryan takes a so-so Jim Carrey vehicle, a long-running reality series at its least annoying early stages, and a radio commentary for a baseball game to make the point that each dances on the line between fiction and non-fiction, whether we the readers can judge the text as a narrative about reality. I am already convinced by her phenomenological leanings toward realities rather than just one.

Hornby estashlishes his ear for dialogue as the creative team gear up for a second series, and one definite highlight of this too short section is the Pipe Smoke blown into the bearded face of Dennis' romantic rival, Vernon Whitfield. The stuffy academic gets what he had coming with Much Ado as his stumbling block! Dennis is humbled too by missing out on a fair fight, but hey-nonny for light comedy.

Narrative have been a major part of my studies in the last couple of years, so it is wit great relish to read Ryan's account of the digital turn as it applies to new narratives for new media. The theoretical groundwork for her argument includes many familiar names, like Ong, Bolter and Hayles, yet her invocation of de Saussure makes a lot of langue about previously grasped topics. Surprised that myth fits in nowhere.

Running the gauntlet of grades from kindergarten to high school graduation and beyond (not yet at university), Lee lets his first vowel do the talking in support of LEA, a whole language approach that is decidedly antibasel. Shame that last year's batch of secondary ELA preservices were prejudiced against his advice, but I look forward to a Procrustean approach when I start teaching the next ones just what they want.

Knowing two-thirds of the authorial team, especially I (LG), it was easier to get through the first four chapters which literally spell out issues with literacy for people whose initial language is not English. A dizzying array of E, L and other letters pepper a thoughtful discussion of why teaching or even determining English-language skills ain't easy. Chapter 4 is a cheat sheet for knowing the unenglished student.

Progressing through the creative process up to the end of the first season, Hornby gives each of the Awkward Squad their due with invigorating backstories that seem more fitting for a mid-sixties England than most retro-pop culture cares to admit. Sophie becomes another Barbara—a fast-talking phenomenon who eclipses her leading man husband yet still innocently invites the LAMDA-trained Lothario into her bed.

Charts the sudden transformation from Barbara of Blackpool into Sophie Straw the sensational soubrette, with a tawdry glimpse at the dating scene in swinging London and even tawdrier, tired tradition on off-West End stages. England still had a Lord Chamberlain? At what point did he give up this long-standing position? Probably sometime after the Beatles started "experimenting" but before Monty Python's TV revolution.

Who would have thought that a week ago, when my sister presented me with an Irish souvenir with physician Niall Ó Glacáin that a week later I would purchase the book where the plague hits London, shortly after the events of Shakespeare's Rebel; at least one Absolute descendent has made it into the cast and I can't wait to delve into the mysterious murky world of 17th century England and its dramatic history.

Finishing off the textbook months after my narrative inquiry course wrapped up allowed me to reflect on the important work I should be doing: making stories that have something to say about how we learn. Many of the visual artists and analysts mentioned in chapter six are doing the same with scholarly examples. Of course Reissman is going to represent the voices of the oppressed, will anyone ever study on unpression?

Taking a stance on behalf of ethics, Culler still insists upon the reading of novels as the key method of understanding us, warts and all. In considering aesthetics, he expands the circle of influence to the animal, environment and the mechanical. Within a decade literary theory may be reduced, as many movies now have, to a Minecraft Minute Parody. His appendix of schools is much like Polkinghorne's quantum envelope.

Back to the books, specifically how words enact who we are and how we do identity, mainly through literature's easily-accessed thought recorder, the novel. The performative transitions our notion of self from 'be' to 'do' while questioning the spoken and written text that surround us from birth onward. Gender became an action, not so much the verb as is popularly used in social sciences but a subjectifying adjective.

More poignant thoughts on the ways we make sense of other people's words. Poetry is summed up as a complex system of overhearing words spoken to something else, usually an object that lacks the ability to listen: "I tell my sorrows to the stones". Rhetoric is the habit of trying to move the actual listeners, us. This places the novel and similar narratives (each movie on my top ten list) as poetical-rhetorical texts.

By an incredible stroke of luck, my BA major was "Cultural Studies in the Arts" as opposed to "Critical Studies" - a spur-of-the-moment decision during my final term which led me down the path that will allow me to see theory in all I read. And now in my PhD studies in Language and Literacy Education has me circling around the same questions on language, meaning and interpretation that Culler summarizes in Chapter 4.

A Sisyphean task to attempt a introductory explanation of both theory and literary - simply a rock and a hard-to-place concept. The impossibility of mastering either is that the rock keeps transforming as if each new theory adds a layer of sediment, the opposite of erosion, while the supposed hill that is literature becomes an unstable structure more often defined by what it isn't than merely plays, poems and novels.

What may cause a universal eyeroll for a trained scientist who insists upon a spiritual outlook on humanity's place on the food chain, may be what is needed most for our strained environment. It means tuning into the variety of signals the quantum universe transmits, rather than violently shutting down fuzzy thoughts. Goneril and Regan turn on their father due to an electrical storm coming, not just pathetic fallacy.

What may cause a universal eyeroll for a trained scientist who insists upon a spiritual outlook on humanity's place on the food chain, may be what is needed most for our strained environment. It means tuning into the variety of signals the quantum universe transmits, rather than violently shutting down fuzzy thoughts. Goneril and Regan turn on their father due to an electrical storm coming, not just pathetic fallacy.

So it turns out to be an origin story, in more ways than one. A few tidy narrative threads tied up while others unravelled. Two narratives are born: one a play with perhaps the most memorable line even for those not familiar with Hamlet, the other a swashbuckling tale of a redcoat in the colonies who has his ancestoral root in Cornwall, England - now I must catch up on Sheridan and Humphreys' earlier series.

Conscious parenting, starting right from the moment of conception, recalls a few odd moments for me, such as a friend's description of getting pregnant as "rape" when it could have been "a happy accident" or "non-consenting." Or my own subconscious response to a high school friend after revealing her breasts and me telling her she doesn't have to take off her bra every time we hang out - really mind, what was that?!

Like the proverb about chasing two rabbits, the body is designed that it cannot properly do two tasks at the same time: we are either growing at the peak of our developmental ability or the brain short circuits all of our cells into protection mode. Unfortunately we can't have it both ways and Lipton makes it seem like the modern world is conspiring to keep the majority in fear so that a Trump-like minority prospers.

Lawley's short, fifteen-month stint as a Gaoler's Man revealed a red herring named Richard I was happy to see rightfully placed in its more historically appropriate place: on the eve of Essex's rebellion. John once again plays many roles with the Privy Council, the Lady of Cloves, the Chamberlain's Men, Tess, Ned and the tangerine rebels but is curiously absent from Lud's Gate when he would have been needed the most.

Here is the point in the book where readers can choose the red filter and decide that this way of thinking about my health, whether such thoughts are a placebo or not, will help me and all my cells thrive. On the other hand, more critical or nocebo minds will be tempted to throw down the book as if it contained a snake, certain of the quackery of new age BS. Too often medicine goes this way because of one assumption.

The fun part of historical fiction is create people who may not have been around to see the events recorded history is fuzzy about, but someone must have witnessed the mismanaged frontline in Ireland, the fevered start to Essex's rebellion that led to a nearly naughty meeting in the Queen's bedchamber. John Lawley makes a good composite character, yet I'd have him see more of Julius Caesar's initial staging.

Very excited to see a biologist embracing the subtle yet revolutionary difference quantum mechanics has on his emerging practice, as many of the body's ailment much like the cell's communication system runs on energy transfer beyond what classical Newtonian physics could determine. In addition to electrical devices and the unfortunate atomic bombs, quantum presents a constructive interference to what scientists know.

Part of me feels like the bewildered first-year medical student in the Grenada university library, hearing Dr. Lipton chirp about how he discovered the Magical Membrane that is like a butter sandwich with pitted olives and lollipop-shaped soldiers on parade. Of course, he could have simply started with the cell's brain is the semiconductor microchip much like the computer or Game Boy and convinced me of its CPU skin.

From Lawley's true love's bower, from a less reputable tavern and lady to the interrogation cell at Lollard's, to the wild shore off Ireland and its dangerous forest, all the way to the enthroned Earl of Essex and his debauched truce-enduring troops, John's journey takes him from all that he loves: Tess, Ned, Will and the players. He may have the opportunity to become a knight but would have been made Caesar instead.