Romeo and Juliet is one the most, or maybe the       most , famous story that deals with forbidden     love. It can seem some kind of annoying 'cause       everybody knows about it. But do they really know everything ? Do they really know that Shakespeare was a genius ?

Well everyone's should because it might be written in old english, it might be about a love that doesn't exist nowadays, this is still THE book to read. 

I'll post in a moment a link ( a video) that kinda resume the story but I advice you to read it all. 

one of the most known adaptation of Romeo and Juliet is surely West Side Story!! 

Synopsis  

Maria and Tony are members of two different clans in New York, but they fall in love at the first sight. They try to live their love whereas it seems impossible. When Riff, a friend of Tony, is killed by Bernado, Maria's brother, Tony wants his revenge! So he kills Bernado. Maria's lost between her love for Tony and her love for a dead brother. She finally decides to forgive Tony. 

Anita, Maria's friend, tries to speak to Tony but she's rejected by the Sharks, Tony's band. So then she tells them a lie : Maria's death. Tony's desperate so he shouts out to Chino, Maria's fiance, to kill him. But Maria arrives and shows him it was only a lie. Unfortunately, Tony's shot dead by Chino and dies in Maria's arms. 

The story ends with some sort of optimism: Tony is carried by 2 Sharks and to Jets, maybe a symbol of peace between gangs.  

Here's the song we all love: Somewhere 

The Balcony scene is , for once, showing a certain superiority of the woman. I'm not saying it should always be shown, but that's good for once. In those stories, both Juliet and Maria are placed upper than Romeo or Tony. Each one of us can have a interpretation, but I think it means that women are calmer and wiser on the contrary of men who are excited by their loves and who are nearly blind to the dangers.

Romeo and Juliet, 1968, adapted from Shakespeare's novel, by Franco Zeffirelli with Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey.

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West Side Story, 1961, by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise with Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer.

We studied some small extracts from the 5th Child by Doris Lessing!  

That was great and it gets a bit freaky but that's okay for me^^. Just to let you have a taste of this book, it takes place in the 1960's and I love the way the author writes !!!!  

Well that's all I had to say for today, except maybe that you should read it !  

Here are the firsts pages of the Fifth Child 

Do you want to know more?

2nd Extract, 3rd Extract, 4th Extract

Wow! Test today on the Fifth Child! Scary! You gotta read it, for sure, because you'll l♥ve it !  

Mailis had on oral on Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin to prepare and it was awesome!

The story itself is hard to understand, so Mailis explained it to us really well!

So, I hope you will understand this one:

"Elizabeth Bennet is a country gentleman's daughter in 19th Century England. She is one of five daughters, a plight that her father bears as best he can with common sense and a general disinterest in the silliness of his daughters. Elizabeth is his favorite because of her level-headed approach to life when his own wife's greatest concern is getting her daughters married off to well-established gentlemen. Only Jane, Elizabeth's older sister, is nearly as sensible and practical as Elizabeth, but Jane is also the beauty of the family, and therefore, Mrs. Bennet's highest hope for a good match. 

When Mr. Bingley, a young gentleman of London, takes a country estate near to the Bennet's home, Mrs. Bennet begins her match-making schemes without any trace of subtlety or dignity. Despite Mrs. Bennet's embarassing interference, Mr. Bingley and Jane become fond of one another. Mr. Darcy, who has accompanied Bingley to the country, begins his acquaintance with Elizabeth, her family, and their neighbors with smug condescension and proud distaste for the all of the country people. Elizabeth, learning of his dislike, makes it a point to match his disgust with her own venom. She also hears from a soldier that she has a fondness for that Darcy has misused the man. Without thinking through the story, Elizabeth immediately seizes upon it as another, more concrete reason to hate Mr. Darcy. She contradicts and argues with Darcy each time they meet, but somewhere along the way he begins to like Elizabeth.

When Bingley leaves the countryside suddenly and makes no attempts to contact Jane anymore, the young woman is heartbroken. Elizabeth, who had thought well of Bingley, believes that there is something amiss in the way that he left Jane in the lurch. Only when Elizabeth goes to visit her friend at the estate of Darcy's aunt does the mystery begin to unfold. After several encounters with Mr. Darcy while visiting her friend, Elizabeth is shocked when Darcy proposes to her. Elizabeth refuses him and questions him about the way that he misused her soldier friend and his undoubted role in the way that Bingley abandoned Jane. Darcy writes a letter to explain himself, and Elizabeth is embarrassed to learn that she had been mislead about Darcy's character. Had she known the truth, she would have loved Darcy as he loved her. Darcy leaves that part of the country before she can sort out her feelings and make amends with him. Then she meets him again when she is touring the gardens of his estate with her aunt and uncle. Darcy treats her with kindness and she believes he may still love her, but before anything can be done about it, she learns that one of her younger sisters has shacked up with the very soldier who mislead Elizabeth and the rest of her family about Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth returns home immediately.

When the indignity of her sister's shot-gun wedding is straightened out, Elizabeth is surprised that Darcy returns to the country with Bingley. She expected that the shame of her sister's actions had ruined any chances of a relationship with Mr. Darcy, or Jane and Bingley. Elizabeth learns from her aunt that Darcy did a great part to help get her younger sister properly married to the infamous soldier. Jane and Bingley sort out the misunderstanding that drove him away before and get engaged. Then Elizabeth and Darcy work out their misunderstandings and agree to marry."  ( summary taken from http://www.bookrags.com/notes/pap/)

 Pride and Prejudice, 1995,by Simon Langton with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.

 Pride and Prejudice, 2005, by Joe Wright, with Kiera Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen.

I'm supposed to write a report, taking 3 documents out of all I have studied or learnt. I think I've already chosen:

- Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare ( The balcony scene)

- Pride and prejudice, Jane Austen 

- The tenant of WildFell Hall ( begining and ending)

Additional documents: 

- A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare

- The Bride of Abydos, Lord Byron

On the 17th of January, we had to read a short story, named Country Lovers and written by Nadine Gordimer. I worked on this short story with Mailis and Helena. The story takes place during the apartheid, that's to say  segregation.

We had to define some words without any dictionnary, which happened to be quite hard because you never know exactely how to define perfectly a word.

[Apartheid : separation system between black and white people in the society of South Africa till the end of the 60's.

Privilege : superiority of a social class and its rights.

Deprivation : when the governement takes away lands, propriety ... to Black People.

Segregation : general word for "apartheid", separation between different people, ethnies, religions ...

Integration : opposite of segregation.

Taboo : a subject you mustn't talk about.

Prejudice : a premade idea of something.

Tolerance : accept all differences.]

After that we had to fill a paper about the short story:

Title : Country Lovers

Author : Nadin Gordimer

Date of publication : 1980

Setting : a farm in South Africa during Apartheid

Characters : Character's description : Thebedi, a black girl who works in a farm ; Paulus, a white man who is the farmer's son ; Njabulo, a black man who becomes Thebedi's husband and also works in the farm.

Here is the short story if you want to read it!

If you love being equals, and you're against segregation, this book will move you. Moreover, we need to know what really happened during those awful years. Futhermore, we can't forget anything, or it might happen again.