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"Bücher für motivierte Studenten"

These books have been ordered as recommended readings for German 102. If one of them interests you, they should be available at the 3 main campus textbook stores.

• Graded German Reader A systematic introduction to reading German. A wide variety of texts arranged in increasing order of difficulty, ranging from a text on the metric system intended for beginning 101 students to some readable and amusing pieces of fiction and folklore.
• Münchhausens Abenteuer Easy reader version of the stories of Baron Münchhausen, the "lying baron" ["Lügenbaron"] who tells tales of such adventures as his ride on a cannonball, or a visit to the moon.  Terry Gilliam made a movie loosely based on these stories, and an older German movie based on these tales is on reserve at the LRC for part of this semester--see the list of movies on reserve at the LRC.
• Neues ABC-Buch Extraordinary alphabet book written in 1790 by the multitalented author and philosopher Karl Philipp Moritz, with new illustrations by Wolfgang Erlbruch that are perhaps designed as much to undermine as to illustrate Moritz' ideas. For each letter, there is a picture with a caption containing a noun beginning with that letter. To the left of the picture is a series of sentences meditating on the more general theme behind the caption. Read by themselves, the 26 picture captions form a poem. With a dictionary, you should be able to follow the thought-provoking ideas Moritz builds out of these simple sentences.
• Asterix This comic book series is actually translated from the French, but is very popular in Germany (Hartmut read it as a kid...). It's about a single village in Gaul that has continued to withstand and infuriate Julius Caesar by virtue of its inhabitants' resourcefulness, stubbornness, and a strength-giving magic potion whose secret is known only to the village druid. Only Obelix, who fell into a vat of the potion as a baby, permanently possesses the strength it gives. We've ordered the first in the series. Worksheets are available to help you through it if you want them--just ask Hartmut.