Midterm Assignment Reading Mapjune 2, 2010

Midterm Assignment – Reading MapJune 2, 2010

Sharp Teeth

After reading Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow, I thought that the book lent itself well to the concept of reading map. Before this semester, I was not familiar with reading maps. Once I looked at a few examples, I thought it would be interesting to put something together for a book that was made up of many different elements that could be further explored by a reader.

First I had to decide which elements to include in the reading map. Sharp Teeth is primarily a werewolf story. There is plenty of internet information regarding lycanthropes and a great many sites are dedicated to these creatures. It’s always interesting to delve deeper into the myths and legends that surround shape shifters.

Another important element to the story is its setting. The action takes place in Los Angeles and the werewolves happen to be gang members. This created an opportunity to provide some information about real life L.A. gangs to help put the story into context. The fact that the werewolves are also rival gang members adds a strange sort of realism to an otherwise fantastical story. The lycanthrope gangs follow the same sorts of codes as human gangs and are as susceptible to betrayal and corruption as their human counterparts.

One main element that sets this book apart from others in the genre is that it is written entirely in verse form. Through the use of web links and access to documents and articles about verse novels, the reading map allows a reader to find out more about this interesting form. I hope this will introduce more readers to verse novels, perhaps shed a bit of light on them, and hopefully help those readers find something within the form that they will enjoy reading.

Having chosen my main elements, I needed a platform to present these elements to readers. I created my reading map using a content management system called Drupal. I became familiar with Drupal last semester in my Advanced Web Design class. Drupal is an extremely feature rich program that lets a user design a website without having to do a great deal of coding. There are literally hundreds of add-on modules that provide even more features to the core program. If the core program doesn’t do what you want it to, chances are there is a module that will.

Drupal works much like Wordpress in that it allows pages and stories to be created in order to build a website. It will generate menus for site navigation and allows for images and links to be placed on pages as needed. There are many ways to do the same thing in Drupal so when creating my reading map, I needed to decide what modules I would use to design my pages. I added some image modules because I knew I wanted to include images such as the book cover, a picture of the author and banners to link other websites. I also added a n rich text editor module that allowed me to add content much like we do on the RA 763 blog when we post annotations. This made it much easier to manipulate text and add pictures and links to the pages.

The design of the book influenced some of my design choices. I decided that the colors of the reading map would be primarily red and black since these are the colors of the book cover. The striking image of the snarling black dog on a sea of red was on that I wanted to show up right on the “Welcome”page of the reading map. The cover image really lets a reader know what they are in for when they read Sharp Teeth. You’re right, it’s a distinctive color scheme and it has an impact, but I have to say that’s it’s harder to read. Would black on red have been easier? However, most of your audience will have younger eyes.

In addition to the many add-on modules, Drupal also has a plethora of themes that can be installed and adjusted to the web designer’s liking. I chose a theme called “Twilight”, which I was already familiar with. One of the appealing things about this theme is that it can be completely re-colored so I tweaked it a bit to reflect the red and black motif I was looking for. As an added bonus, the theme provides several choices of a silhouette in the header, one of which is a city. I thought this fit well with the Los Angeles aspect of the book and I really liked the look of the black silhouette against the red background. The theme also allowed me to easily title the site and add the words “A Reading Map” as a sort of slogan underneath the title. The white letters of the title provide further contrast to the black city and red background.

Now that the color scheme was decided, it was time to start adding pages. I created nine pages in addition to a “Welcome” page to accommodate links and information about Sharp Teeth. Each individual page is devoted to one aspect of the book. An annotation page is included, as well as a character list and conversation with the author,both of which were taken from the paperback version of the book. This paperback version included several extras; the aforementioned character list and conversation, as well as a questionnaire, a test to determine if your dog is a werewolf, and a playlist of songs that the author listened to while he wrote the novel. I also came across an excerpt of the first chapter in one of the online reviews so I decided to include it in the reading map in order to give readers an idea of what it’s like to read a verse novel.

On the “Reviews” page I chose to go with logos of sites as links to reviews and I liked the way it looked so I also used site logos for the “Interviews” page. A click on the respective logo will take you to the appropriate review or interview. I find using an image to represent a link can help a page look less cluttered. Since my first few pages are rather text heavy, I wanted to change it up a bit and use the images for these pages.

I chose a more spartan approach for the “Gang” page. This page contains simple text links to the various websites that deal with gang related subject matter. I also included an image of a map of Los Angeles with push pins representing the various gangs. This image is clickable and will take the user to a larger version. There is also a link to a downloadable listing of California street gangs taken from Wikipedia and converted to a PDF file. The image and the PDF link were positioned on the page using what Drupal calls “blocks”. These are customizable areas that can contain information and be placed in various areas around the page. I created several custom blocks and was able to show them on specific pages while excluding them from others. This way, only relevant blocks show up on their respective pages.

I wanted to get back to using images for links for the “Werewolf” page so I decided to use banners linking to the sites. I also included an image from the great werewolf movie “Dog Soldiers” (which links to a review) and one from a graphic novel that was recently published about werewolves (and a tornado!) in Texas. Most of the banners include red on them and that really helps this page fit in with the overall design of the site. Even though the user has to scroll a bit to see all the banners and images, I like the way this particular page turned out.

The last page on the site includes some articles in PDF form about verse novels which, like the gang list, can be downloaded from the reading map site. In addition to these links on the “Verse Novel” page, a top ten list of verse novels taken from the guardian.co.uk website is presented. Hopefully this information will shed some more light on the format of the verse novel and entice readers to try one.

The entire site is navigated through the use of the horizontal menu at the top of the pages. This menu is always visible no matter which page is being viewed so it’s very easy to go from one page to another. The active page’s menu item turns from red to black when on that page. Wow! In addition, titles at the top of each page, which correspond to the names of the menu items, help discern or perhaps “identify” which page a user is viewing. Finally, a “Home” button is always present on the left side of the page so getting back to the “Welcome” page is as simple as a click. Since each aspect of the book has its own page, navigation throughout the site is very simple and straightforward.

Collecting the links and information was achieved by various Google searches. Using various search terms, I found results were found for each of the aspect categories. [sorry, just fssing. Dangling phrase; results weren’t using various search terms] I then looked through the various results and chose the ones I thought were most useful or interesting. All links were checked and rechecked after being placed on the site and everything worked as it should. I used the image of the book’s cover to link to the author’s site for Sharp Teeth and placed it on several of the pages. This is a clever and interactive site and I wanted to make sure interested readers could experience it as well.

My goal with this reading map is to help readers explore the world of Sharp Teeth and have a little fun doing it. I tried to keep the site lively with the use of color and images but also wanted to keep it simple to navigate and find information. Perhaps it will intrigue readers to pick up and read this interesting and atypical book.

Link to the Sharp Teeth reading map:

Internet Sources

General:

Amazon (various pages):

NoveList Plus: accessed through the DominicanUniversity and Skokie Public Library databases

Interviews:

Interview with Toby Barlow at The Book Depository.

Love Bites: An Interview With Toby Barlow | Mother Jones.

Omnivoracious: Toby Barlow's Poetic Responses About Sharp Teeth.

Toby Barlow | Books | Interview | The A.V. Club.

Reviews:

Amazon.com: Sharp Teeth (9780061430220): Toby Barlow: Books.

Sharp Teeth : The New Yorker.

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow - Book Review - About.com.

'Sharp Teeth' Gives Werewolves an Epic Treatment : NPR.

'Sharp Teeth,' by Toby Barlow -- New York Magazine Book Review.

Sharp Teeth, by Toby Barlow - Reviews, Books - The Independent.

Gangs:

Gang - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Gang Populations - City of Los Angeles.

GIS - Maps and Territories of Gangs in Los AngelesCounty.

LA Gangs - official website of THE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT.

Street Gangs.

TIME.com - L.A.'s Gangs Are Back.

Werewolves:

Dog Soldiers | Werewolves.

Shapeshifter Emporium.

The Werewolf Page - This werewolf related site contains an extensive collection of resources pertaining to the legend of the werewolf.

The Wrong Night in Texas by Boulet.

Werewolf News - News about werewolf movies, games, books and art.

Werewolves.

Werewolves: The Myths & The Truths.

Verse Novels:

Barlow, Toby. Sharp Teeth. New York: Harper, 2008.

Barlow, Toby. Sharp Teeth. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.

Campbell, Patty. 2004. "The Sand in the Oyster Vetting the Verse Novel." Horn Book Magazine 80, no. 5: 611-616. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost.

Michael Symmons Roberts's top 10 verse novels | Books | guardian.co.uk.

Murphy, Patrick D. “The Verse Novel: A Modern American Poetic Genre”. College English 51, no. 1 (Jan., 1989): 57-72.

Wikipedia contributors, "Verse novel," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,

Very nicely done, Val! And I’m assuming you’ll use your annotation for your horror annotation? Or do you have something else in mind?

This will be a great example for future classes, and I hope you don’t mind if I share it with members of The Reading List committee, who chose this as the best horror novel when it came out!

20/20 A

Kyriakopoulos – LIS 763 – Readers Advisory – Summer 2010 – Joyce Saricks1|Page