Questions about English A1 EE in general + The Kite Runner

[meowchelle]

Hello people!

So at first I chose one of Agatha Christie's novels to write about, but unfortunately my teacher doesn't approve it as she said it's not literary enough even though I could find out some symbols in the story.

But I still want to do my EE in English because my English teacher has the most years of experience in our school (only 5 but that's because our school's IB programme is only 5 years old) and she has produced so far two or three As in English EE and quite a number of Bs, so it's not as impossible or "scary" as the other subject I'm really interested in which is Psychology, because the psych teacher is new this year so I'm definitely not going to risk doing a Psych EE and get maybe a C at best!

I'm considering The Kite Runner as my novel for EE, which is touching and poignant and made me tear up in some parts. I chose it because 1, my teacher suggested a novel with a lot of symbolic themes and messages and literature aspects in it, and 2, I've seen half of the movie about 6 years ago and I never forgot the scenes, I knew the title but never had the chance to finish watching, and 3, I love the book!

However as it's a good novel to read and also do analysing in, I've heard that it's one of the more popular novels that people would do their EE in or even one of their Parts in the syllabus.

Hence here are my questions:

1. Will doing a cliche/more popular book with a relatively common EE title cause me to have a lower chance of getting an A, especially in the "originality" aspect? I don't know the titles of other people's EE of course, but it would be hugely common if I were to write about the general themes/symbols in the book right?

2. Will talking about "discrimination" be part of something I should avoid, because according to the guide, we should avoid writing about culture, language and something else, and if I relate discrimination between the two ethnic groups in the novel to the actual situation in Afghanistan, this would mean I'm talking about the culture of the country right?

3. What kind of EE titles would work better, about themes, or symbols, or characters, or settings, etc? I would like to avoid some titles that are generally not that advisable for English EE that would cause me to have more trouble getting resources/discussing about it.

4. Can I choose to only do my EE in one book? I love TKR and even though I love many other books as well, none of my other favourites share the same genre/background/plot. I generally dislike books with this kind of plots and find them quite boring. But TKR is awesome and I can't think of any other book to compare it with....will doing one book only put me at a disadvantage?

5. Having said in point 4, I would still like to ask for anyone's advice on what other books you could recommend me to read that I can compare with TKR? Hopefully not another popular book, perhaps something not as well-known but as well-written as TKR?

Thank you so so so much for your time in reading and answering!

[1stblondealternative]

I would really suggest you do not do any popular novels, even if the case is that you come up with a really unique topic. This is because these novels have been too much procesed, people get sick of it. Examiners could also get sick of the repetiotion of frequency of thesetopics and this may influence your grade a lot. Also my english teacher who is in IB for 10 years suggested not to do any popular books, and I'm guessing that she does know what she's talking about. Definately stay away from topics such as symobism/themes etc. If you are to write about culture, you can only do english-speaking country culture, as I know. Discrimination would not be a bad idea, but only if you are careful enough not to say directly if you are dicriminating against someone. For titles, I would suggest you be really straight-forward and say what your essay is about right away. You do not have to necesseraly stick to one book, you can two several, I would recommend at most two, in case you want to do some comparison of plots, or writing tools used. The 5. point I would have to agree with, it would be a good idea, if you really want to use a popular book, then use less popular one to compare it to, so you can obviously point to the differences and hopefully improve the essay.

Good luck!