English with Monira

“I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened." - Mark Twain.

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.
― Norman Vincent Peale

We don't know who we are until we see what we can do.
-Martha Grimes

❤️Welcome December ❤️

❤️ Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.
-William Shakespeare

Netherlands has world's highest English proficiency for non-native speakers

Netherlands residents are the best non-native English speakers in the world, according to the EF English Proficiency Index. In the ten years that this index has been ranking English proficiency in various countries, the Netherlands has topped the ranking four times, and has never ranked lower than third.

The index based its figures on English test results of 2.2 million adults in 100 countries around the world. The participants had to complete various tests, including reading advanced texts, using "nuanced and appropriate" language in social settings, and negotiating a contract with a native English speaker.

The Netherlands scored very well, with women in the country scoring 81.88 percent on average and men 81.25. The global average is 62.75 and 62.25 respectively, and the European average 68.5 and 69.13 percent.

Nine of the top 10 countries in this ranking are in Europe. Singapore and South Africa are the first non-European countries in the ranking, in 10th and 12th place respectively.

The top 10:
Netherlands
Denmark
Finland
Sweden
Norway
Austria
Portugal
Germany
Belgium
Singapore

Source: NLTIMES, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2020 - 12:30

Oh Beloved, take me.
Liberate my soul.
Fill me with your love and
release me from the two worlds.
If I set my heart on anything but you
let fire burn me from inside.

Oh Beloved, take away what I want.
Take away what I do.
Take away what I need.
Take away everything
that takes me from you.

-Hazrat Rumi R.A

:
1) David Copperfield → Charles Dickens
2) Hamlet → William Shakespeare
3) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner → Samuel Taylor Coleridge
4) Das Capital → Karl Mark
5) Animal Farm → George Orwell
6) Dialogues → Plato
7) Tempest → William Shakespeare
8) Main Kemp → Ad loaf Hi**er
9) Mother → Maxim Gorky
10) As You Like it → William Shakespeare
11) Paradise Lost → John Milton
12) The Tale of Two Cities → Charles Dickens
13) The Merchant of Venice → William
Shakespeare
14) Pride and Prejudice → Jane Austen
15) All’s Well that Ends Well → William Shakespeare
16) Anna Karenina → Leo Tolstoy
17) Origin of Species → Charles Darwin
18) Discovery of India → Jawaharlal Nehru
19) Asian Drama → Gunner Myrdal
20) The Old Man and The Sea → Earnest
Hemingway
21) Julius Caesar → William Shakespeare
22) Man and Superman → George Bernard
Shaw
23) War and Peace → Leo Tolstoy
24) Gulliver’s Travels → Jonathan Swift
25) Heaven and Earth → Lord Byron
26) Blue Bird → Lord Alfred Tennyson
27) Othello → William Shakespeare
28) India Wins Freedom → Abul Kalam Azad
29) Marriage and Moral → Bertrand Russell
30) God of the Small Things → Arundhuty Roy
31) Caesar and Cleopatra → George Bernard
Shaw
32) Romeo and Juliet → William Shakespeare
33) Jungle Book → Rudyard Kipling
34) Lycidas → John Milton
35) Emma → Jane Austen
36) A pair of Blue Eyes → Thomas Hardy
37) Odyssey → Homer
38) Memories of the Second World War →
Winston
Churchill
39) For Whom the Bell Tolls → Earnest
Hemingway
40) Wealth of Nations → Adam Smith
41) West Land → T.S Eliot
42) Vanity Fair → W.M Thackeray
43) Prince → Machiavelli
44) Republic → Plato
45) Freedom → Bertrand Russell
46) A Long Walk to Freedom → Nelson Mandela
47) Robinson Crusoe → Daniel Defoe
48) Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow → D.H
Lawrence
49) Ulysses → Lord Alfred Tennyson
50) Sense and Sensibility → Jane Austen
51) Roots → Alex Haley
52) To Skylark → P. B Shelly
53) Time Machine → H. W Wells
54) Try and Try Again → W.E Hick son
55) Seven Seas → Rudyard Kipling
56) Around the World in Eighty Days→ Jules
Verne
57) Waiting For Goddot → Samuel Becket
58) Things Fall Apart → Chinua Achebe
59) Silent Women → Ben Johnson
60) Wuthering Heights → Emile Bronte
61) The Way of the World → William Congreve
62) Voyage of Lilliput → Jonathon Swift
63) Top Secret → Henry Fielding
64) Twelfth Night → William Shakespeare
65) Utopia → Sir Thomas Moore
66) Tom Jones → Henry Fielding
67) The Return of the Native → Thomas Hardy
68) The Alchemist → Ben Jonson
69) Tess of t D’Urbervilles → Thomas Hardy
70) Scholar Gipsy → Matthew Arnold
71) The R**e of the Lock → Alexander Pope
72) Prelude → William Wordsworth
73) Ode to the West Wind → P.B Shelly
74) Great Expectations → Charles Dickens
75) King Lear → William Shakespeare
76) Kublai Khan → Samuel Taylor Coleridge
77) Isabella → John Keats
78) Measure and Measure → William
Shakespeare
79) In Memoriam → Lord Alfred Tennyson
80) Pilgrim’s Progress → John Bunyan
81) Oliver Twist → Charles Dickens
82) Paradise Regained → John Milton
83) Iliad → Homer
84) Divine Comedy → Dante
85) Crime and Punishment → Dostoevsky
86) A Brief History Of Time → Stephen
Hawking
87) A Farewell to Arms → Earnest Hemingway
88) A Midsummer’s Nights Dream → William
Shakespeare
89) Adonis → P. B Shelly
90) Akbar Nama → Abul Fazal
91) Canterbury Tales → Geoffrey Chaucer
92) Comedy of Errors → William Shakespeare
93) Don Juan → Lord Byron
94) Dr. Faustus → Christopher Marlowe
95) Politics → Aristotle
96) Volpone → Ben Jonson
97) Dictionary → Samuel Johnson
98) A Passage to India → E. M. Forster
99) Macbeth → William Shakespeare
100) Samson Agonists → John Milton

BREAKING NEWS
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Louise Glück was born 1943 in New York and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Apart from her writing she is a professor of English at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. She made her debut in 1968 with ‘Firstborn’, and was soon acclaimed as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature. She has received several prestigious awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize (1993) and the National Book Award (2014).

Louise Glück has published twelve collections of poetry and some volumes of essays on poetry. All are characterized by a striving for clarity. Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings, is a thematic that has remained central with her. In her poems, the self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting the illusions of the self. But even if Glück would never deny the significance of the autobiographical background, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. Glück seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works. The voices of Dido, Persephone and Eurydice – the abandoned, the punished, the betrayed – are masks for a self in transformation, as personal as it is universally valid.

With collections like ‘The Triumph of Achilles’ (1985) and ‘Ararat’ (1990) Glück found a growing audience in USA and abroad. In ‘Ararat’ three characteristics unite to subsequently recur in her writing: the topic of family life; austere intelligence; and a refined sense of composition that marks the book as a whole. Glück has also pointed out that in these poems she realized how to employ ordinary diction in her poetry. The deceptively natural tone is striking. We encounter almost brutally straightforward images of painful family relations. It is candid and uncompromising, with no trace of poetic ornament.

It reveals much about her own poetry when in her essays Glück cites the urgent tone in Eliot, the art of inward listening in Keats or the voluntary silence in George Oppen. But in her own severity and unwillingness to accept simple tenets of faith she resembles more than any other poet, Emily Dickinson.

Louise Glück is not only engaged by the errancies and shifting conditions of life, she is also a poet of radical change and rebirth, where the leap forward is made from a deep sense of loss. In one of her most lauded collections, ‘The Wild Iris’ (1992), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, she describes the miraculous return of life after winter in the poem ‘Snowdrops’:

“I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring –

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.”

It should also be added that the decisive moment of change is often marked by humour and biting wit. The collection ‘Vita Nova’ (1999) concludes with the lines: “I thought my life was over and my heart was broken. / Then I moved to Cambridge.” The title alludes to Dante’s classic ‘La Vita Nuova’, celebrating the new life in the guise of his muse Beatrice. Celebrated in Glück is rather the loss of a love that has disintegrated.

‘Averno’ (2006) is a masterly collection, a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone’s descent into hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death. The title comes from the crater west of Naples that was regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Another spectacular achievement is her latest collection, ‘Faithful and Virtuous Night’ (2014), for which Glück received the National Book Award. The reader is again struck by the presence of voice and Glück approaches the motif of death with remarkable grace and lightness. She writes oneiric, narrative poetry recalling memories and travels, only to hesitate and pause for new insights. The world is disenthralled, only to become magically present once again.

Anders Olsson
Chairman of the Nobel Committee

Learn more:

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2020 The Nobel Prize in Literature 2020 was awarded to Louise Glück "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal".

The art of Teaching is the art of assisting Discovery.
- Mark Van Doren

"True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen."
-La Rochefoucauld.

"Advice is like snow - the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge