Read challenging books. The more, the better. And read them deeply.

Ryan Y. seems to have gotten a good handle on the opening chapters of Mikhail Bulgakov's best-known novel

Oh, how the months have flown by! Here at Accella, we’re beavering away as usual, but we wanted to take an opportunity to reiterate something here that we often say in person to students and their parents: read challenging books. The more, the better. And read them deeply.

This post is topped by a snapshot of an answer to a reading comprehension homework question recently posed to students in our most advanced course. In 2020 alone, students at Ryan Y.’s level have worked their way through Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. As you may have inferred from the cover thumbnail visible in the image above, we’re currently reading and examining The Master and Margarita, a classic darkly comedic novel by Mikhail Bulgakov that is consistently ranked as one of the finest works of fiction published in the twentieth century.