Another vital piece to this project is literature. As the students map their way across Asia, sampling the films and studying the geography, they will also be asked to sample the literature. Again look at my itinerary and the bibliography in the back of this unit to decide which of the writings I have chosen fits your needs. At each stop students will be given a chance to read and discuss the literature of the area before moving on. There is lots of literature available from Russia and China. Literature from Mongolia is less easy to find. I will ask students to use their social studies textbooks during our section on Mongolia. Studying Genghis Khan serves as a good contrast to the images I will be sharing with the students.
I have given students in this unit some of my favorite authors to study; Pushkin, Akhmatova, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Li Bai, Tu Fu and Amy Tan. There are scores of other poets, novelists, philosophers and short story writers that could be included in the project. These were chosen mostly out of personal taste.