Koine Greek Reader

At AAR/SBL this year, Bobby from Hendrickson gave me two books:
A Patristic Greek Reader and Philippians. Nice looking books (thanks, Bobby), but I didn't even get a chance to look through them before Matt (Grace Seminary Greek prof) borrowed them to look over. He promised to return them this week, but he left me with Koine Greek Reader from Kregel—which I have to return to him this week. Anyway, I spent a bit of time over the weekend looking through it, in between house projects. Here are some thoughts...

I like the general layout, nice font size, good organization. His recommendations for reading the Greek through just to hear it, then a second time using the vocabulary notes, then a third time with BDAG are good. Finally, go through it a fourth time for grammatical stuff. Now, if he can get students to do that... His notes and questions are good, too.

The book is separated into two sections, Part 1 is NT, Part 2 is Septuagint and Church Fathers, with extensive lexical notes and parsing of verbs in part 2. The choice of readings in both sections is a good cross section of Greek, some more difficult than others, which is what you want in a reader.

What did strike me was that he says this textbook is adequate for an entire year. Now, I haven't taught second year Greek for quite a while, but there is no way that it should take that long to get through this book. I would have pegged it as a semester long course. Am I that out of touch with the real world?

Also, is a reader for the NT necessary? Wouldn't it be better just to take the NA 27 or UBS text and run with it and supplement it with grammatical and lexical notes? I liked part 2, and his notes on using BDAG, but I really wonder about the necessity of putting all those NT passages in a reader. Once I get A Patristic Greek Reader back from Matt, I'll look through it. Perhaps that is closer to what I am talking about.