We’ve read a number of newer ones - The Things They Carried (great), Slaughterhouse-Five, and Song of Solomon being among them, as well as Cuckoo’s Nest and Catch-22, but those are over 40 years old now. Another class read Ender’s Game.
The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, seems to be a popular book among English teachers, but it’s also the worst book ever written. In my opinion, of course, but let’s just say in this case it also doubles as fact.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is another lousy newer (mid '70s) book we’ve been treated to.
I read Beloved in eleventh grade and thought it was decent, but just about everybody else in the class hated it. In my mandatory introductory lit crit class in college we read The Woman Warrior, which went over pretty well. The only other example I can think of, from a later college class, was Ratner’s Star, by Don DeLillo. Everybody who took the class, including myself, now recoils in horror at the mere mention of that book. Dreadful, truly dreadful.
I got a minor in English lit, but all the classes that I specifically took were from before the 20th centruy. I honestly have no idea what’s read in the 20th centruy classes.
We read Fifth Business by Robertson Davies in high school. The book was about twenty years old at the time (it was published in 1970). I feel that it was the best book I read for a high school class.
About three years later, I read A Wizard Of Earthsea (published in 1968) for a college English Lit class. I still have no idea why.
Here’s a list for a class I’m taking this semester.
H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
A. E. Van Vogt, “Black Destroyer”
Murray Leinster, “First Contact”
Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
James Blish, A Case of Conscience
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
Joe Haldeman, Forever War
Octavia Butler, Dawn
