Favorite novel read in high school

Cafe Society
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Books I liked, and when they were assigned:
Catcher In the Rye (11th grade)
Adventures of Huck Finn (11th grade)
The Great Gatsby (11th grade)
Crime and Punishment (10th grade)
The Sun Also Rises (11th grade)
Watership Down (10th grade)
To Kill a Mockingbird (9th grade)
Beowulf / Grendel (12th grade)
Macbeth (10th grade)
Hamlet (12th grade)
The Crucible (11th grade)
A Streetcar Named Desire (11th grade)
The Once and Future King (12th grade)
Fahrenheit 451 (9th grade)
The Grapes of Wrath (don’t remember if I read this on my own, or if it was assigned)

Books I didn’t like:
Ethan Frome (9th grade)
The Sound and the Fury (11th grade)
The Scarlet Letter (11th grade)
A Separate Peace (9th grade)
The Old Man and the Sea (9th grade)
Siddhartha (10th grade)

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Books I loved: Catcher in the Rye, (and everything else by Salinger), Brave New World, 1984, Animal Farm. I think Catcher needs to be read when you’re 16 or 17, not as an adult to get the full experience.

Books I hated: There Eyes Were Watching God, The Awakening (I had much of the same reaction as above… thank god she’s dead).

These were from Senior year of High School and Freshman year of College. (yes, both… grrr).

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**The Stone Angel ** by Margaret Laurence.

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High school Junior checking in.

DO NOT ASSIGN BILLY BUDD. Your students will hate you for all eternity. In fact, avoid Melville in all forms: Bartleby the Scrivener, Moby Dick, etc. Also avoid Henrik Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People.”

I personally did not like Heart of Darkness, and neither did my classmates. The only good thing about reading Heart of Darkness was that, in order to introduce some of its themes, we were assigned Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible,” which I love and would definitely recommend.

If you’re going to do Shakespeare, which I don’t have a problem with, remember that they always assign the tragedies in high school (Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, etc.) and that you might want to try a comedy. Much Ado About Nothing has some particularly great insults. The Winter’s Tale, while not widely taught, is fun and interesting. If you do The Tempest, make sure to examine it from the point of view of its being Shakespeare’s last play, and how Prospero often speaks for him saying goodbye.

If you’re going to assign Grapes of Wrath, give the students enough time to get through it. It’s a slow read.

The Scarlet Letter, while objectively a good book, got irritating very fast with its blatant symbols.

I liked The Great Gatsby, Death of a Salesman, and The Glass Menagerie.

In junior high, I read and enjoyed William Saroyan’s “The Human Comedy.” It’s not particularly challenging, but if you’re teaching a lower-level class, they might enjoy it.

In addition, I think it’d be worhwhile to assign The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. I wrote a paper on it this year. It’s amazing, and totally unlike anything your students will have read before. It’s a totally different discussion when you’re analyzing a character’s utter LACK of emotion. (The protagonist has Asperger Syndrome. He narrates the book. It’s very interesting to see the events through his worldview.)

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For the record, I just finished a year of AP English. In addition to the things I’ve mentioned above, we also read The Crucible and Ethan Frome, both of which I was neutral about.

If you’re interested a VERY short story to illustate writing techniques and the way we understand language, you might want to take a look at “Birthday Party” by Katharine Brush.

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Read in high school and remember hating:

Native Son by Richard Wright. Depressing, depressing, DEPRESSING, and I don’t recall any characters in it that I could identify with in any way. Put me off anything having to do with racism or social justice for a long time.

The Grapes of Wrath. Again, depressing, and the ending- I’m sure it was profoundly symbolic and all that, but my reaction was just “Ick”. I’m sure this is not an atypical teenage response.

Great Expectations. I had a lot of trouble getting into it because so little happened in the first part of the book.

The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad. I’m sure it was profound and all, but I just didn’t get it.

Read in high school and liked:

Romeo and Juliet

Macbeth

The Crucible (maybe I’m into witches, too)

Huckleberry Finn

The Invisible Man (actually middle school)

Beowulf

The prologue to The Canterbury Tales

Read on my own around that time and liked:

The War of the Worlds

The Time Machine

The Once and Future King

Animal Farm

The Tempest

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Warning: has sex and rape scenes, so some parents might not approve.

Chesapeake by James Michener. Especially good if you’re in Maryland like I was

Caribbean by James Michener.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

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I also read The Joy Luck Club on my own around then and liked it. I read The Kitchen God’s Wife in a college class my first semester of college, and liked it.

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I loved this book, but be aware that it does have a lot of what some parents might consider inappropriate language in it.

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I agree with this – Twelfth Night is fun and has a bunch of cross dressing. or Titus Andronicus – that’s a play that will get kids’ attention. But, any kid who graduated high school without reading Hamlet is the victim of a substandard education.

–Cliffy

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My senior year of high school I took a advanced English class (not AP, but advanced material not for the faint of heart nor slow of reading, we read 6 complete novels in a 4 month semester)
The reading list (the school had to raise funds independent of the school district to obtain copies of these rather contraband novels of sex & death.)
Sons & Lovers by DH Lawrence
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Death in Midsummer by Yukio Mishima (the first non-western author I ever read)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (one of my favorite books ever)
We the Living, by Ayn Rand (one of the worst books I have ever read)
And then we had reader’s choice, for which I selected Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

I read Tess of the D’urbervilles by Thomas Hardy outside of school and devoured it in an afternoon. (Jude the Obscure… not so much).

It might be fun to read one of the classic british novels that has had a movie modernization… Emma + Clueless? Pride & Prejudice + Bridget Jones’ Diary?

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One thing we did in 8th grade English that I really liked: we had a choice of several novels to read, and split into book groups (one group for each novel) to discuss them. That gave us a little more freedom to read books that might be interesting to us. I always thought it was such a good idea, but none of my high school classes ever did anything like it.

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Let me second (or third or fifth) both Catch 22 and Cat’s Cradle as having the humor and anti-athoritianism to caprivate most high school readers. One more I would add is Candide by Voltaire, even though its originally written in French, and I was assigned to read it in a history class, it would do well in high school English.

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If you let kids out of high school without having read some Shakespeare, Lord of the Flies and The Scarlet Letter (yes, it’s boring, but also unfortunately still relevant) they’re going to be culturally illiterate boobs. I’m just saying.

I was a big ol’ literature geek in high school. I read all the books, liked a lot of them, was neutral on a few and hated a few too. I “got” *Billy Budd * and liked it more than some of my classmates, but I agree that Melville is practically impenetrable and an automatic turnoff to high school kids. “Bartleby the Scrivener” is one of the lousiest, most irritating experiences I’ve ever had with assigned reading. I liked Heart of Darkness and *The Stranger * but I was one of exactly two students in my AP English class who felt that way. A lot of authors wrote good stories in stultifying books. Melville and Dickens are excellent examples of this.

The Great Gatsby, however, completely rocked my world. I read it in one sitting, then went out and read everything else Fitzgerald wrote. I think high school kids can relate well to that book because in a lot of ways it deals with a man’s insecurity and inability to win true love in the midst of the popularity contest that is life no matter how much money he had or how many lavish parties he threw. Sure, it would’ve helped if he wasn’t chasing that vapid Daisy, but plenty of high school tears have been shed over dumber specimens. Plus, it’s pretty easy to identify uses of symbolism and imagery and all that stuff you’re supposed to teach the kids how to spot. It doesn’t whack you on the head with it like *A Separate Peace * (which I loved when I was 14 but can’t really get behind now).

I loved Steinbeck and Hemingway too. Hooray for the 20th Century novel.

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Here’s my listed of hated books:

The Great Gatsby
A Death in the Family
A Tale of Two Cities

I love A Tale of Two Cities now, but I just couldn’t slog through it in high school

I loved these:

The Good Earth
The Grapes of Wrath
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Red Pony

And, like others here, I was seriously disturbed by Lord of the Flies, although it was a fascinating read. Nowadays, every time I see a group of unsupervised, hellish feral children, I think back to how true that book was.

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Caine Mutiny ** and the Trilogy of the Bounty Books**

I’m female but I remember I was reading all of Wouk’s books when I was a Jr./Sr. and could no t put the Caine Mutiny down

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I had just about the same experience, though it took me longer to read Tess. Loved it though! Jude the Obscure, well, it’s still sitting on my bookshelf with the bookmark about a third of the way in. I had to read **The Rainbow ** for a class as well and my impression is that it was good, but not very memorable, the only thing I really remember is pretty descriptions of the countryside.

Wasn’t there a Monty Python skit about Lawrence writing his “newest novel”?

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Animal Farm.
Midsummer Night’s Dream.
To Kill a Mockingbird.

But more than anything…
Hamlet

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[perks up] Hey!

:eek:

Acch, where to begin?

First, my confessions: I’m not proud of this, but I didn’t like Moby Dick either. In fact, it was the first time in my life that I shirked on a reading assignment. I managed to get through about the first third or so, but then gave up (the whole Queeqeg thing made me queasy) and cursorily skimmed the rest, skipping chapters and rooting for the whale. As for Billy Budd, not only have I never read it, I’ve never even watched the B&W classic-turned-TCM-fodder.

But “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street”? What’s not to like? It’s a brilliant fusion of the comic and the tragic, populating its absurd storyline with a small cast of stock comedic caricatures (Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut – excellent names for a trio of dispeptic pet cats, IMHO) and all the irony that Melville could milk out the confrontations between the inscrutable title character and his bewildered boss. I think that Melville’s greatest accomplishment in this story is how he illustrates, in his acid portrayal of the airless legal office – without explicating Bartleby’s interiority or point of view at all – why a wage slave like Bartleby might well come to the conclusion that life’s mortal coil is no longer worth the elbow grease (and, most of all, its attendant sullying of one’s spirit) necessary to maintain it. Or, to put it another way: Bartleby opts out because he’s apparently concluded that a man in his position can either be a Homo Economicus servilis or a Homo Sapiens dignititis, but not both. The mystery of his odd deportment and ultimate demise is less a question of the reason than of the method: why does he doggedly pursue a strategy of muteness, withdrawal, and starvation? Why does he persist in his physical presence, when in every other aspect he seems to have already checked out? What’s Melville’s point in the paradoxical dynamic of Bartleby’s passivity and, ultimately, his aggressive impact on the firm?

“Bartleby” remains one of most resilient literary gems of its era: striking modern, Ur-existentialist and proto-Marxist, broadly and darkly comic by turns, and it ends on a perfectly elegaic grace note.

Besides, it’s short. :smiley:
One more thing – skip the steaming pile of crap that is the indie flick starring Crispin Glover. For all its faults, its main problem is that film is just the wrong vehicle for this story’s nuanced and decidedly literary humor and despair. Film “Bartleby”? You’d might as well novelize “Star Wars”. :wink:

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I teach Junior level English, and I use the Princess Bride as my summer reading. It is a smashing success: the kids love it–probably 85% read it, which is phenomenal for summer reading, and it is stylistically rich enough to give me a way to introduce close analysis.

marymargaret , Have you taught before? I would be very leary of doing Beloved, not because it’s not a great book, it is, but because your first year you really, really, really have to pick your battles, and it only takes one parent to make this into a battle. The reference to violent interracial homosexual oral rape is a great scene for a parent to bring in to your principal. Wait until you have built some capital as the wise English teacher, then decide if this is a battle you want to fight.

In the meantime, are you teaching AP language and compostion or AP Lit and composition? The two are very different, and different books are appropriate.

Is your class a survey, either American or English lit?

What are the demographics of your school?

Can you ask them to buy books? Dover publications has a “thrift” line of books that are $1-$2 each, for the most part. If there is a book you really want to do, these are cheap enough that most kids can afford them, and if some can’t, you can just hand them a copy.

Lastly, teaching junior AP Lang and Comp (as an American lit survey) is my whole life, and there is nothing I enjoy more than talking about how to do it well. So freel free to ask any questions you might have.

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I don’t recall any of the literature I read in high school English classes. The majority of reading I did on my own consisted mainly of science fiction and mysteries. A librarian gave me a copy of The World According To Garp saying she thought I was one of the few students she knew who was mature enough to appreciate it.

I’m glad she did. It was totally unlike anything else I had ever read up that point.

When I got to the point where:

Pooh shot Garp to death in the gym

I was so stunned, I had to read it a couple more times just to be sure I had read it right. I’d never felt a reaction like that from reading anything.