England, Wales and Northern Ireland, yes. Sorry for any confusion.
Parts of it, yea. I remember it having a lot of street slang and being very fast paced.
Here is a review/summary. As a frame, all main characters are stuck in a traffic jam, and a lot of it is told by flashbacks.
I forgot I had to read other works by that author, short stories and drama (La pasión según Antígona Pérez).
And if you go through the reading list, you can tell something about my school.
No New Zealand authors?
English lit is so broad that there’s not really any one book that is head and shoulders above the others in prominence. Authors like Dickens and Bronte would be maybe more popular on the reading list as they’re more accessible to 12-16 yos in high school.
Shakey is mandatory (as San Vito says). I think it would be really unusual for a British student to go through school without reading at least one of his plays. We read Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet as I recall. Those who studied English lit beyond 16 would do the big tragedies.
The parameters of the ‘literature list’ are set by the school; there is no national requirement that you read 18 books, or any sort of country-wide conditions that those books need to meet (so and so many before 1900; so and so much poetry). I did have to draft a similar list at my school, but it’s not universal, and certainly after the secondary education reforms of the 1990s, this is not how Dutch literature is commonly taught to a great deal of students. Also, this sounds like requirements for the higher tiers of secondary education - which only a relatively small percentage of high-school students are in. Especially students in the lower levels of secondary education, prepping them for some sort of vocational program over the course of four years as opposed to university over the course of six, read next to zero literature. That is the majority of the Dutch population.
This is true, they are the big three - but by no stretch of the imagination is it true that ‘almost everyone’ has read most or even some of these books. What is even less true is that:
You are sorely overestimating the Dutch I’m afraid. Turks fruit, De avonden, and De aanslag have been made into movies, and they’re popular books, sure. But the odds of approaching someone in the street and having them tell you who wrote Donkere kamer van Damocles, let alone what it’s about, are very slim.
Honestly, if there is one book originally written in the Dutch language (although not by a Dutch national), it’s Anne Frank’s diary. Of course, that’s not fiction 
What surprises me, looking back, was that I went to school in Scotland from 1977 - 1990 and don’t recall reading anything particularly Scottish. Lots of my contemporaries from other schools report being assailed by the horrors of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, for example - Sunset Song was already mentioned upthread.
I think we read a lot of the same stuff as folks in England. Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Shakespeare and pick some from Dickens, the Brontes and Jane Austen.
I got the number 18 from a DUO document, and the poetry and before-1900 requirement from memory, so that could be my own school. I am referring to VWO, because the OP specified “educated”. I don’t know what they might read in HAVO and MAVO (or wotchamacallit nowadays). But surely some of the big three? Because if not :eek: ! And if not, then what do they read?
Certainly everyone I know is familiar with the books I listed, though I do realise “everyone I know” is far from the average.
But after all that, if you had to name the books that are the Dutch books everyone is supposed to have read, it would still be those books, right?
I disagree with the OP that there are any novels that nearly all Americans would have to read in school. Granted that I went to school a while ago and that it was a lousy high school, but we didn’t read a single novel outside of our literature textbooks. (And I was in the college prep track. Those who weren’t planning to go to college were in even worse shape than what I’ll describe.) The literature textbooks were mostly filled with short stories. There was some nonfiction in them. There were some shortened versions of at least one Shakespeare play and one Dickens novel.
And inside of your literature textbooks, it was too dark to read.
Now I’m wondering whether your experience (of reading 0 novels for class in high school) or mine (at least 18 in four years of high school English) is closer to typical—but that’s getting off topic for this thread. I will note, though, that the OP didn’t limit his question to full-length novels.
In Australia, I think it would be
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Something by Patrick White, our only Nobel prize-winning writer. Probably Voss, since it is about European explorers lost in the dead heart of Australia
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The ‘bush poets’, especially ‘Banjo’ Patterson and Henry Lawson. They, and C.J. Dennis, managed to get the crude Aussie vernacular into mainstream literature
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And, unfortunately, if you want the one or two books in the last 10 years that everyone has read, Fifty Shades of Grey or The da Vinci Code.
“Florante at Laura”
“Noli Me Tangere” and “El Filibusterismo”
Would also recommend “America is in the Heart.”
I can accept short stories, poems, or other small works. The important thing is that everybody’s read them.
checks
wonders whether she was also wrong in Spanish
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runs back to thread
We just found two pairs of false friends. ES* aliteración* = EN assonance, whereas in ES asonancia is a kind of rhyme.
Cool link, KarlGrenze. It does seem to be a very aptly-named book, since the review says the book has a lot of rythm and the title already does.
Moving thread to Cafe Society from IMHO.
Thudlow Boink writes:
> And inside of your literature textbooks, it was too dark to read.
And there was some point to quoting this old joke, which I’ve read dozens of times in my life? Did you really think that I’m so stupid that I’ve never seen it before? Does this in some way relate to what I said?
> Now I’m wondering whether your experience (of reading 0 novels for class in
> high school) or mine (at least 18 in four years of high school English) is closer to
> typical—but that’s getting off topic for this thread.
I think that that is exactly what the topic of this thread is. The OP started by making a statement about what was “mandatory” for American students to read. I’m saying that at least it wasn’t true that American students had to read the books that were mentioned. Indeed, there are high schools were it isn’t necessary to read any standard classic. I have no idea what’s more typical. I suspect that there are more pathetically worthless high schools than you might expect.
> I will note, though, that the OP didn’t limit his question to full-length novels.
Yeah, but the OP doesn’t mention any short stories specifically.
And before someone decides to patronize me by saying, “Oh, you poor thing. You never had to read anything difficult in high school. I guess you must still be barely literate,” let me point out that I read a lot in high school. I read a lot now. I just do it on my own, just like I did in high school.
Good point. I did read some other “classics” on my own, outside of school. And I also want to make a point to distinguish:
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Assigned in high school
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Read by those who are considered “educated” people
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Classics that the bare plot or at least something from the book is at least known/recognizable to a good portion, if not most of the population at large
Those three vary. For example, from the list I gave, novels like La charca, Don Quijote, and Cien años de soledad fit into the last category, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other works that are considered important.
Belgium: late 80’s-early 90’s
Believe it or not, I was never assigned a book written by a Belgian author.
It’s even worse than that: we didn’t even mention Belgian literature. What did we study, then? Why, French literature of course :rolleyes: … Now, I won’t argue that there have been tons of major French writers that, as a francophone, you must know but there have been some very noteworthy Belgian authors, too like Verhaeren, Rodenbach, de Ghelderode and Maeterlinck (our only Nobel Prize in Literature by the way). If you don’t study them at school, how are you supposed to know about them? (Come to think of it, we did learn a poem by Verhaeren when I was 12. That was it).
As far as French literature is concerned, I’d say that every francophone pupil encounters at least:
[ul]
[li]Molière’s plays[/li][li]de La Fontaine’s fables[/li][li]Hugo’s or Flaubert’s novels.[/li][/ul]
Other major writers that are usually covered include
[ul]
[li]Rabelais[/li][li]Corneille[/li][li]Racine[/li][li]Voltaire[/li][li]Rousseau[/li][li]Balzac[/li][li]Stendhal[/li][li]Baudelaire[/li][li]** Verlaine**[/li][li]Rimbaud[/li][li]Zola[/li][li]Proust[/li][li]Gide[/li][li]Sartre[/li][li]Camus[/li][/ul]
That doesn’t mean that you are assigned books by them but you’re supposed to know who they are and what they wrote. As far I’m concerned, I was only assigned books by Molière, Flaubert and Sartre plus some other, less famous but more accessible authors like Mauriac (yuck!) and Anouilh.
Correction: Baburnama was written in the Chaghatay language, which was a Turkic literary language of Central Asia, the ancestor of modern Uzbek. Babur was from what is now Uzbekistan. It was translated into Persian during the time of Akbar.
As for Uzbekistan itself, their great classic literature is the poetry of Navoi, also written in Chaghatay.
I was going to post about the Shahnameh, but you beat me to it. It really is the most obvious choice among Persian literary greats. It was the work that founded Persian literature (post-Arab invasion, when the language changed from Pahlavi to Persian). The *Shahnameh *is very long and on an advanced level, difficult reading with many archaisms. I can imagine that if it were assigned reading, it would be only selections, not the whole thing. I don’t know if it still is in I.R. Iran, but for many years the one book of absolutely required reading in Persian education was the Golestan by Sa‘di, which is fairly short and accessible for the average reader and filled with wise parables for general edification.
The Bible is studied in western schools for its literary merits far more than its scriptural ones. In any event, there is nothing that separates the Quran from any work of fiction other than the reverence that certain people hold for it.
Don’t all Americans have to read O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”? I thought it was the cornerstone of the Introductory Irony course.