YOUR Required Reading List (poll)

In My Humble Opinion
1

Well, we all know that in High School we had required reading. I was not entirely pleased with many of the books we had to read.
So, if I could run the nation’s educational system in at least this part here’s the books I’d require, two per grade level.
9th: The Scarlet Letter (yeah, I did like it) and The Phantom of the Opera.
Mainly because freshmen need to get a grip and both of these are tails of the “good” in people (IMO). Maybe we can avert Manson freaks this way, who knows…anyway
10th: Any two religious works, or study of any two religions in general (with specifics on as much original text as possible for, say, Old School Sumeria or something). This year The student picks two and gives a detailed report on both of them. Either two seperate reports with much detail and perhaps even history, or one report comparing and contrasting the religions (if applicable).
11th: Atlas Shrugged (no sighs please), The Communist Manifesto (ditto), 1984, and Brave New World. I see these as the extremes in political positions/ideology with semi-corresponding distopian views.
12th: Here’s the biggie…drum roll please…nothing! That’s right, no particular book required at all this year, only a book, probably of a decent length (over 350 pages, say) and a detailed report on it. This report, as well, need not be praising it per se, it could be a systematic critique laying bare flaws, it may be a collection of thoughts, etc etc. Hell, its your senior year…give them a break after all the hell I put them through before. Yes, I know I was a little rough on the tykes, but I think our nation needs a swift kick in the ass to get the brain back up where it belongs :wink:

So, what does anyone else think? I mean, which books would you require were you so inclined? Needn’t be as wordy as me, of course, or ramble on even longer if you will. :smiley:

2

Required reading for everyone, IMHO: Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut! Bestest book ever!

Number 2 would have to be Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins.

3

The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, **Catch-22
and Fight Club.

4

I’d require some Steinbeck (probably Of Mice and Men and some more Vonnegut (Slapstick or Time Quake along with those mentioned above.

It’s interesting to note that the OP centered the reading list thematically as opposed to a time or place (18th century lit. or European Lit., American Lit., etc.). This represente two very different and opposing schools of thought (NPI). The thematic approach allows for more direct connections to life situations (“Authenticisms” as dubbed by Grant Wiggins) while time period or location grouping allows more connections to social history i.e., comparing Victorian era British writings to the social, political and economic events of the time. The groupings need not be steadfast; it can change by years, semesters or even units.

Sorry about the detour; many of you know from my earlier postings that I was a teacher. I guess you can’t separate the teacher from the person, regardless of their current job!

5

I think a great book for 9th or 10th grade (and short for those densely packed high school semesters) would be The Collector by John Fowles. In addition to be exciting and somewhat “freaky”, which is all the rage with the kids these days, it also deals with self esteem issues in a non-catcher-in-the-rye way. In fact, Catcher In The Rye is discussed.

Also, I think everyone in the world should be required to read A Prayer For Owen Meany…if for no other reason than to foster a love of reading.

jarbaby

6

I would definitely have people read A Prayer for Owen Meany as well, jarbaby. And I’d have them read at least one of Shakespeare’s plays per year, with the caveat that they either act them out or see them performed for the first two years – it lends a depth and appreciation that just reading doesn’t.

I’d have them read parts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and part of Beowulf, so they could see some of the evolution of our language.

I’d have them read Grapes of Wrath, some Dickens (I was an ENGLISH major, and I managed to escape without ever having read Dickens!), some Moliere, and a bunch of poetry.

Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” would be mandatory, too, as would The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, and Slaughterhouse Five. I’d at least expose them to Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and some of T.S. Eliot’s work. I’d encourage them to read/see Our Town, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Cyrano de Bergerac.

Oh, there are so many more! I guess I’d love to have literature a bigger focus in high school, but then it would have to be like 7 years long. ::sigh::

Oh well. I guess I’ll just have to inflict this stuff on my kids, when I have them. :wink:

7

spritle that’s interesting, never knew there was actually some school of thought around it.
stargazer Yeah, Gatsby is awesome. I might (in my hypothetical world) put it on a suggested reading list for the senior year.
spooje Fight Club!! Great book indeed. Sort of communism-meets-nihilism, in its own cute way. This, however, is a prime example (and the only example, IMO) of a case where the movie was better than the book.
jarbabyj You might want to check out a book simply entitled “Girl” which is pretty Catcher-in-the-Rye-esque as well. Catcher is probably my third favorite book.
Interestingly enough, none of my “favorite” books are on my reading list. Hmmm…
astro Robbins, man, I gotta get something by him. He has been referred to me multiple times. So many good books to read!
Steinbeck, though, to all who mentioned him…so damn depressing. Even Travels With Charley depressed me for chrissake. That man has an ability to hit me, I dunno.

8

The Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid

Beowulf

The Canterbury Tales

Boccaccio’s Decameron

Dante’s Divine Comedy

Anything by Shakespeare

Milton’s Paradise Lost

Any novel by Dickens

Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Hemingway’s short stories

9

Atlas Shrugged!!! No way in hell are you going to get your average high school kid to read atlas shrugged. Its long, boring, and repetative. The whole book should have been cut down by about 75%.

In another thread about Ayn Rand someone posted a very funny ayn rand imitation. Maybe someone can find it for me. It reminded me of the teacher from South Park writing a romance novel.

 "John was a big manly man, with a strong penis, a large throbbing penis that stood tall.........etc"
10

Antigone
Death of a Salesman
The Glass Menagerie
The Canterbury Tales
Macbeth
Hamlet
Twelfth Night
A Midsummer’s Night Dream
Slaughterhouse 5
The Hobbit
The Lottery
Pygmalion
Tender is the Night/The Great Gatsby
Fahrenheit 451
The Mayor of Casterbridge
A Separate Peace
To Kill a Mockingbird

As for poets, they need to read Dickinson, Poe, Eliot, Pound, Lord Byron, Tennyson, Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexander Pope, Emerson, Longfellow, Stein, and Phyllis Wheatley.

11

I like Nocturne’s list.

Add some Eudora Welty and Willa Cather, Shirley Jackson and Poe, Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy.

12

I read some awesome books in high school, and I would require many of the same:

Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya

A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Madame Bovary by Flaubert

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Great Expectation by Charles Dickens

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Twelfth Night, Mr. Shakespeare

Leaves of Grass, Walk Whitman

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, TS Eliot.

A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams

Some I didn’t read in school, but it would have been cool if I had:

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

You Can’t Go Home Again or Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden

In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaajte

Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I’m totally blanking on the author!

Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald

Something by Faulkner should be required of seniors; and every child should read The Wind in the Willows, Anne of Green Gables, The Little Prince and The Chronicles of Narnia - Book 2 (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) seems to be the accepted standard, and I’d go with that.

And of course, the book that made me love to read above all others, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle.

13

D’oh! I forgot The Wish Giver by Bill Brittain and The Master and Margarita by Bulgarov. Awesome books, the first for kids and the second for adults. Both are incredible.

14

Per grade level, I don’t know. But the following, some of it agreeing with the above, in no particular order:

Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Cyrano de Bergerac - Edmond Rostand
The Iliad - Homer
At least pieces of The Greek Myths, by William Graves (it’s a big book) along with Bulfinch’s Mythology
1984 - George Orwell
Macbeth - William Shakespeare
Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin
Essay on Man - Alexander Pope

In social studies:
All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
Gorgias - a political dialogue by Plato
1984 - George Orwell
and, an offbeat suggestion, but my favorites for how the world really works:
The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith ( surprisingly liberal views, in the modern sense of liberal, not at all like his stereotype )
Cities and the Wealth of Nations - Jane Jacobs, who argues in the book that cities are the source of all economic growth, and that the world should be divided into city-states. If the kids are going to read about utopias, it might as well be one that is grounded in an argument from evidence, instead of ideology.
The Constitution - the whole thing. Should cover at least a semester, with appropriate debates about all the issues covered in the Bill of Rights.

15

I am of the opinion that the best book I was required to read in high school was Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. That’s a must for the curriculum. Dickens bugs me, but somewhere along the way you gotta do some; David Copperfield, while ponderous, is at least one of the better things he’s written. I’d also add Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and, somewhere, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Can we have a “humanities/philosophy” section, where I can make my students read Socratic dialogues and Aristotle’s “Ethics”? Pretty please?

I’d eliminate The Scarlet Letter; it would have been a great short story, but as a novel, it’s a colossal waste of time. One of only two books I couldn’t get through in high school, the other being Willa Cather’s Death Comes For The Archbishop, which also gets the axe.

I musta blinked when Nocturne said “Dylan Thomas”, right? hehehe…

16

i don’t know if i like the term “required reading.” Because it implies you have to read the book and in school…I think suggested reading, not necessarily in school because we all know how it is having to discuss symbolism and whatnot.

But I’ll take a shot at books I have deemed good enough to make it in this world. I’ll try to put on “good” books, that is, books that have some shot at being classics.

*A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

The White Hotel

The Handmaid’s Tale

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Rebecca

Flowers for Algernon

*Something by SK- there are a lot but at least one should be read. IMO.

*Ethan Frome

The Haunting of Hill House*

This is a “children’s book” section…books for adults and kids but primarily aimed towards children. Some books are too good to be missed when you’re young, and when you’re older you might feel too mature to pick them up…

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- or James and the Giant Peach, Mathilda, or * The BFG* for that matter. Roald Dahl rocks…for kids and for adults.

*The Secret Garden

The Long Secret/Harriet the Spy

The Trial of Anna Cotman*

Can’t remember anything else, sorry…:stuck_out_tongue:

17

Aagh!
Last semester I did my student teaching near my college in Pennsylvania in an English classroom. Here are the required readings for the academic 11th graders that I taught:

The Scarlet Letter
The Grapes of Wrath

I personally feel that these two novels should have been read in 9th, or maybe even as late as 10th grade. Here are the books that they should have been reading, and not that mamby-pamby, not challenging the kids BS:

Kate Chopin,The Awakening
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Yevgeny Zimyatin, We
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Terry Prachett, Small Gods

Now, for a senior Advanced Placement class… ooooooo, the possibilities!

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Joel Charmichael trans.)
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphasis
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
William Faulkner, Light in August
Fyodor Dosteovsky, Crime and Punishment
Soren Kierkegaard, selected essays, journals, etc.

::sigh::
All better.

~Mag

18

Mag, you beat me to it. I can’t believe it took that long to mention Crime and Punishment.

19

Hey, if someone has to do it, it will be me…

20

No-one should be required to read any book. There has to be some latitude for taste and interest IMHO.