High school reading assignments.....

[nancylebov]

I'm currently hacking my way through the comments to a post about The Fountainhead being assigned in a high school honors class, and as might be expected, there's plenty of complaints about the books people hated having to read in high school.

So, are there any assigned books which people liked in high school? Hated but now believe it was a good thing you read those books then? Books you'd recommend as part of a high school curriculum?

Offhand, I'd recommend Westerfeld's Uglies. Readable, and plenty to discuss.

ETA:A comment by inge

Good point. I always got the impression that the creators of curriculae and textbooks tended to overestimate teenagers' understanding of human nature, yet consistently underestimated their ability to make sense of a tale. I found that the books which went over best in school were the ones where the students could relate to the character's motivation. Having adventure, defying authority, saving the world, fighting for what's yours, gain understanding of the world and of yourself, all fine. Deal with complicated nets of responsibility, retain your social standing, get grind down by society, cope with futility, have sex with your daughter, not so much.

Comments

[reddragdiva]

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Fountainhead_Earth

[eftychia]

I'm lumping middle school and high school together, since I went to the same school for grades 7-12.

Lord of the Flies: really disturbed me, so I hated wading through the parts where, if it'd been a movie, I would've been tempted to close my eyes, but it was still engrossing.

The Oddessey: yay! Though if I'd had to read the Lattimore translation (which I got in college) instead of whoever translated the Penguin version, I don't think I would've appreciated it in 8th grade. (I also read parts of it in Greek, in Greek class, but not enough of it to count here, I think. A stanza here, a stanza there ...)

To Kill a Mockingbird, The Human Comedy, Red Sky at Morning: not books I ever would've chosen on my own, but all good (though I didn't like the parts that made me cry). I still find myself reciting, "East, West / Home is Best / Welcome Stranger" at odd moments, and the line, "It's the color of the sky," can zap my mood in interesting directions if it catches me off guard.

Shakespeare: Liked some, didn't care for others (as reading anyhow -- some of the ones I didn't enjoy reading are great to watch being performed).

Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead: oh how this one tickled me -- more than anything else we read during the unit on theatre of the absurd, this was what sucked me in and made me want to explore writing in that genre. Ionesco is good and often funny, Beckett is fascinating to read and study, but Stoppard, oh Stoppard, he's the one whose work actually spoke to me.

All the King's Men: I don't remember whether this was for English class or not, but it probably was, since it's another that I wouldn't have picked on my own. Well-told story, kept me eager to find out what would happen next. Enjoyed it.

A Man For All Seasons, The Crucible, The Lady's Not For Burning: all kept my attention, never had me wondering why we were reading them. The Crucible is the one "later really glad I read this" play that stuck with me, but I did enjoy all of them at the time.

Whatever anthology we read "Wakefield" in: uh, I only really remember "Wakefield", which stuck some themes in my head that I argued back and forth with myself over for the next few years and occasionally come back to. I don't remember being especially impressed or entertained by it, but the "I want to argue with the author ... or wait, maybe I agree with him after all ... no, no, he's wrong because..." aspect was interesting enough in its own right,in this case.

Beowulf: loved the first half, don't remember most of the second half until right before the end, want to get around to reading the whole thing again. Also a "later glad I'd read it" book, because I don't think I would've appreciated a couple of SF novels anywhere near as much if I hadn't read Beowulf first. Also the book that first got me even a little interested in learning anything about OE, ME, and the history of English in general. (Our teacher brought in an LP of someone reading parts of it in Old English, and showed us the first page in ME and OE side by side.) Also: never would've appreciated "Beowabbit" if I'd only heard of Beowulf and not actually read it.

Beautiful Swimmers: enjoyed this much more than I thought I would, and gave me a greater appreciation for my state and the bay. (This was for Biology class, not English.)

Whatever anthology we read "No Exit" in: I found "No Exit" interesting, and was another case of "want to argue with the author" -- continued formulating responses to it through college.



I can't remember whether I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Tristan and Isolde in high school or in college. The first was kinda interesting, the second more fun and left me with a bunch of cultural hooks to hang references on later (as well as increasing my enjoyment of a SF novel based on it that I read later (uh, The Firebird, I think?).



The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea: didn't especially like (or hate) them; glad I have the cultural references and hooks for metaphors from them.

The Sun Also Rises: one and only one reason to have any positive memory associated with this book -- the reaction when, as each of us in class was asked what we thought the main theme was, I responded, "It's just a bunch of depressed alcoholics sitting around feeling sorry for themselves."

Books to add to the curriculum

[eftychia]

Oh, jeez, they ought to add some science fiction beyond the two or three Silverberg and Bradbury short stories everyone seems to consider "safe". How about The Demolished Man, or More Than Human? I'm not sure whether Bova's Millenium would mean as much to a post-cold-war high school class, but it's worth considering. Maybe even follow Tristan and Isolde with the SF novel based on it and do comparisons, including looking for other examples of the episodic form and comparing it to the structure of a novel. Or examine how Doorways in the Sand uses some elements of absurdism to tell an essentially not absurdist story. Heck, bring in about a dozen Zelazny short stories (love his novels, but his short stories are better).

Angel at Apogee, or Memento Mori, or Trouble and her Friends might be good. Also: read "True Names" and then some Gibson and study the development of cyberpunk memes into a proper subgenre.


I'm tempted to suggest reading Lem right after the absurdists, but that may be taking things too far. :-)



Also, I forgot to mention in my previous comment: Animal Farm was a book I both enjoyed and found philosophically stimulating in 8th grade, and is in the later-really-glad-I-read-it group because of the important memes in it and the shared-culture references that serve as useful hooks to hang political shorthand on when speaking to anyone else familiar with the book. Oh yeah, and the "stuff to watch out for and guard against in your political movement" lessons that have real-world applications.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

We had Wilfred Owen's poems set for "O" level. I've loved them ever since. We also covered a fair bit of Orwell, certainly Homage to Catalonia, which is a tremendous book and an object lesson in how to write English prose. We got lots of the other usual stuff including, of course, Lord of the Flies which may just be Golding's least interesting novel.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I loved Les Miserables, assigned in tenth grade.

Later I came to appreciate having been assigned the Poetics, and those Greek plays that we studied closely, even if they were tough going at the time.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

A turning point in my life was when "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock" was assigned. Despite being an advance reader in prose all my life, my concept of metaphor and allusion was so limited it seemed incomprehensible, almost a foreign language. Once we deciphered the meanings and references, it was like I had finally learned to read. Whole vistas opened up to me.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

I would say that Uglies is actually inappropriate for a high school honours class - which is not to say I didn't enjoy it, but it's not really literature. It's appropriate for school for grades 7 and 8.

(speaking of such things, I was once scolded by a teacher for reading a book 'far below your reading level' when, at age 11, I did a book report on 'Bambi: A Life in the Woods'. I remembering arguing, pretty passionately, that anyone who thought that was a fool who obviously hadn't read the book. While the movie is total pablum, the book was actually pretty terrifying for an 11 year old. Wikipedia notes:

"The Wall Street Journal's James P. Sterba also considered it an "antifascist allegory" and sarcastically notes that "you'll find it in the children's section at the library, a perfect place for this 293-page volume, packed as it is with blood-and-guts action, sexual conquest and betrayal" and "a forest full of cutthroats and miscreants. I count at least six murderers (including three child-killers) among Bambi's associates."

)Anyways, one of the things that always bothered me is that in Canada, a frequently read in grade 11 and 12 honours lit was Fifth Business. Don't get me wrong, I love the book pretty passionately. But it really doesn't say much to most teenagers. Davie earlier novel from the 50s, A Mixture of Frailties, which is really the book where he moved from a Stephen Leacock/Garrison Keillor storyteller to a serious author who needed to be paid attention to, is far more compelling for people under the age of 20.

(Mixture of Frailties, while published when he was 45, was apparently written while he was in his 30s. Its a classic in the tradition of The Great Gatsby. Davies captures the insecurity of a fairly innocent 21 year old woman coming of age as she studies music in England admirably, without it tending to trite coming-of-age novel tropes)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The real Bambi is definitely VERY different from the Disney story. I came at it after first reading its sequel, Bambi's Children--and yeah, both novels were filled with all kinds of intense adventure.

[nosebeepbear.livejournal.com]

I liked To Kill a Mockingbird. I loathed reading Shakespeare in school, but enjoy it now. I think having students read aloud went a long way toward the loathing. Also, I think at the time I felt pressured to understand every word, but now I'm OK with missing a few details due to language barrier as long as I get the gist. That makes Shakespeare bog down *far* less.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I appreciated the Shakespeare far more than George Eliot myself - I agree with the comment about individual action vs social nets and their costs.

High school was also just about my only exposure to poetry. Funny, considering how interesting I found the actual poems.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Well, I've taught high school english. So I've been told why certain books were assigned in certain grades in our area. Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade because the behavior of the Montagues and Capulets is a lot like the behavior of the Nortenos and Surenos and they're hoping that the kids will draw a parallel and get the story better and also be appalled at what their cousins and neighbors are doing and not want to do it. Of Mice and Men because it has such lyrical descriptions of our area, and the men are migrant farmworkers much like a lot of the families locally. The Lord of the Flies -- no, I didn't get that one, much less why my daughter was required to read the damned thing four times. Bless Me, Ultima and The Milagro Bean Field War also because their cultural and political issues are similar to local ones. Hamlet because it's developmentally appropriate. Macbeth and Julius Caesar because -- I forget, but it was convincing at the time.

High school students are not all alike. I mostly taught the kind of kids who would graduate by the skin of my (that is not a typo) teeth if at all, and what I noticed about them is that they were not comfortable with the concept of written fiction. It bothered them that what they were reading wasn't true. They could handle fantasy and untruth in film, but they said they didn't really pay much attention to the plots of movies anyway. They would get mad at the author when a character said or did something stupid or mean, even if that person was supposed to be a villain or an idiot -- they felt that the author must be endorsing everything they wrote. They could understand and use irony and sarcasm in speech and oral story-telling, but written, no.

On the other hand, there are high school students who are not only capable of reading the most complex, layered and obscure material, they're capable of producing it. So if you want these different sorts of people to have some amount of common cultural background, you're going to have to be really clever in producing a curriculum and teaching methods that can make literature accessible to the first group without boring and condescending to (and therefore making the material inaccessible to) the second group. Hence the weird sorts of projects high school teachers come up with sometimes. They're meant to give the first group something solid and chunky to anchor their thinking about literature while allowing the second group some room to expand their thinking. Sometimes thois works, and sometimes it's just dumb.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I have too much to say about this apparently. To KIll a Mockingbird is one of my favorite books for teens. Some of the "second group" gets impatient with its simple structure and language and moral stance, but it's so thick in context and rich in culture that they can be brought in anyway. (one of the local bookstores is selling bumper stickers that say "What would Atticus do?" and "What would Scout do?" I think that's so cool) But it should really be read along with Meridian which nobody ever reads. Huckleberry FinnBeloved.

My brother hated Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I loved all of Hardy but I didn't read him till I was in my thirties. My brother loved Catch-22 but I didn't get that in high school.

Something that is successful a lot of the time is assigning the biggest, fattest, fanciest book that's currently wildly popular among children and teenagers -- they were assigning Harry POtter in some elementary and middle school classes and kids who might otgherwise fall into my first group were gobbling it up. I don't know how zeitgeist helps to overcome that alienatiuon from literary convention, but I'm all for it.

In my own high school era, I remember really vividly being drawn into heated discussions about The Scarlet Letter. But that was the teacher more than anything, I think.

Such a bias towards American literature -- I wonder if that's me or my school experience?

[xanath.livejournal.com]

I loved Oedipus Rex, assigned in tenth grade, as well as Moby Dick in eleventh grade. But I was really enjoyed Crime and Punishment in my senior year. My classmates either hated it or picked every little symbol apart in it (I remember our teacher informing us that the translation of Svidrigailov's name hinted at his essential nature). I wish I'd kept my notes; I had pages of what every character's name referenced and all the issues of the day in St. Petersburg.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I and my all-male prep school class hated Pride & Prejudice. I reread it years later and recognized how good it is. We also hated The Last of the Mohicans, and we were right about that; it is everything Mark Twain said about it, plus racist and sexist. We also read a lot of good stuff that I appreciated at the time: Tom Jones, Vanity Fair, The Sun Also Rises…And we were spared Silas Marner, which everyone was supposed to suffer through. I may have enjoyed Middlemarch even more when I finally got around to it because I didn't have to forgive the author.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

First story I can remember reading in school and thinking "wow, that was awesome" was "The Most Dangerous Game"; I also have had a long-term appreciation of The Gift of Fire by Richard Mitchell, which I was assigned junior year, would probably never have read otherwise, and have probably reread an average of once every two years or so since.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I actually liked most of what I was assigned to read in high school. The only thing I can recall actively disliking was Mrs. Bridge, which I loved when I reread it twenty years later. Go figure...

[redbird]

I remember liking the Shakespeare we got; it probably helped that we had the Folger editions with obsolete words quietly glossed at the bottom of the page, no need to turn to the back or get a dictionary. But that's partly me: I liked The Canterbury Tales in tenth grade, and for that we were given an interlinear translation, middle English text on one line, modern English on the next. I didn't like Jane Austen; having gone back to her much later, that's one I really was just too young for.

I suspect that if I was handed a long list of books, I could identify a lot of the ones I read during high school, but not always which were assigned in English class: a 45-60 minute commute by subway each way meant a lot of reading time. I did almost all my English class reading on the subway (they gave us paperbacks; the social studies texts were mostly too heavy to carry back and forth, or read while using one hand to hold on to a subway strap or pole). And I was still stopping at the library weekly for more books to read on the train.

[lysystratae.livejournal.com]

Oo, Uglies would be a good choice.

I loved To Kill A Mockingbird, detested The Black Pearl (still do; one of the most boring and pointless books I've ever read). I don't really remember being forced to read anything else, but then since I generally read a few books a week, and have since I learned to read, there could be others I was assigned and had either already read or planned to so it didn't stick as 'homework'.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I liked To Kill a Mockingbird, better indeed than I like it now. I liked Shakespeare, so much so that high-school class was not my first encounter with him.

Some books hit me in the gut. Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm. Memorable, but I'm not sure if "like" would be an appropriate term.

The canonic novel I read during my high-school years that I liked best, and still do, was not on any class curriculum I had. Huck Finn.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

I read like a demon, and had books confiscated because they were inappropriate.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

The one that jumps out at me, in memory, is being assigned Orwell's Animal Farm in 9th grade. I thought it was dull -- for the entirely fair reason that, like almost every 9th grader, I knew NOWHERE NEAR enough of the history of the Bolshevik Revolution to get most of the jokes.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

I developed a lifelong love of anti-Utopian novels between junior high school and high school, in having to read Brave New World, Animal Farm, and 1984. To this day, I'm fond of telling people (half-truthfully) that "I'm glad I'm an Omega." (The ones who get it tend to laugh loudly, and as for the rest, I either rec the book or move on quickly.)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

You might like Lafferty's Past Master. A planet has modeled its society on Moore's Utopia and things go wrong-- the stronger minded people are voluntarily forming slums. Thomas Moore is taken out of the past in an effort to get him to solve the problem.

[darius.livejournal.com]

One period of several weeks spent on poetry was a revelation -- not so much the discussion, but the reader had a lot of really good poems.

Most of the rest of my high school English could have been skipped. Lord of the Flies I especially hated. Return of the Native I couldn't finish. Pride and Prejudice turned me off in the first few pages, though I figured if I skipped it then I might enjoy it when older, which was right. Moby Dick was sort of the converse: "Wow, this is great! I'd better not spoil it by reading it for school." Came back to that years later too. Othello and a selection from Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice I was glad to have gotten in class, else I probably would have missed them.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

(NOTE: Commented before reading anyone else's comments.)

Stuff I liked that I might not otherwise have read: The Chosen by Chaim Potok. A lot of Shakespeare and Greek tragedy that I might have read anyway but not nearly as soon. Thornton Wilder.

Stuff I hated then but am better off for having read, but reading them then was SO TOTALLY THE WRONG TIME: About 2/3 of what we read in World Lit -- so much depressing and/or existentialist stuff, now we know what mid-20th-century Euro-goths did when they got out of school! But it's stuff that adults ought to be familiar with, just not emotionally fragile high schoolers. Oh, the other 1/3 of what we read in World Lit? I still find it worthless today.

Things I'd recommend? Oh I could get in so much trouble. This is nowhere near an exhaustive list.

1984 and Animal Farm *IN CONTEXT* as a devastating slam on the USSR under Stalin *by a confirmed Communist sympathizer.*

Mid-20th-century science fiction, again in context of the directions people thought the world might/could go, among others. Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon" and "Requiem" are a must.

19th century American: Irving, Hawthorne, Stowe, Whitman, Twain. I'm reluctant to ask for anything longer than a short novel for *any* category; there's too much ground to cover and only 4 years of high school English.

20th century American: Sandburg, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck (depressing as it is), Faulkner, Runyon.

British: the usual selection, but also include Tolkien's "Tree and Leaf" and maybe other short stories.

World Lit: there should be some. The trouble is figuring out *WHAT*.

Last 50 years: I want things from the 1960s and things from the 1970s but not at all sure what works properly capture those times. For anything more recent I'd tend to skew towards F&SF....

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

Anybody who thinks Orwell a "Communist sympathizer" should be compelled to read Homage to Catalonia until the light sinks through the cement. Anarchist sympathizer? Now that's a different question; but one of the problems with the Stupid Party is that they can't tell the difference.

[milimod.livejournal.com]

In 10th grade, A Tale of Two Cities knocked me onto the floor! Talk about deceptively slow-moving narrative that carries you, unsuspecting, to the most dramatic conclusion imaginable. That would be at the top of my list any day.

I think our English department must have fostered a lot of independence in its teachers (this was in the early to mid-1970s in New York). Many of my friends were assigned books that I wasn't, so invariably I'd go out to the local stationery store and get what they had. This included 1984 and Atlas Shrugged. A Social Studies teacher mentioned The Exorcist offhand; that was another one for the collection. As for Ayn Rand, reading her biography went a long way toward putting her "literary" creations into perspective. She wasn't some visionary genius; she was just a traumatized kid from the tundras who had a thing about bucking societal convention. Someone who could afford to buy lots of bond paper and typewriter ribbon...

My yellowed Penguin Classics version of The Canterbury Tales is never far from my nightstand. It's essential for any discussion of how the Bible influenced literature and culture after the 11th century CE or so.

The only book that I considered a major waste of time was John Steinbeck's The Pearl. This may be because my English teacher who assigned it was a raging alcoholic whose idea of "teaching" was to hand out poorly mimeographed copies of chapters, one week at a time with a quiz on Friday, and have us read it silently in class while he sat at his desk rubbing his head. After about a month of this, I got fed up and went out and bought the book to finish on my own. Then I brought my own books to class and read them silently. The best one was Bob Greene's Billion Dollar Babies, a book bout Alice Cooper's concert tour. Mr. O'Hara didn't like that, but I don't think he had the strength to tell me off.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I learned how to appreciate Shakespeare in high school--read a summary, then see the play in person or do a dramatic reading, then read on the page. I know a lot of people who learned to hate him, because they only did the last. We had Julius Caesar and Hamlet, and Taming of the Shrew which I enjoyed arguing over even though I didn't like the story.

I also loved Moby Dick, though rereading it as an adult, I realize we glossed over the really interesting themes. I loved Vonnegutt and 1984 and Animal Farm. I liked The Confessions of Nat Turner.