I recently finished Brave New World, a book that I'd picked up once or twice in high school but never read. I can safely say that I didn't miss much. The world A.F. seemed much too much like a caricature, and I don't think the ending could have been more heavy-handed.
And while it doesn't strike me as a book commonly assigned in high school, it did make me wonder what books that are commonly read in high school that I missed. For example, two books that everyone in my high school seemed to read other than the classes I was in were The Red Pony and The Yearling. I'm told by the wife I didn't miss anything with the former, the merest thought of which sends her into paroxysms of disgust.
In any event, I'm giving you all the chance to shape my reading list.
Simply comment with the name of the best book you were assigned to read in high school. By "book" I include books, plays, and poetry (collections, epic, and otherwise), and by "assigned" I mean either what you think it means or a book you chose but got credit for reading (my sophomore year we got to choose books, but had to run them by our teacher first).
To help narrow things down, these were among the works I read in high school:
The Odyssey, The Iliad, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Pride and Prejudice, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Babbitt, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Crime and Punishment, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Man and the Sea, The Chosen, The Sound and the Fury, Treasure Island, The Scarlet Letter, Catcher in the Rye, The Sun Also Rises, Dandelion Wine.
Since then, I've read The Great Gatsby, some other Sinclair Lewis stuff, and a whole raftload of Greek drama and other classical bits.
So, based on that, recommend away!
23 September 2005
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13 comments:
Jane Eyre by default. None of my favorite books were ones I read for high school credit.
Othello.
so, you didn't have to read Catcher in the Rye? I'm surprised.
that was Greg, btw.
Hmmmmm. I'll go with "No Exit" by Camus.
For my senior year project (Brit Lit), we picked authors out of a hat. I ended up with DH Lawrence. While the focus of my essay was on his semi-autobiographical work on his childhood, Sons and Lovers, I managed to roll in quite a bit from Lady Chatterley's Lover, highly recommended and quite amazing that I pulled it off given I attended a Jesuit High School. By far my favourite assigned book was for freshman biology when we got to read the early Chrichton novel Andromeda Strain
Oddly enough, we had a suplemental reading list for honors world history that included Tai Pan (James Clavel) and Exodous (Leon Uris) both of which are very entertaining, though not especially great literature. We read these and had one-on-one oral exams about them. In addition to our regular reading which included Thucidides' History of the Peloponesian war, Herodotus' history, a bunch of Sutonious' lives, The Divine Comedy (Dante), Candide, The Prince, The Oddyssey and The Communist Mannefesto. My world history teacher was old school. When she retired, my little sister had some assclown who let her write papers about vampires in Romania and they didn't read any books at all.
My favorite assigned book...Hmmm. I'll call it a dead heat between Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath.
BTW, Sarah is so right about The Red Pony. That one truly sucks, and I like John Steinbeck a lot.
"Death Knocks" by Woody Allen; The Brothers Karamozov; and naturally, I have to add The Hound of the Baskervilles, even though it wasn't on the official reading list.
Speaking of Steinbeck, given the hurricanes have caused our biggest refugee relocation/class struggle since the Dust Bowl, I'm thinking of giving Grapes of Wrath another go.
I highly recommend both Ivanhoe and To Kill a Mockingbird. I own copies of both and have read them several times since high school. Just be warned that Ivanhoe takes a while to get going, but it's worth it.
One other I forgot - Death of a Salesman. Then rent the HBO version with Dustin Hoffman, Charles Durning, and John Malkovich.
Good stuff so far, thanks. We did actually read To Kill a Mockingbird, but it's probably worth a revisit. I also remember seeing that version of Death of a Salesman, not sure when we read it... we had some summer reading for AP, may have been then.
Which reminds me to add The Crucible to the list.
I'll nominate Things Fall Apart from Chinua Achebe.
If we're limited to books assigned in class, I will go with, believe it or not, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I haven't re-read it in 34 years, so I don't know whether it would hold up in my estimation; it's probably more sentimental a tale than I would enjoy now. But I found it riveting when I was 15, and very much appreciated the strong female characters.
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