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i'm know i'm forgetting tons, but these are the ones i can remember off the top of my head...
brave new world
1984
hamlet
merchant of venice
the chrysalids
watership down
the stone angel
there were lots more, but i've blanked all of them out, no doubt. i found english class to be pure misery, trying to pick apart books & sort out themes and so on. i find that exhausting & miserable, and i'm kinda in awe of people who can do things like that.
I didn't have to read Watership Down but other teachers in my school assigned it.
share"i found english class to be pure misery, trying to pick apart books & sort out themes and so on. i find that exhausting & miserable, and i'm kinda in awe of people who can do things like that."
NO ONE can do things like that without an interpreter, especially with 100, 200... 400 year old writings. Probably high school kids today can't pick up Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, or the dude who wrote Catcher in the Rye and be able to handle it on their own.
I had to take an art history class in college, and I kept putting if off again and again until my very last semester, and it was the only class I had to take to graduate. It was the best class I had in college, I learned A LOT. FASCINATING. The teacher was a total freak, he had a ton of crazy personal stories, but he didn't really have any assignments or tests, he just showed slides on his projector and pointed out things to notice. I think for his final exam he put up something like 4 slides and we had to write something he told us about them. I think everyone got A's.
Interpretation case in point: I also had to read t s eliot's "The Wasteland" in high school for a project, it wasn't assigned to everyone, the teacher was not fond of me, nor I of her, and I think she wanted to knock me down a peg or two. I learned later somewhere else that you essentially have to have a Phd to appreciate that poem. I got a solid "C" on that report, now that I recall, as well as the bitterness!
shareall the ones that are being banned
-To Kill a Mockingbird
-Of Mice and Men
-Huckleberry Finn
Of Mice and Men? WHY?
shareI have no idea why. I never read in school, and just depended on room readings, discussion, etc., but from what I did read, I don't remember anything that could even be a little controversial. And what's wrong with "controversy"?
I don't know the name of the latest school, but there has been a LOT of bans. Classics removed from the curriculum, or the latest story that said "These books are on pause while we deliberate" (bullshit, they want to weigh the public fake outcry vs. fake public clapping)
"The Bell Jar" and 2-3 short stories like "Metamorphosis" in which some guy turned into a giant bug.
"Flowers for Algernon" was suggested reading in my Psych class." I'm the only one who read because "Charlie" was one of my favorite movies.
Here are the ones I remember:
Of Mice and Men
Travels with Charlie
Lord of the Flies
Walden
Anthem (Ayn Rand)
West Side Story
Romeo and Juliet
Julius Caesar
Hamlet
Macbeth
Cold Sassy Tree
Their Eyes Were Watching God
A Room with a View
Pride and Prejudice
Wuthering Heights
The Once and Future King
Oedipus Rex
Antigone
The Great Gatsby
The Scarlet Letter
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Great Expectations
Brave New World
You likely also read Oedipus at Colonnus, it was a trilogy. Did you go to an all-girls school, or coed? I've seen "Pride and Prejudice" on others' lists, and I just can't imagine boys being able to suffer through it.
shareI had Romeo and Juliet and his sonnets in high school, and Othello in college, and that's it for the Bard. Worked for me, I'm not a fan. I get it that the language is clever, the stories are good, but I can't deal with reading stuff I can't understand without an interpreter.
shareShakespeare is ruined for many students by being taught as text from a book. The best way to appreciate his plays is to see them performed, preferably a live performance, but at least a good filmed one. When I was in high school—class of 1971, the "olden days" now—a company of actors would perform a Shakespeare play live for the English classes in the auditorium once a year. Even if the language was complex, it didn't take long for the story to engage us, enabling us to naturally begin to understand the richness of the language. Don't know if anyone does that today, but I'd say that any play is best appreciated by being performed first. The reading of a text can come after that.
shareRomeo and Juliet
MacBeth
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Kite Runner
Of Mice and Men
The Old Man and the Sea
The Things They Carried
The Crucible
1984
Fahrenheit 451
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
The Great Gatsby
Lord of the Flies
Moby Dick
The Iliad/The Odyssey
Dante's Inferno
Beowulf
Yeah . . . looking back at it we read a lot of dog shit.
I grew up in a rural small town. The school board believed the school's function was to generate jobs for hometown people. They weren't unconcerned with education, and if their hiring policy had been to favor locally born teachers when all other things were equal, that would have been okay. But given a choice between a good teacher who wasn't a local and a poor teacher who had grown up in the area, they'd hire the poor one.
So our faculty were a mixed lot. I'd match our math teachers against any high school's. At the other extreme, our English department was pathetic. My ACT scores were more or less constant across all the subtests except English, which was several points below the other categories. My parents inquired into the matter and found that this was a common pattern in our school.
We weren't assigned any of the books you list. I read Moby Dick, Lord of the Flies, and Brave New World before finishing high school -- because I realized that colleges expected applicants to have a high school education, the English teachers at my school weren't doing the job, and if I wanted to compete with other applicants I'd have to do it myself.[*] I also read Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, The Catcher in the Rye, a couple of Kurt Vonnegut's books, The Odyssey, Frankenstein, The Outsiders, The Time Machine, The Shining, and some others I can't recall. A good effort, I suppose, but in college I found that most of my freshman classmates were better read than me.
What were we assigned? Julius Caesar, Tom Sawyer, Bartleby the Scrivener, Thanatopsis and Our Town. Beyond that, it seemed to be whatever the teacher personally liked. One thought She Stoops To Conquer was wonderful, but I don't recall anything about it. Another assigned some book about Soapy Smith, but I don't even remember the name.
[*] If that sounds like I claim unusual foresight at age 16, I'm not. Our English teachers weren't just bad, they were grotesquely, obviously bad.