Required Reading from High School/College

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The Knife

The Knife

Magnificent Witch
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Oct 2, 2013
The conversation in Chris' Canterbury Tales thread was veering a little off-topic about things people were and were not required to read at school (and I, um, may have been fueling that fire), so I thought I'd make a thread for it.
 
Most of the books I had to read in high school like Nineteen Eighty Four, the Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men was stuff I generally liked.

The one book I didn't like that we had to read in high school was the Crysalids. I sorta liked how it mostly bashed a lot of really conservative religion but I thought it was a pretty boring book in general.
 
We read all the Shakespeare plays. Each grade we had to read another. 10th grade was Taming of the Shrew, 11th was Hamlet, 12th grade was MacBeth. I wasn't there freshman year though. I remember reading that one Vietnam war book by Tim o Brien, and Kite runner...
 
What I find weird is that there were authors I really hated at school that I quite like now - Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens spring to mind. I think it's to do with the way they were taught, i.e. that they were held up as these perfect authors and the work was perfect and shut up if you think you know any better. In my last year, we had a guy who was a bit more irreverent, and encouraged you to actually think for yourself about the books. The authors we went over with him, Chaucer and Shakespeare in particular, really stuck with me.

I'd say the really formative experience for me in literary terms was studying English at uni, where you really do have to think for yourself. I enjoyed most of the books we looked at there, particularly when we got on to twentieth century authors and science fiction. I even got into things like Restoration literature, which I wouldn't have looked at twice five years previously.

Not Pamela, though. Samuel Richardson should be ashamed of himself for writing such a boring, sentimental pile of pious shit. Fuck Pamela.
 
Let's see.

My memory is a bit hazy but here's what I recall:

9th grade:
I was in "regular" English, so we read a lot of crappy stuff.

I only remember reading two things - Romeo & Juliet and we read something called "The Boxer" or something. It was about this black kid in Harlem in the 60s who tries to become a big named boxer and there's stuff about the Black Liberation movement. We also read "The Miracle Worker" or whatever that play about Helen Keller was called. Fortunately I did so well in the class, I got moved up to "honor" English.

10th grade:
I found out honor students get to read better stuff. Some of the stuff I remember:

- The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Night by Eli Weisel
- A Separate Peace by John something

11th grade:
I had a really awesome teacher. We read some really great stuff:

- 1984 by George Orwell (though I already read the book the summer before)
- Anthem by Ayn Rand
- Macbeth by Shakespeare
- a play version of Catch-22

We also read a lot of non-fiction as well that was related to the stuff we were reading. I remember we read the introduction to Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" which had a huge impact on me and I highly recommend reading the whole book. I remember we read an article about how schools differed by class, like lower class schools would emphasize things like obedience and that teachers have absolute rule but the higher up you get, the more teachers are democratic to where you have the upper class schools where the teachers are facilitators and classes are discussions of materials and not just lectures.

12th grade:
I took AP English Lit.

- Hamlet by Shakespeare
We literally spent like, half the year on Hamlet. My teacher said "On the exam, pretty much any essay question can be answered with Hamlet." I know that play backwards and forwards and it's my favorite Shakespeare play.
- Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
- Our Town by some guy
- Death of a Salesman

We also did some short stories and some American writers. I had to do a presentation on Dorothy Parker who is a real hoot to read.
 
I loved English class in high school.
For some reason we read an abridged version of Les Miserables in freshmen year which turned out to be a nightmare for my teacher because how the hell do you get a bunch of slacker 14 year olds to give a shit about that complicated mess of a story? I also remember reading Flowers for Algernon that year, which kept everyone's attention better because you know, retarded people are fascinating to teenagers I guess.
In tenth grade our teacher had us read a mixed bag of literature. We read A Child Called It and Go Ask Alice among various works of Shakespeare. Again I think this was a ploy to try and hold our attention because stories about child abuse and drugs were much more relevant. However a friend and I ruined the stories for everyone by researching the background info on those two particular stories. It turned out that Go Ask Alice was a work of fiction touted as the true writings of a teenager in the sixties and there are evidently discrepancies in David Pelzer's story.
I remember reading a lot of Tennessee Williams' works in 11th grade, which fascinated me because they were so dramatic. Also Death of a Salesman, which I found more depressing than anything. I think that was the year we took out state English exams and I got a near perfect score writing about the works I read that year. I was so smug about that.
I don't remember any of the works we read in senior year besides trying to get through the Canterbury Tales. To be fair my senior year was pretty *yawn* since we were done with state exams so that class was more about writing projects.
 
It was a tad over 20 years ago but the ones I recall was that in 9th grade we used a text book so it was all poems and short stories.
The Jungle
The Bell Jar
Ann Frank
To kill a mocking bird
Flowers for Algernon
Animal Farm
In cold blood

I really hated the Jungle and got into it a few times with the teacher.
 
The English class I had in high school was tailored towards gifted kids with issues such as ADD, so we didn't read books as a class, but were required to read books of our own choosing for an hour each day (class was 3 hours long). This was when I discovered Orson Scott Card, Kurt Vonnegut, and Lovecraft. I would get much more absorbed into what I was reading than anybody else. People would say things to me and I wouldn't even hear them.

We would read short stories as a class and then discuss them. These were often by authors such as Hemingway, Ellison, and Kafka. I think my favorite stories out of those were "The Most Dangerous Game" and "Repent, Harlequin!' said the Tick-tock man".
 
Arctic said:
Did anyone else who read Catcher in the Rye think that Holden was a whiny brat?
Click to expand...
I noticed Catcher is a bit more self aware upon subsequent readings of the text. For one thing there's a particular scene in the novel where Holden Caufield gets his ass kicked by a prostitute's pimp for only hiring her to wanna talk to her. And he spends the remainder of the chapter fantasizing about killing him.

Likewise there's a lot of points in the novel where Holden's mental derangement become a lot more noticeable. His fascination with childhood innocence being a primary one that comes to mind. Indeed the last chapter of the novel implies that he is in some sort of mental care facility after his breakdown at the carousel at the end of the story.

I've always interpreted Catcher as an attempt by the author to symbolize himself looking back at how much of a 'tard he was as a teenager. It seems a lot closer to how most English teachers tend to frame the novel. And it's a big reason why I think it's taught in high school.
 
In university:
Basic courses:
City of God
Giovanni and Lussinia
The Aenied
Martin Luther
Candide
Locke, Hobbes, Hume, and Descartes
Max Weber
Eric Voeghlin
Hannah Arendt(personal favorite)
There's more, but I'm drawing a blank on them. Anyone know a collection of old french short stories like bisclavet? I think thatbwas one of them.
 
The things that stand out in my memory were 1984, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Catcher in The Rye, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Jungle and most of Shakespeare's well-known works. I enjoy reading though and so I got into most of the books I read. I particularly liked The Jungle and 1984.

Something I always found frustrating about my age group was how adverse everyone was to reading. It's always inspired a unique sort of rage in me to hear people say that you can't gain anything from reading.
 
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Konstantinos said:
The things that stand out in my memory were 1984, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Catcher in The Rye, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Jungle and most of Shakespeare's well-known works. I enjoyed reading though and so I got into most of the books I read. I particularly liked The Jungle and 1984.

Something I always found frustrating about my age group was how adverse everyone was to reading. It's always inspired a unique sort of rage in me to hear people say that you can't gain anything from reading.
Click to expand...

People like that have existed for as long as written word has been about. And still after hundreds of years language and books continue to evolve and grow our understanding about our lives.
 
Arctic said:
Did anyone else who read Catcher in the Rye think that Holden was a whiny brat?
Click to expand...

When I was eighteen after having read it for the first time, I sure didn't.

Now that I'm 37? Absolutely. Holden Caulfield was a whiny brat. You really don't see that when you're his age and just as confused and pissed off as he was.
 
Memory is fuzzier the further back I go. I probably read much more than this lol.

8th grade:
Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry
Flowers for Algernon
The Tell Tale Heart
Holocaust Unit, where I read this one really disturbing book I forgot the title of...
Most of this time was preparing for standardized testing. Hooray for No Child Left Behind!

9th grade:
Oedipus
The Odyssey
Julius Cesar
Of Mice and Men
To Kill a Mockingbird
12 Angry Men
Lord of The Flies

10th grade:
Scarlet Letter
The Good Earth
Great Expectations
The Plague
Romantic poetry/works such as Whitman, Thoreau, etc.

11th grade:
Invisible Man
Great Gatsby
Waiting for Godot
Night
King Lear

12th grade:
Macbeth
The Metamorphosis
Canterbury Tales
Hamlet
Taming of the Shrew
The Kite Runner

University:
The Aeneid
Miscellaneous philosophers such as Foucault, Descartes, Nietzche, Marx, Socrates, etc.
The U.S. Constitution
Frankenstein
Notes from Underground
Souls of Black Folk
 
My memory of high school might be a little fuzzy, but I remember having to read the following:

9th Grade:
Romeo and Juliet
The Odyssey
A few of Edgar Allen Poe's stories.

10th Grade:
Lord of the Flies
To Kill a Mockingbird
Julius Caesar
A Sound of Thunder
Montana 1948

11th Grade:
The Crucible
The Catcher in the Rye
The Kite Runner (It was an option out of 10 other books)
The Great Gatsby

Since I've taken AP English Literature my senior year, I was required to read Brave New World then write an essay on one of the themes.

12th Grade:
The Stranger
Macbeth
Hamlet (An option out of many of Shakespeare's other plays)
And a whole lot of poetry

My English Composition course last year didn't have any books that were required readings as the majority of our time was spent writing essays based on various aspects of today's culture.
 
I had to read Frankenstein for like 5 different classes in high school and college.
 
Here's what I remember...

Middle School
-Johnny Termain (sp) (boring)
-To Kill a Mocking Bird
-Tom Sawyer

High School
-Romeo and Juliet
-Of Mice and Men
-The Lost Boys
-Education of Little Tree

Tech School
-For Whom the Bell Tolls (I hate how Hemingway writes dialogue.)
-Equuis (be prepared to not look at horse the same way again for a while)
-A Long Day's Journey into Night
-Bone (the whole lit class was full of depressing books)

College (first time)
-Don't, Let's Go Out to the Dogs Tonight
-Liar's Club
-Running with Scissors
-Bless Me Ultima
 
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