Books you think should be read in high school

If you could form a Literature / English ( / whatever is the variant of the subject in your country) reading list for the final four years of education prior to university (i.e. high school), supposing a subject could include both national and world literature (in ratio of your choice), and supposing it is written for university-bound (and in those universities humanities-bound) students, which works would you select as important ones to be read?
It can be absolutely any kind of list, from the list which includes a work or two of Harry Potter - type literature per semester, up to 30-a-year list of huge 'classics', in any order you wish (chronologically by periods or entirely mixed), as long as you sincerely believe it is a good list for the circumstances as described above.

Recently at school we were challenged to do this, and I was surprised with how many brilliant lists students from my class came up with, so it got me interested into seeing what would high school reading lists look like if created by members of LitNet. So... :) I'm very curious.

(As far as my choice is concerned, I'm still having second thoughts about half of the works I enlisted, so I'll have to think it through again before posting.)

Schools are not serious about teaching literature, nor are students bothered about studying it and parents don't care about books either. People are more concerned about education that pays instantly for the effort and money invested. People want to study Business Administration (whatever that is supposed to mean!) or IT etc. As long as you can tell your IE 1394 from USB 2, they are OK with it. What would they "get" by studying Dostoevsky?

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Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow

Schools are not serious about teaching literature, nor are students bothered about studying it and parents don't care about books either. People are more concerned about education that pays instantly for the effort and money invested. People want to study Business Administration (whatever that is supposed to mean!) or IT etc. As long as you can tell your IE 1394 from USB 2, they are OK with it. What would they "get" by studying Dostoevsky?

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Perhaps you've got a point, but that's for another discussion. :D You aren't answering my question.

I would have 2 major novels, by the likes of Faulkner, Melville, Hardy, Lawrence, Davies, etc., 2 Shakespeare plays a year, one comedy one tragedy, one major poetic time period a year, and a thick set of shorts and essays.

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Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow

Schools are not serious about teaching literature, nor are students bothered about studying it and parents don't care about books either. People are more concerned about education that pays instantly for the effort and money invested. People want to study Business Administration (whatever that is supposed to mean!) or IT etc. As long as you can tell your IE 1394 from USB 2, they are OK with it. What would they "get" by studying Dostoevsky?

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Very cynical indeed. My view (and I like to have a view because I am studying to teach high school English) is that the goal is to get them interested and to appreciate literature (and English) and through this comes caring about it. I disagree that teachers don't care - sure, you will always have some cynical "failed-as-a-writer-so-now-I'm-a-teacher" teachers, and I despise these people because they take away from those who love to teach and who do a great job - but I would have to say the majority cares about teaching. Any given hgh school student can develop and interest/care in literature....it's all about finding out how to do this. Parents are parents....who cares about them? Sure they are a great way to foster learning in kids - if the parents care the kids are more likely to care - but when it comes down to it, a teacher can inspire a student despite the parent's apathy.


But I digresss..... a lot

MY IDEAL READING LIST

GRADE 9:
Romeo and Juliet - only because it is so traditional and I think, despite it's overuse, everyone should be exposed to it

Great Expectations - Perhaps a little early to be thrown in the Dickens pool...but everyone should start somewhere and I think Great Expectations is a good start

GRADE 10:

Boccacicio - Selections from The Decammeron (in translation)
Chaucer - selections from Canterbury Tales (modern translation)
Cyrano de Bergerac

I think a great idea for an English class is a running theme. This theme would be fablio/carnivalesque. You can introduce the students to great literature while having a lot of fun as well...the works aren't too difficult (in translations) but are meaningful


GRADE 11:

Selections from Thomas Moore's Utopia
1984
Brave New World
Handmaid's Tale

Granted, I stole this idea from one of my English teachers - a distopian theme would be really interesting I think....not too sure how I would model it exactly (probably wouldn't get them to read all three works) but it's a start


GRADE 12

Gogal - short story selections
Dostoevsky - The Idiot
....................

I'm going for an anti-hero theme here, but I can't think of any more off the top of my head.

I think my list would be different from yours, Charles Darnay!

I think Romeo and Juliet should be read before high school. High school should be reserved for the major tragedies. Maybe it's just my personal view coming through here- I really dislike that play.

Grade 9 is also a little early for Dickens, as you said. I was a fairly advanced english student and when I read it grade eleven, I still had a hard time with it. I just don't think it would capture a student's interest, and the language may be beyond the average grade nine.

I really like your grade eleven list though!

My list

Grade 9
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
Under Kilimanjaro - Ernest Hemingway
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Grade 10
Eugene Onegin - Aleksandr Pushkin
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
Short stories - Guy de Maupassant
Light in August - William Faulkner

Grade 11
Anna Karenina - Lev Tolstoy
War and peace - Lev Tolstoy
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Grade 12
Short stories - Gogal
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Ulysses - James Joyce

for 11 grade - i think they (students) won't be able to read all these books in one year, take War and Peace! four volumes! even in Russia many students cant read the novel without skipping War deacriptions or other secondary themes.

Ulysses is very hard and War and Peace is very long.

I'll start from Year 10 (I think that's the equivalent for american grades- 14 to 15 year olds?)

Year 10:
Romeo and Juiliet
Brave New World
Animal Farm

Year 11:
Macbeth
The Great Gatsby
Fahrenheit 451

Year 12:
Othello
A Clockwork Orange
Lolita

Year 13:
Hamlet
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
Brideshead Revisited
Catch-22

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Originally Posted by Mariami

My list

Grade 9
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
Under Kilimanjaro - Ernest Hemingway
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Grade 10
Eugene Onegin - Aleksandr Pushkin
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
Short stories - Guy de Maupassant
Light in August - William Faulkner

Grade 11
Anna Karenina - Lev Tolstoy
War and peace - Lev Tolstoy
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Grade 12
Short stories - Gogal
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Ulysses - James Joyce

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Light in August in grade 10? I applaud your confidence in students!

Kelby, your list actually sounds a lot like my actual high school reading list (strike Clockwork Orange and Lolita - I don't think you can get away with teaching those in high school - at least, not where I'm from)

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Originally Posted by Charles Darnay

Light in August in grade 10? I applaud your confidence in students!

Kelby, your list actually sounds a lot like my actual high school reading list (strike Clockwork Orange and Lolita - I don't think you can get away with teaching those in high school - at least, not where I'm from)

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That's interesting; I think one of the senior classes at my old high school covered A Clockwork Orange, and I'm sure the English teachers would love to get away with Lolita.

Light in August would be quite advanced! My senior class read As I Lay Dying, but I think that's all the Faulkner that got covered in high school. It depends on the teacher really-- if they're spectacular, as mine was, they're capable of instilling understanding of even complicated works. Mariami, I like your idea of Dostoevsky in successive years.

Under no circumstances would I include any literature that was any good - its my opinion that school puts people off of books for life, I think its criminal to put people off of shakespear and other classic literature.
The number of average people who's only knowledge of literature is from school is I expect quite large, and how many of those people form favourable opinions of the works that are forced on them?
No, I would only use books released in the past few years, preferably ones that were utterly banal page-turners so that kids could at least associate reading with pleasure and if anything be put off reading poor quality writing.

The English education system is different though I think, we have 11 years of mandatory school, 2 optional years of college, then university; and I'm only referring to the first 11 years part - if people have chosen to study Lit at college then that's different.

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Originally Posted by DapperDrake

Under no circumstances would I include any literature that was any good - its my opinion that school puts people off of books for life, I think its criminal to put people off of shakespear and other classic literature.
The number of average people who's only knowledge of literature is from school is I expect quite large, and how many of those people form favourable opinions of the works that are forced on them?
No, I would only use books released in the past few years, preferably ones that were utterly banal page-turners so that kids could at least associate reading with pleasure and if anything be put off reading poor quality writing.

The English education system is different though I think, we have 11 years of mandatory school, 2 optional years of college, then university; and I'm only referring to the first 11 years part - if people have chosen to study Lit at college then that's different.

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This is sort of what our school did in the first few years... And it didn't work. But I do wholeheartedly agree with including more modern books; just not only using them and no classics.

One thing that schools, or at least ours, do is they include too much. Therefore our experience with some of the works is very rushed and therfore unappriciated. Take for example last year when we did Romeo and Juliet, we never had time to read the whole thing. We read barely any of it. It was quite a dissapointment. And just now we did The Theban Plays, or rather, The Theban Play. I have a feeling our classes understanding and interest would have been increased if we had read all 3, instead of hastily rushing through only one of them.

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Originally Posted by Charles Darnay

Light in August in grade 10? I applaud your confidence in students!

Kelby, your list actually sounds a lot like my actual high school reading list (strike Clockwork Orange and Lolita - I don't think you can get away with teaching those in high school - at least, not where I'm from)

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Actually in Ontario many schools are teaching A Clockwork Orange in the grade 12 curriculum. I know my school certainly did (though I was in the class that did Gatsby instead).

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Originally Posted by JBI

I would have 2 major novels, by the likes of Faulkner, Melville, Hardy, Lawrence, Davies, etc., 2 Shakespeare plays a year, one comedy one tragedy, one major poetic time period a year, and a thick set of shorts and essays.

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This sounds like a good pattern to me, but I think I would include slightly more, especially in the last couple years. If the students are heading for humanities-based postsecondary study, I think seven or eight novels in the final year is not unreasonable.

Grade 9: the year of making literature fun
Macbeth
perhaps Animal Farm; something satirical, at any rate
The Millere's Tale
The Odyssey

Grade 10: the year of the complicated villain
Richard III , Othello & The Merchant of Venice
Crime and Punishment

Grade 11:
Hamlet
'Bartleby' and Benito Cereno
The Brothers Karamazov

Grade 12:
King Lear
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
Moby-Dick
The Scarlet Letter
passages from the Bible

Much has been left out because I, personally, feel severely crippled by not having yet studied such authors as Hemingway and Faulkner (and perhaps Lawrence) and I think there should probably be a novel from each in here.

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for 11 grade - i think they (students) won't be able to read all these books in one year, take War and Peace! four volumes! even in Russia many students cant read the novel without skipping War deacriptions or other secondary themes.

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Light in August in grade 10? I applaud your confidence in students!

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Light in August would be quite advanced! My senior class read As I Lay Dying, but I think that's all the Faulkner that got covered in high school. It depends on the teacher really-- if they're spectacular, as mine was, they're capable of instilling understanding of even complicated works. Mariami, I like your idea of Dostoevsky in successive years.

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I think students will be able to study by my list. I'm 15 and I have read all the books I listed this year. Haven't encountered any problem understanding them.
During high school, kids become adults. At that age they form their opinions about many things and I think reading what I have put in my list would help them greatly. :)

I can't really make a list since I've read very little outsde of religion, non-fiction, fantasy and old poems/sagas. Why is 9th grade early to start reading Charles Dickens? I remember reading most of oliver twist in at a very young age, and my aunt(2 years my junior) was in like second grade when she read it. Great Expectations must be a little harder to understand?

D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers would be a good choice for senior year of high school. Also Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Dickens's Great Expectations.

I bet most people in any high school class would "spark notes" Great Expectations. Not to say that it's too difficult, merely that students will find it so boring they wont bother with it.

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Originally Posted by Antiquarian

I loved Great Expectations, but I agree, most high school students are bored by it. I didn't read it until I was older.

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hi antiquarian...we read that in high school and while i cant speak for my classmates, i can say i remember enjoying it (in so much as a 16yr old male who liked sports and gym class but otherwise hated school can!)

I had an autodidact friend in highschool who was not allowed to use Ulysses for his senior paper because our teacher a) hadn't read the book, and b) got insulted that his student was a stronger reader than himself. If the students wish to pursue difficult works, and more material, especially if they are interested in English at a post-secondary level, they will on their own. As it is however, most people are pushed towards other fields of study, and therefore have no interest/time for 7-8 books a year, or however many you would choose.

Lowering the bar is inevitable in an English class. What should be proposed is an elective literature class where people who actually care about literature can go. The focus of English classes seems to be primarily on hammering down material, and making sure the kids can write essays (at least the 5-para-type) by the end to a sufficient degree.

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Originally Posted by *Classic*Charm*

I bet most people in any high school class would "spark notes" Great Expectations. Not to say that it's too difficult, merely that students will find it so boring they wont bother with it.

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Originally Posted by Antiquarian

I loved Great Expectations, but I agree, most high school students are bored by it. I didn't read it until I was older.

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Originally Posted by bounty

hi antiquarian...we read that in high school and while i cant speak for my classmates, i can say i remember enjoying it (in so much as a 16yr old male who liked sports and gym class but otherwise hated school can!)

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I read it in high school too and I didn't think it was so hard. It's a rather straight forward story with lots of colorful characters with a young person as a central character and central mystery. I think it would be ideal for high school.

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Originally Posted by Mariami

I think students will be able to study by my list. I'm 15 and I have read all the books I listed this year. Haven't encountered any problem understanding them.
During high school, kids become adults. At that age they form their opinions about many things and I think reading what I have put in my list would help them greatly. :)

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I agree with you in theory, but I think you (and I and many on this forum), in our high school selves are a very large minority in English classes. Especially in Canada (I'm pretty sure US as well?) where English is manditory for all years of high school, you will get people who detest reading - and teachers have to be able to teach to them.

i think jbi is right.

i taught high school english 35 years ago. i took high school english 40 years ago!
this may be the dumbing down of america, but we 1st have to teach most students the joy of reading. pick short easy books that can lead to interesting discussion. the good readers will pick up great books on their own or participate in an advanced reading class.
here are some thoughts in no particular order

old man and the sea
deliverence
a day in the life of ivan denistovich(sp?)
of mice and men
farhrenheit 451
one flew over the cookoos nest

if there has been a good movie made of the book, then show that after the reading to discuss the values of each.
the goal of high school reading is not to satisfy the geeks like us, but to encourage others to read. that is one reason i feel the harry potter success is excellent. it has created a generation of readers.

At the high school I teach at, it's like this and it works great:

Grade 9:
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Moon Is Down - Steinbeck
Great Expectations - Dickens (they demand this, but nobody reads it :()
Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
The Chosen - Chaim Potok
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Metamorphosis - Kafka

Grade 10:

A Gathering of Old Men
Death of a Salesman
The Optimist's Daughter
The Scarlet Letter
The Grapes of Wrath
The Sound and the Fury OR As I Lay Dying
A Prayer for Owen Meany
The Great Gatsby
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Invisible Man
Huckleberry Finn

Grade 11:

1984
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Alias Grace
Frankenstein
Hamlet
Macbeth or Faustus
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
The Canterbury Tales
Brave New World

Grade 12:

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Heart of Darkness
The Inferno
Waiting for Godot
Crime and Punishment
Beloved
The Things They Carried
Fences OR King Lear OR The Tempest

Ninth Grade:
(Dystopian/Sense of Loss theme)

-1984
-Romeo and Juliet
-Dracula

Tenth Grade:
(Philosophical/Mythology Theme)

-Crime and Punishment
-The Oddyssey
-The Illiad

Eleventh Grade:
(Catch 22's Theme)

-Catch 22
-The Jungle

Twelth Grade:
(Hopelessness theme)

-Hamlet
-Lord of the Flies

9 The Call Of The Wild--London, The Old Man And The Sea--Hemingway

10-The Futurological Congress--Lem, The Grapes of Wrath--Steinbeck

11-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--Twain, Candide--Voltaire

12--Letters From The Earth--Twain, The Great Gatsby--Fitzgerald

Poems by Mallarmé, Valéry, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and especially Paul Celan. Then, once the poetry phase is over, they can move on to prose: Finnegans Wake, Ulysses by James Joyce; The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann; Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon; The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner; The Castle by Franz Kafka; Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco; The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil; 2666 by Roberto Bolaño; Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre; The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky and The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett, in no particular order.

Don't forget The Unconsoled by Ishiguro!

Do such classes exist, outside of the imagination? The last four years of "High School" includes childish imaginations and young adults. It would be necessary for such pupils to study more than literature. It is daft to give such minds a diet of heavy depressing classics with which they have few points of reference. That's a good way to turn them off. By the age of seventeen, eighteen there are more of them able to survive being depressed. But even then not,definitely not, Bloody Ulysses. Tennyson's idle king yes but not Joyce's priapic satyr.

Wishful thinking but The Possessed/ Devils/ Demons by Dostoevsky for high school seniors.

I think we still need the classics but how about interspersing them with something a little more frivolous or modern and seeing if they can relate them to each other. For example try them with Midsummer Nights Dream followed by Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett or Don Quixote then Going Bovine by Libba Bray. Maybe mixing it up in this way could get more high schoolers interested in reading the original classics and understanding how literature works.

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Originally Posted by ennison

Do such classes exist, outside of the imagination? The last four years of "High School" includes childish imaginations and young adults. It would be necessary for such pupils to study more than literature. It is daft to give such minds a diet of heavy depressing classics with which they have few points of reference. That's a good way to turn them off. By the age of seventeen, eighteen there are more of them able to survive being depressed. But even then not,definitely not, Bloody Ulysses. Tennyson's idle king yes but not Joyce's priapic satyr.

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This is in itself a childish resolution. If, in your predicament, children should be spared of reading depressing classics, because they risk getting depressed, then what's the point of reading depressing classics when they can live through a depression, and thus limiting the potential of a book? Then we should, perhaps, give them Cioran's aphorisms.

May I put in a word for The Time Machine and Mary Barton.

I have no idea which classics are usually read in an English or North American classrom. I think one idea is to make a list with older and more recent titles and let the children vote the books they want to read. It depends very much on the class. A friend read Wuthering Heights with his class and they loved it without knowing anything about England and its moors.
Ulisses definitively not but maybe some of Joyce´s short stories could be in the list.

Meanwhile out of the ivory towers and in the real world children are children. There are hundreds of texts written by good writers for children. Teachers of literature soon learn to be practical. (They won't be long teaching if they don't) Good language teachers have always used the light and entertaining to engage young minds and develop language skills. Sometimes these texts have no great "literary" merit but they have enormous language merit. A sprinkling of the Godots and Goldings and Salingers can come later for the more mature developed reader. (We all know the Lennon/Salinger intersection). Wallace who I thing was teaching young adults eschewed the use of heavy duty literature and used instead texts like Carrie and The Silence of the Lambs. He was far from the first to realise this was a useful approach. It also gives the lie to snobby Bloom's idea that Wallace couldn't think. Wallace was capable of thinking practically and of doing something.