I really get interested. I wonder which authors, correctly which works of them are required reading by school programs?Quote:
Originally Posted by electric_kool_aid
Printable View
I really get interested. I wonder which authors, correctly which works of them are required reading by school programs?Quote:
Originally Posted by electric_kool_aid
I'll think back to the past four years.. and let's see.
Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, Death of a Salesman, Night, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frankenstein, Othello..
That's all I remember having to read in English, there were parts of Beowulf and a few other stories, but I can't recall them. I'm pretty sure I barely read any of those or just Sparknoted them at some point. Ah, youthful rebellion and slacking off.
Hmm, despite my difficult memory, the ones that I remember:
The Scarlet Letter
The Catcher in the Rye
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Turn of the Screw
Of Mice and Men
Grapes of Wrath
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
Stranger in a Strange Land
Not 100% sure I understood the question, but this semester we were working with:
Gulliver's Travels
Mrs Dalloway
Brand New World
Walden
The Importance Of Being Earnest
Heart Of Darkness
Waiting For Godot
The Bell Jar
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Absolom, Absolom
Bartleby The Scrivener
The Horse-Dealer's Daughter
Modest Proposal
some of T.S. Elliott's essays
Canterburry Tales
Humphrey Clinker
Tristam Shandy
Macbeth
several sonnets and poems
Aside of a few works we were only required to read parts of the novels.
Ill tell you what we have to read In Grade 10:
Romeo and Juliet
The Alchemist
To Kill a Mockingbird
*Frankenstein
*Girl with the Pearl Earing
*=You have a choice between the books one which one to read
There definatley going to be more, I forgot which other ones we have to read.
Well, in the 10th grade it's the following:
- Of Mice and Men
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- Animal Farm
- Their Eyes Were Watching God
- A Midsummer's Night's Dream
- Lord of the Flies
There are more, but I can't remembe them right now.
All your book lists are really long compared to mine! Maybe this is because you're all at American schools or something? I go to school in the UK and you only get set a maximum of 4 or 5 books a year for the A levels exams that we sit in June. I personally don't think this is enough, but then again it's incredibly hard to revise for more at once
Anyway, for GCSEs (which lasted two years) I did
Of Mice and Men
The Merchant of Venice
Jane Eyre
Poems by Christina Rosetti, Emily Dickinson, RS Thomas and Robert Frost
For AS Levels this year, I'm
Death of a Salesman
A Passage to India
Antony and Cleopatra
The Franklin's Tale from Chaucer
my IGcse books were
Animal Farm
An Ideal husband
A view from a bridge
(An anthology by Seamus heaney cant remember what )
and somthing else but cantthink what
AS was
The handmaids tale
Hamlet
Faustus
The whitsum weddings By philip Larkin
A2
a long list but I chose The color Purple and Pamela or Virtue rewarded
Othello
John Keats
sasson
wilfred Owen
Jessie Pope
and then lots of ww1 poems
Pat Barker regeneration trilogy
Birdsong
and anything with ww1 as a theme more or less
Yeah im in england at school at the moment and ive just finished english (YAWN). We have studied so far (and i'm almost at the end of the two year course):
Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy
Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare
Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw
Short Stories from different cultures
Opening Worlds Poetry
War Poetry, by Wilfred Owen and Alfred Lord Tennyson
But my friend next to me here in french has a completely different syllabus
I think that the following novels should be read in the 10th Grade:
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
A Tale Of Two Cities
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
Pride And Prejudice
The Hobbit
High school reading I can recall:
Of Mice and Men
Romeo and Juliet
1984
a book by Isacc Asimov, can't remember which
Huckleberry Finn
Lord of the Flies
Alice in Wonderland (we chose this in an honors class to read, not normal syllabi material)
and more...
Pensy - What did you think of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? I grew up in Brooklyn, so it was one of our required reading.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pensive
I liked it a lot. I think that it is good for 10th Grade students, specially for American students.As far as I can recall, itwas published in 1943, probably a few years before you were born. I am very glad to find that you have read it in the school. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Can you remember in which grade did you read it?
Yes it was before my time. I'm old, but not ancient.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pensive
I think I read it around the same grade, which would correspond to about 14 or 15 years old.
so far i've had to read:
Brave New World
A Tale of Two Cities
Gulliver's Travels
MacBeth
Hamlet
The Canterbury Tales
Beowulf
Frankenstein
The Catcher And The Rye
The Great Gatsby
The Crucible
...maybe some others.
and more to come seeing as how i'm not finished yet.
NO FAIR!!!!!!!
You guys got to read the good books.I was stuck with The Scarlett letter and Great Expectations AKA Snorefest 3000
Of Mice and Men!!! Jane Eyre!!!!The Catcher in the Rye!!!!!
You guys suck.
hey i liked The Scarlett Letter, you have'nt read Hucklberry Finn?
I really dont get how people could dislike any Dickens novel - sure he has a tendency to use 25 words when 1 might do, but he is hilariously funny (or that could be just my wierd sense of humour).Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryduce
On Topic.........At school I got to read:
Romeo & Juliet
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (which the teacher completely ruined)
Some poems by Blake (Little Lamb, Tyger, and Sick Rose)
The rest of the time in english class was spent doing pointless worksheets cos' the teacher couldnt be bothered teaching us.
Dickens was achingly sad and hilariously funny in my opinion. G.K.Chesterton once wrote of him something like this' Hans Christian Anderson came to stay with Charles Dickenson at a particularly hard time in his life. When he left Dickenson stuck a sign outside his house that said that Anderson had stayed there two weeks. It seemed like a month. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by kilted exile
This year I've read:
Invisible Man (no not the "the invisible man"- I was disappointed)
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Lord of the Flies
1984
Heart of Darkness
and we plan to read:
Animal Farm and Hamlet
I wanted to read "Flowers for Algernon" (not sure if i've spelled that right) but my teacher wouldn't let us.
Wow, some of you guys are lucky to get to read so much good stuff in school. Here for required we have had,
Of Mice and Men
Several Edgar Allen Poe short stories
Midsummer Night's Dream
Macbeth
Romeo and Juliet
Hamlet
Catcher in the Rye
Animal Farm
and I think thats it although they are trying to remove Hamlet.Also since I had a really cool English teacher we got to read 1984 this year. Next year she said we'll do Hamlet even though they're removing it and Watership down, and she said for me she might teach us one of Kafka's short stories :D .
Somehow all the lists contain not a lot of books. I graduated from a Russian high school- here is an approximate list of what we were reading during our next to last year:
Gogol "Dead souls"
Ostrovsky "Storm" and other plays
Turgenev "Fathers and sons"
Dostoevsky "Poor folk", "Crime and punishment"+ 1 out of "Idiot", "Brothers Karamazov" and "Devils"
Tolstoy "War and Peace" + either "Anna Karenina" or "Resurrection"
Chekhov short stories, "Cherry orchard"
Orwell 1984+ 1 out of Strugatskiy's "Doomed city", Zamyatin's "We" and Huxley "Brave new world"
Chernishevskiy "what to do" (one of the most horrible books I've ever read)
I'm probably forgetting something. The number of books is not a lot bigger, but the size of them is
"Flowers for Algernon" is one of my favorite short stories- I absolutely love itQuote:
Originally Posted by softball336
The God of Small Things
Heart of Darkness---my eyes bled
Things Fall Apart
Much Ado About Nothing
Brave New World
Macbeth
The Awakening
The Great Gatsby
The Catcher in the Rye
Of Mice and Men
a lot of shakespeare
I had to read..
To kill a mocking bird
A merchant of venice
King Lear
Silas Marner (Jane eyre or pride and prejudice could also have been picked)
and poetry by TS Eliot, Sylvia Plath, WB Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop, Michael Longley.
weeell my GCSE course seemed to have some awful, some brillaint things to study
To Kill a Mockingbird (grrrrr)
Twelfth Night (actually didn't mind this)
Strange Meeting (tedious)
An Inspector Calls (loved it - lucky as i had to do a workshop, a portfolio and an essay on it)
Then i got to choose a pre 1900 novel to read, so i did tess of the D'urbervilles, but if i hadn't been taking literature as an extra i would have done 'A view from a bridge' *shudder* lucky escape
i think that's all the novels/plays certaintly not the best selection
Well most of this seems pretty familiar to what I read in high school when I was living in California....good to know...
when I moved to St. Thomas my mom sent us to a private school and my education went to hell, though I do remember reading "The Glass Menagerie" and "Death of a Salesman" my senior year...I think that's about it.
Perhaps he/she was busy on Lit Net. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by kilted exile
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
No, I have my doubts over her ability to even switch a computer on let alone use it.
All in one semester? Blimey!Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay
I go to an American school (in London), but here's what we had to read in grades 9 and 10
9: (I had a teacher who was pretty radical and adventurous and he went outside the traiditional curriculum quite a bit by introducing two very recent novels, and I thought it was great that he was willing to take such a risk and I was taken aback by how passionate he was about the subject, and he's now my favorite English teacher)
The Odyssey
A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Catcher in the Rye
Everything Is Illuminated
10:
Huckleberry Finn
Hamlet
A few Hemingway short stories
The Great Gatbsy
Death of a Salesman
The Bluest Eye
For 11th and 12th grade in my school you get to choose what to take out of a list of classes, each of which lasts one semester. I'm in 11th grade, and at the beginning of the year I took Art of Poetry in which we looked at poems by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Frost, Yeats, Eliot, Wilfred Owen, E.E. Cummings, Bysse-Shelley, and a few others (can't remember them all) and then had to write our own poems, and right now in the second semester I'm taking Shakespeare, and we've done King Lear, King Henry IV Part One, and Othello. Next year I've enrolled for, in the first semester, Russian Literature and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland (one entire semester spent on one poem, and we'll also be reading some of the works he references), and for the second semester I'll be doing 20th Century American Lit (by far the best century for American literature IMO, and really if there's any single country that outshone all others in the 20th century in the field of literature, you just can't beat a country that claimed Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Heller, Vonnegut, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison, to name but a few).
It's been 10 years since I was in high school and I don't remember reading many of the great books on your lists. I have read many of them since and often wondered why we didn't read them in my school. For many of them I think it is because they are not "safe" books. For instance, 1984 and A Brave New World I really wish I had read in high school. However, the books deal with a lot of issues my school district would never allow in a reading program, issues such as sex and substance abuse. I think the closest we came to dealing with a sex in a book was The Scarlet Letter. And I think some parents spoke up against that one! I think it's great that superunknown had a chance to read modern authors like Eggars (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) in his class. I have read his other 2 books and look forward to reading this one soon. I think all the books I read in high school were by dead authors.
GCSE: Romeo and Juliet, Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, Poetry Anthology
AS: Hamlet, Translations, The Return of the Native, Keats
A2: Othello, Wuthering Heights + The Return of the Native, Carol Ann Duffy, Captain Corelli's Mandolin
::sigh:: oh, it's been a good few years' reading... :nod:
Goodness, many of you seem to have attended schools with far more interesting syllabi than I did!
9: Romeo and Juliet
The Oddysey (thoroughly abridged, of course)
Lord of the Flies
The Gift of the Magi
10: Julius Caesar
Animal Farm
To Kill a Mockingbird
11: British Lit:
Some of the Canterbury Tales
Macbeth
Excerpts from Beowulf and Gulliver’s Travels
A Modest Proposal
The Merchant of Venice
Various samples of English poets: Gray, Pope, Marlowe, Donne, and so on
American Lit:
The Scarlet Letter
The Great Gatsby
excerpts from Walden
Civil Disobedience
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (those Puritans sure had a knack with titles, didn't they?)
The Crucible
12: AP American Lit
Hamlet
Brave New World
The Stranger
Frankenstein
(I took a dual-credit class in addition; we read the following)
Their Eyes Were Watching God
various short stories and essays, among them The Art of Fiction (James), Hills Like White Elephants, Barn Burning, The Loons, The Story of an Hour
plus three novels by an author of our choosing, for which I did three early novels by Henry James
It's been a few years... let's see.
The Odyssey
Hamlet
Romeo & Juliet
The Canterbury Tales
Night
Brave New World
Lord of the Flies
Heart of Darkness
Things Fall Apart
Animal Farm
Jane Eyre
The Great Gatsby
Black Like Me
To Kill a Mockingbird
A Farewell To Arms
Oedipus Rex and Antigone
We read a few pieces by Kafka. I remember we read "The Awakening" by Chopin... and assorted poetry.
I find it somewhat disheartening that virtually every American school teaches nearly the same course of study. Many of the books mentioned were the very same ones we were required to read when I was in school, and that was 30 years ago. It isn't so much that these are not classics, but that we are still teaching the same thing Dad and Grandad read.
As a student, I found many of these works to be vital and exciting, but others were dry and dull; especially to young minds. Why are these reading lists never revised?
I have to say that in public American schools book shortages seems to be a huge issue that needs to be addressed. My generation is barely literate, unversed, potato couches. The books that are avaliable to the school, and happen to be avaliable in the appropriate quantity are the ones we read. I must say that until my sophmore year of school when we got a heaven sent teacher that we had no materials to care for. He brought his own books and let use them at times and through this we have gathered a wider range of reading.
Eigth grade advanced Engish....
Romeo and Juliet
The Odessy
Ender's Game
Treasure Island
The Invisible Man
Freshman year(Themes of Literature)....
The Pigman
Juius Ceaser
Antigony
Sophmore year(American Literature)....
The Crucible
The Scarlet Letter
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The American
The Pilgrim Delima
Junior year(Classical European Literature)....
1984
Frankenstine
Dracula
Robinson Crusoe
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Macbeth
Gulliver's Travels
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Stranger
Oedipus Rex
Canuberry Tales
Othello
Senior year(Advanced World Literature)...
Yet to be known.
They seem to be more interested in training young people for the business world, these days.
I really don't understand why the force it down our throats. We have one principal at our school that tries to force feed us the belief that the business world is the only world. I myself, find that I hate business. I don't want to be a skirt suit kind of girl. I'm more of a maiden skirt and corset girl. Haha...funny. Err..The United States public school system sucks. Well, it's the State's fault.
During the summer semester I took a Literature class, the class was broken up into three different sections: Short Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. We also had an optional section on the Fiction Novel. In the Short Fiction section I read "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner, along with other selections. In the Poetry section we cover many different styles of poetry written by many different poets; the poems that I wrote about were "Sonnet 18" by William Shakespeare, "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell, and "she Being Brand/new" by e.e. cummings. We read "Oedipus the King" by Sophocles and "Death of a Salesman" by Auther Miller for the Drama section of the class. I did take on the optional assignment on the Fiction Novel, and I read "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I wrote essays on all of these works and I truly enjoyed all of them.