Books you think should be read in high school

[Mariami]

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.

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

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.

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.

[Oniw17]

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?

[Virgil]

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.

[*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.

[bounty]

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

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!)

[JBI]

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.

[Virgil]

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.

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

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 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.

[Charles Darnay]

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 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.

[tscherff]

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.

[bluelightstar]

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

[Seabird111]

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

[desiresjab]

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

[EmptySeraph]

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.

[desiresjab]

Don't forget The Unconsoled by Ishiguro!

[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.