Good morning, ILB. This term, your GCSE set text will be _______________: A classroom classics poll

In the spirit of my junior high self, I'm voting for the shortest one.

didnt read any of these at school (not that i read all of our set texts but none of these were there iirc)

have only read wh

Oh wait, I think Of Mice and Men is marginally shorter than Animal Farm.

Wuthering Heights by far my fave of these. Dig Hard Times but it's hardly his best, Jane Eyre is the other stand-out killer here, Catcher in the Rye feels like a one joke science thesis to me now, the rest are, well, they exist. for a drug fiend Huxley did a terrible job of making me think Soma was supposed to be bad. fuck Steinbeck with a sharp stick altho i guess OMaM is his best. Golding might be alright if school hadn't killed him for me.

MIA: To kill a Mockingbird

main gcse literature set text was great expectations, of which i read about 80 pages iirc

yeah To Kill a Mockingbird belongs here, also some 50s/60s Brit kitchen sink stuff, possibly There is a Happy Land

Dickens' "focused" stuff is his weakest imo

SHIT. Mockingbird. I knew I'd missed something.

Yeah, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, that would make sense in the set.

or A Kestrel for a Knave

i mean whatever, i'm still gonna vote for crazy Emily Bronte

Have read the first six but not the chicks or, um, Dicks. They're all pretty terrific, except Brave New World could be quietly put to sleep some time ago but even it has some good ideas. I think 1984's probably the best.

frankenstein was also a gcse set text (and a set text regla no doubt)

actually read that one cuz i wanted the a* in eng lang

basically everything we studied post-18th c was either horrible or made horrible by the teaching, the postwar stuff was just unremitting trash

the prosody in most of these is so fuckin pedestrian

Wuthering Heights would be worth voting just for how much it made every single guy in my lit class foam angrily at the mouth.

I've often wondered why The Great Gatsby hasn't made it into this canon.

my A-level english teacher turned us on to Kathy Acker he is one of my life heroes tbh

For myself, Brontes top of the pile, Charlotte ahead of Emily for me atm.

Love Dickens, actively dislike Hard Times.

Orwell, Steinbeck, Golding - never want to read books by these ppl again. (Huxley too maybe? But I'll prob end up reading the early novels at some point, I'm curious about 20s brit modernism, before the 30s generation kicks in)

shit i actually studied at A-level: Joseph Andrews, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Rape of the Lock, Larkin. best syllabus ever.

will support michael gove's education reforms up to and including the reintroduction of caning and workhouses so long as vathek is included at gcse by a new unified exam board

the Brontes are so out of place in this shitpile u can only assume they've locked into some "token woman" action

token woman who didnt write near exclusively about the provincial landed gentry

Hard Times is the only one here I don't think I did read in grade school. Read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities instead, iirc.

the Earnshaws are provincial and landed iirc

also make 15 year-olds read Middlemarch imo

yeah but heathcliff &c

suggested GCSE reading list

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Gulliver's Travels
Slaughterhouse Five
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
Crow
selected Borges short stories
Pale Fire
Invisible Man
Donne

sorry Borges can't count, translation
throw some Poe in there or somethink

i mean i'd make the fuckers read Houellebecq but i guess the lit ought to be originally in english

true and weird anecdote -- i remember a kid in another class saying how they were studying 'of mice and men' and not having heard of it and from the pronunciation i assumed it was 'of meissen men' as in pertaining to the awkward chinoiserie figures on the eponymous porcelain until i later saw a copy of the book

In 8th grade, I'm pretty sure the 10 or 12 gory pages made me like The Jungle better than anything else on the syllabus.

The only one of these I think anyone in my high school had on their reading list was Lord of the Flies (I read it, I enjoyed it). A couple of the classes may have done Jane Eyre. Funnily enough I was pretty annoyed at the time that I wasn't getting to read any 'classroom classics' so I actually read a bunch of them in my own time. Yeah, I didn't have much of a social life in high school.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles was the one I remember being the biggest chore.

xps

new syllabus is thin on women, maybe get The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish in.

Actual things on my reading lists:

GCSE equivalent: The Princess Bride (no joke), Macbeth, Lord of the Flies, various short stories
A-Level equivalent: Hamlet, King Lear, Pride & Prejudice, various poetry, The Odyssey, selections from the Canterbury Tales, Beowulf.

In retrospect, being made to read the Odyssey in high school was really great, kind of wish I'd given it more of an honest go (I skimmed a lot of it). Same with Canterbury Tales.

just get rid of centralized syllabuses for subjects like english except for maybe ensuring a certain % of taught material has to be old

ime the emphasis on close-reading of shitty prose texts was stultifying as hell even prior to gcse

xxp

cd throw Middlemarch on my proposed list

shit I've just remembered having to do Silas Marner for GCSE. It put me off Eliot for a few years.

don't really love any Eliot except the last 2 - maybe 3 - but they're more than enough

We only read four or five of the CT. Wish our teach had committed to the whole thing because it seemed dope to us teens.

Oh yeah... we also read The Pigman in grade 9. Strange book. Alberta curriculum really seems to love this one, cos it still seems to be listed in the curriculum guidance notes.

reading list in school

Huck Finn
The Pearl
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hard Times
Great Expectations
The Great Gatsby
Philadelphia Here I Come

I had a challopsy English dept. head who had us read "A Druid's Tune" and "A Canticle for Liebowitz" with "Eye of the World" as a possible independent study unit. When she got Oates' "Foxfire" in the syllabus some righty Xans accused her of trying to corrupt their young'uns and the school board made her get back to basics

Oh and Jane Eyre in this poll

US question: does Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451 actually deserve a place within our parallel canon (read it in middle school IIRC—also Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron", a terrifying but rather silly anti-communist dystopia)... or has it just been lazily enshrined as the 'homegrown' alternative to Orwell's & Huxley's works?

which is I guess like saying: how important is this particular strain of 'speculative fiction' or wtfever you wanna call it (sci-fi satire?)—obviously the historical moment of e.g. Orwell makes it nice when you're simultaneously trying to teach kids history of the 20th century; but something about the genre just strikes me as... quaintly artificial? idk

NEW IDEA I'm going to edit Ayn Rand (take out all the sex) and sell it for middle school classroom use

'Far From The Madding Crowd' was my GCSE set text, although I wouldn't vote for it.

Mayor of Casterbridge for me; it seemed much too ancient for us, though I'd never've touched it later so I'm glad we did it. But then we did Tess a bit afterwards and it was ripper.

i never had to read any of these books at school but they all seem ok, i probably like 'animal farm' the best, it has funnie animals

Most of these are actually pretty great. Dickens and CBron can get tae fuck, though. Still not actually read the Steinbeck. It took me until I was doing an MA to re-read Wuthering Heights (first read late primary, I believe), and realise it's actually a pretty great book about a pair of psychopaths, rather than a shit book about romantic love. Catcher in the Rye is knocked so often I kind of stopped defending it, but it is actually a good pre-teen existentialist tract.

Going with 1984 for top pick.

I'm somewhat startled by how many of these I read for fun; I think Jane Eyre is the only one I read for a (college) class and I had read Catcher in the Rye, 1984, Brave New World, and Lord of the Flies by the time I got to high school. (I can't remember if I read Animal Farm then as well or if the reading I did in high school was the first time.)

Oh, yeah, I think the main reason that I still like these are that I read them in my own time, either before being asked to read them for class (some of these were still A Level set texts, too) or they just never came up.

For me, I never really think of myself as a LITERATURE person, but I'm starting to realize it may because I read a shit-ton of Books To Be Studied when I was 14 and got it all out of my system then

I read only two of these at school, Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm. I've read all the others since except Of Mice and Men. It looks like a list of books I liked less than I would have hoped - the exceptions are Hard Times - my favourite Dickens although that's not saying much - and Lord of the Flies, which I voted for.

the book on this list that surprised me was Jane Eyre; I was reading it for some random college core class and ended up pulling an all-nighter so I could finish it (when I didn't have to) because it was such an enjoyable read

Actually, I was just thinking that I read WH and JE at about the same time, so maybe I should give it another chance. But then, I have a stack of books in my 'to read' pile already, so... maybe not.

I read JE (not for school) when I was about 16, and was similarly locked into late reading with it. Really love CBro's tone, was having a v good time with Villette recently.

Wuthering H did not grab me the same way but I am almost certain I should read again, given how much I like her poetry and her sister.

Despite the fact that Aldous Huxley had no feeling whatsoever for character and as a consequence his plotting was horribly weak and idiotic, I chose Brave New World, because I've always admired its virtuosic juggling of brightly-colored ideas. It is rare that a book that is exclusively concerned with the intellectual fads and fashions of its day stays relevant after nearly a century. Especially when there isn't a single recognizable human in it.

didn't read a single one of these in high school -- we read things like 'their eyes were watching god' and 'the good earth.' i've still never gotten around to any of the brontes.

golding is a strange case 'cause he has this whole other career, tons of critically acclaimed novels with intriguing titles that seem to have fallen off everyone's radar.

I've got a couple on my shelf, but they are v unenticing

actually thinking back, we read some great shit in high school:

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Sula
The Awakening
Siddhartha
Johnny Got His Gun
Death In Venice
Going After Cacciato
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Things Fall Apart
Native Son
I think Animal Farm? not 100% sure

oof also "The Yellow Wallpaper"

i think 'catcher' gets taught for rather patronizing reasons -- assuming that kids will somehow be more interested in this late 1940s teen, with his jacket and tie and period slang, than they will in thomas hardy or whatever. (i had no trouble relating, but i was a weird kid.)

I also remember reading Heart of Darkness and The Jungle and being shocked that no one else noticed or picked up on the egregious racism in both books, and the confounding conversation I had with classmates when we got to Huck Finn and they proudly proclaimed Jim's depiction to be racist and I was all "actually, you all letting a dialect blind you to his intelligence, good sense, and innate heroism is what's racist"

good times

yeah, ppl who blindly dismiss 'huck finn' as racist are the most maddening thing in the world.

Man, it turns out I really remember nothing of The Jungle outside descriptions of men cutting their hands into pulp and getting pussy gangrene in their bleeding eye sockets.

Um, by "pussy," i mean "having puss."

And by "puss," I mean "pus."

Pussy Gangrene was really the worst Bond girl

What's wrong with Heart of Darkness? Not that there were any African characters iirc, is that the point? But I remember it as being quite specifically framed.

oh there absolutely were African characters all over the place

there was a cabin boy, lovingly described by the protagonist as looking like an out-of place monkey in an ill-fitting suit

there is an overall arrogance/assumption that the brown-skinned people they are interacting with at the docks before they go up the river are wholly subhuman

the skirmishes as they travel upriver are described as being with savage animals

when they finally find Kurtz, the first reaction is that being around so many savage, uncivilized brown monsters turned him into a monster, and as a white man he naturally became their king

it's a fucking repellent book and one of the most offensive things I've ever read, even taking into account the time in which it was written, and I am to this day sorry I ever read it

basically the overarching message I got out of the book was "white people, beware the infection of savagery that Africans carry deep in their dirty animal bones"

I didn't study HoD but my friends a couple of years above me did, and I remember racism being one of the issues they discussed. Find it a bit odd that it would be elided over.

chinua achebe on HoD: http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html

The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe's civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz.

Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.

I have to say, nothing made me feel more vindicated than reading that excerpt years after the class where we read Heart of Darkness and seeing that I had made many of the same arguments

Yeah, kind of a repulsive book, both in its ideas and its impenetrable writing style.

I also remember after the class where we discussed HoD the teacher held me after class to both praise me for the arguments I was making and to apologize for assigning the book

Crikey. I'll need to read it again now. I loved it and read it as a tale of corruption by power, I don't recall those tropes.

golding is a strange case 'cause he has this whole other career, tons of critically acclaimed novels with intriguing titles that seem to have fallen off everyone's radar.

yeah, he's a funny one. I don't think he's off the radar quite in England, but he's definitely out of fashion. There was a big biography by John Carey a couple of years ago - it was diligently reviewed, but I don't think it sold (hardback looks fairly heavily remaindered at amazon uk). Failed attempt to reclaim him as a Major Writer - but Carey's glum + choking view of literature often means he's a rubbish barker.

Golding's books often sounds amazing from outside, but I don't get on with his style or sensibility. I've read The Spire and The Inheritors as well as Lord of the F. Didn't like them much, Inheritors my favourite.

is Hard Times really so ubiquitous a school text?

I didn't read any of these in high school – the only novel I remember reading is Great Expectations in ninth grade. In eleventh grade my English teacher showed us every episode of "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" so I guess that makes up for the lack of classics?

I took a class in grad school, "English Methods," which was supposed to teach me how to teach an English class but really should have been called "How to Teach Lord of the Flies." I hadn't read it until then. That book fucked me up!

xp

I think of it as being set often, in Britain at least - partly because it's more-or-less the shortest dickens, partly because it's neatly 'about' things that essays can be written about (and about schools), and partly because it was singled out for approval by FR Leavis in The Great Tradition & he had major effect on English teaching in mid-century Britain. Might be wrong or outdated on that though.

I would expect Great Expectations, David Copperfield or A Tale of Two Cities to be the Dickens choice in the US (esp Tale)

My friend is teaching senior English next year and they gave her ten or so books she could teach – one of which is The Black Dahlia –––!?!

Didn't read any of these for high school -- Actually, I think I missed almost all of the regular "books you're supposed to read in high school" except for like The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird and some Hemingway novel.

I did get to read all kinds of other awesome stuff like The Heart is the Lonely Hunter, The Invisible Man (Ellison), The Bluest Eye and Pere Goriot. So I guess I lucked out.

Though I did read Brave New World outside of class around that time and I think I was sort of obsessed with it, so I'll vote for that.

xxp

yeah, i can imagine Great Expectations being the Dickens-for-GCSE more often now.

Ah! yes - both on what looks like a modern, slightly official list of regulars.

The Go-Between! That should probably have had a place in the poll.

i don't wanna defend Conrad as a not-racist because i'm sure DJP and Chinua Achebe are right and y'know, i've got that privilege thing happening.

BUT despite the noble savage shtick and some horrible uses of language - by a narrator, not Conrad - i think it's reasonable clear that the heart of darkness he has in mind is centred in Europe and its culture and not Africa.

Kurtz isn't driven mad by Africa, he takes his madness with him and lets it run amok

if i was african i would not want to read that book

i dont think it has or had any great morally propadeutic value, even the english and french imperial class thought leopold's congo was a genocidal abomination at the time

although i would have been happy to read it for gcse cuz it is short

problematically i'm not sure it's "about" colonialism half as much as it's "about" writing stories

but as darragh said elsewhere litterchewer is for people who can't write stories and thank fuck for that i say

The more charitable reading of the book is "isn't it a shame we upstanding white people just as savage as these horrible unwashed brown savages?" which, frankly, is not any better.

Also I can't say anything about how I've talked about this book in other threads but I haven't accused Conrad of being a racist in this thread; I've accused the book of being full of offensive racism.

idk if it is about anything but the ease with which it could be transposed to indochina shows it certainly isn't about africa or africans in any manner other than their being apt placeholders for lugubrious white self hatred

although i would have been happy to read it for gcse cuz it is short

― text:gabbneb AND displayName:gabbneb (nakhchivan), Monday, July 16, 2012 1:19 PM (5 minutes ago)

going off this logic, wouldn't Animal Farm be the obvious choice?

xxp there's a load of darkness imagery in the Thames-bound external kernel of the book which leads me to think that the h.o.d. is Europe. i agree that the portrayal of Africa is horrible but i think the "savages" are supposed to be "noble".

fine distinction really between writing a v. racist book and not being a racist but i take yr point.

gatsby is short and great

The other time in 2004 when I took an English Methods class the novel they were teaching us how to teach was Gatsby, and the professor spent a day explaining that the eyes of TJ Ecklseberg are confusing to students.

lots of Canadians got to study The Wars by Timothy Findley <3

voted CITR. still love it probably because I skipped the grade that read it, phew. The Wars is the only book I ever re-read after studying.

the conversation is moving on, but i wld like to put in a good(ish) word for william golding, for the simple fact that every book of his (apart from the rather interminable late sea shanty stuff) seems to me to be quite different from any of his others, in terms of idea/treatment/narrative, if not necessarily theme (which is, we are living in a godless world etc etc). his books don't seem especially dated - the almost seem to exist outside of history - and don't seem to owe anything much to any kind of school or trend. he is quite an original figure, i think is what i'm saying, and it's as hard to think of imitators (jim crace comes closest to mind) as it is of people he's like. my guess is that he is still the last brit to win the nobel prize for literature, and i wld not be surprised if he is the last for quite some time to come.

Pinter after him.

the professor spent a day explaining that the eyes of TJ Ecklseberg are confusing to students.

i did have to read that part three or four times tbh.

i wonder if golding was any kind of influence on j.g. ballard? he was the guy i kept thinking of when i reread 'flies' a few months ago -- the lovingly detailed and naturalistic language he uses to describe the island, the classic brit-novel setting juxtaposed with horrific violence.

re: Conrad: alls I've read aside from HoD was Lord Jim (cuz Fred Jameson talked about it, and Nostromo, a lot in a book) but that was basically zany picaresque about running away from one's fate. or something. kinda-existential? exciting, not that great.

can't really comment on heart of darkness, been ages since I read (possibly didn't finish?) it. and compare/contrasted with apocalypse now, of course. yay movie tie-ins!

even though they're going into neutral territory, Apocalypse Now has the Vietnam War backdrop to give a human motivation to the attacks on the boat, plus Kurtz's descent into madness was better mirrored by the fraying sanity of the soldier on the boat as the trip went on; basically, restaging the story in an explicit theater of war where the travelers were explicit combatants participating in said war clarified the theme immensely IMO

lol i was trying to work out the influence of Golding on Harold Pinter until it clicked - doh.

3> chinua achebe, btw

Doesn't Hard Times have mad blackface iirc? My GCSE class, not a particularly smart or well grounded one, would have been insufferable if we studied that. We actually read Great Expectations. And Lord of the Flies.

In the spirit of my junior high self, I'm voting for the shortest one.

― the new dire homonomoreboobsativity (Eric H.), Monday, 16 July 2012 12:46 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

i wonder if golding was any kind of influence on j.g. ballard? he was the guy i kept thinking of when i reread 'flies' a few months ago -- the lovingly detailed and naturalistic language he uses to describe the island, the classic brit-novel setting juxtaposed with horrific violence.

I'd have thought similarities are more from some common background - bit of british late imperial experience (Ballard's Shanghai, Golding's naval years), colonial adventure literature + heavy war experience (+ scientific grounding?). They are from different generations, but Golding's such a late starter that I think Ballard is already pretty well formed by the time Lord of the Flies comes out (and it takes off slowly iirc).

Also think that a lot of post-war British fiction is haunted by that sense of (nuclear) catastrophe - and Lord of the Flies def has thing in common with Wyndham's Day of the Triffids (published 1951)

voted jane eyre because it is the only one i have not read and i am quite excited about my plan to read it this week

if huck finn were on this list i'd vote it like a shot; as it is, i dunno, prob catcher or jane eyre? we didn't read any of these in school; we read the woman warrior and things.

djp+achebe are right that heart of darkness is racist in that africa and africans are used as a giant shallow metaphor for savagery. the only way to get anything out of it now is to totally ignore this, to basically pretend the book takes place on another planet, the ability to do which i get is Privileged. (altho there's probably a not-unfertile reading in approaching it as not just a commentary on but in part a symptom of the neurosis of european imperialism, the surreal arrogance of the scramble for africa, the papering over of naked powerlust and exploitation with platitudes about civilization). in conrad's defense i guess i'd say that the book is thoroughly and universally misanthropic, convinced of humanity's innate violence and psychopathy, unimpressed by the shallow crust of european civilization, and definitely mocking of marlowe's titillated audience who consider themselves so refined. they think we're in africa to civilize but we are there to murder and rule. (see also: they think we're in vietnam to allow the "south vietnamese" to self-determine but we are there to murder and rule.) the HOD isn't in africa or europe; it's just in people. in this sense at least it's egalitarian. it's racist but not imperialist. that doesn't undo all the thoughtless "monkey" stuff obv, which i guess you could attribute to the narrator and not conrad, but nah it's probably conrad. we did read this book in school, btw, which meant we spent like four class days watching apocalypse now. we watched a lot of movies in school. i really hated school.

altho there's probably a not-unfertile reading in approaching it as not just a commentary on but in part a symptom of the neurosis of european imperialism, the surreal arrogance of the scramble for africa, the papering over of naked powerlust and exploitation with platitudes about civilization

this is the topic I managed to turn our classroom discussion onto

that must have been a blessing. i don't think we really talked about any of it (and i was too young+blinkered+white to bring it up myself) which is funny considering we were a state (HI) with a rancorous colonial history and lots of other stuff we read was explicitly about racism/colonialism/oppression/etc.

on another note i really don't know why they give you 1984 instead of an essay collection.

Because it is A Classic in the way that none of his essay collections really are? Also kind of mindblowing in the total confidence of setting the world and atmosphere - the first 20-30 pages are unbeatable.

i mean yes they are they are like top five essay collections in history; that's what he is, he's One Of Our Greatest Essayists. you're right tho they don't have the meme status of 1984 (prob because they are essays) (and because they aren't taught in high school). i am not knocking 1984, which i used to do (for being too didactic or whatever for the snotty nabokovian standards i was regurgitating at the time) until i realized how vividly it described things which needed to be described and which we did not then have words for, which is why we now (still and forever) use orwell's. also i like how focused it is on language as tool of control and thought-shaper. but come on, at least throw the kids "shooting an elephant". i didn't read that till college.

iirc we did:

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
To Kill a Mockingbird
Hard Times
Great Gatsby
Animal Farm

Plus a couple of Shakespeares and "Philadelphia, Here I Come!"

Ah no I'm not knocking his essays at all! I'm just saying that I'd not like to try to convince a school board to take 1984 off a list and put one of them on. Which you're right is totally a vicious circle.

re: 1984: i kind of suspect that the first 20-30 pages are much better for encountering them first at 40 or 50 years remove: that in 1948 they seemed possessed of a certain obviousness which is elided when the dystopia proposed becomes a timeless one and not one riffing on the immediate situation. the essays, on the other hand, require a reader with some kind of basic knowledge of the cultural background already, which i think is in some ways a no-no for this kind of list ... ?

Hard Times seems very popular here. We did Great Expectations.

Also Loneliness..., the culture of which was very foreign and exotic. Also, A Separate Peace, which takes place at an American private school and is unread by, and unknown to, everyone except American boys attending private schools. This was when we were just getting started in literature.

Our Shakespeare was first Romeo and Juliet, and then Othello a year later. (The same year I discovered The Atrocity Exhibition, which was not on the list.)

All American students in that era read The Scarlet Letter at some point.

Never did Lord of the Flies, nor To Kill a Mockingbird. Come and get me, coppers.

There was a big biography by John Carey a couple of years ago

I know it's dumb, but this is almost enough to put me off reading any more Golding ever.

we read 'shooting an elephant' in senior year of HS, tho as i recall didn't discuss the background or relevance or even meaning of it AT ALL -- it was more like, 'why is this a well-constructed essay.'

Anyone else read Native Son in school? That was the big one for me.

I'd read Black Boy first on my own but Native Son was one of the most life-changing books I read in school

Less problematic Conrad for high schoolers would be stuff like "The Secret Sharer," "Typhoon," and "Youth" -- we did the first of those.

I don't think I read any of the poll options before college except Catcher in the Rye. iirc the standard things we all had to read included Great Expectations, The Scarlet Letter, Rouse's prose Iliad, some Shakespeare, and (because we were in Georgia) Flannery O'Connor.

Oh, and The Deerstalker, James Fenimore Cooper, yeah! zzzzzzzzzz

Vathek looks great.

Horrible list - rather read Orwell's essays than his dumb fiction, even if I'd be out of my depth. Goes back to 'literature when you're young' thread but again, rather read something foreign but w/risque adult themes than written in the mother tongue that just is fkn terrible: wonder what I would have made of The Decameron or a he Arabian Nights when I was younger.

Probably a separate question but I wonder how those books get to be chosen in the first place/what is the crietria and who gets to choose and how much scrutiny there is. I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird and this Kitchen Sink style novel, obv Shakespeare, but I would have wanted to read Greek tragedy too and I'd like to think it would have complemented S.

Criteria is obv having a contemporary social theme, something that gives a flavour of the poetry of the language in prose (Orwell doesn't), or something young and kinda macabre - violent but not sexual (along censorship lines for films), involving children.

Good arg for Golding - might try something else by him.

jane eyre is pretty good

are there any books by female authors on the high school curriculum that don't have a really fucked up view of gender relations

now bikini kill are playing in my head, oops

when i work saturdays i feel like ilx is a huge cavernous hall filled with the traces of a long dead civilization and i am wandering around it talking to myself

that female-authors question of yours is so heavily begging for creative strikethrough.

i almost did it myself with 'in the canon' for 'on the h.s. curriculum'

if you mean 'by female authors' then i mean, well, there's a bunch in which women are basically absent, there's that

anyway: woman authors are regularly chosen to highlight ~gender issues~ in a way male authors aren't?

though i don't really remember the gender relations in female-written books we studied at school being any more fucked up than gender relations actual.

well, my high school encounters were emily bronte and the plath of 'daddy' etc. if they'd been austen and the plath of the ted-hughes-what-a-bastard poems i'd probably feel the other way about it.

i... genuinely can't remember what is fucked up about the gender relations of wuthering heights beyond standard it-sucks-to-be-a-woman-in-the-nineteenth-century?

i kind of find the fact that everyone in it is an awful human being is what creates its unique atmosphere, not so much the pressure of gender roles and prescribed relationships.

i wouldn't disagree with you about that. the brontes are just ... v interesting guides to how to tell if a boy likes you, i mean.

i guess to me that isn't "gender relations"? like, that's just... romance, the way they wrote it.

nb i studied yr austen/gaskell/brontës/plaths/etcs in a girl's school (and quite a liberal one at that), which i guess would have some kind of impact on how i think about this stuff?

yeah, by 'a fucked up view of gender relations' i meant that stuff more than i meant books in which the narrator or implied author is going 'hey, look how fucked up this is' i guess? i don't know. & i certainly don't think either of those is a barrier to actually teaching them well. i did all my 19th century lit. in a british state school tho so er.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i read all of these except the brontes and dickens (instead we read "tale of two cities" and "david copperfield")

also we read "shooting the elephant" in history class

i was never assigned lord of the flies and have never read it, and it really made me feel out of the loop in some of the english ed classes i took last year. also whenever i tell people i got a job teaching english they let me know how they feel about lord of the flies (very polarizing book, apparently) and i never know what to say. obviously the solution is to read it but i've built up an aversion at this point.

wuthering heights is definitely the stunner on this list, but i will stan for catcher in the rye all day long.

i'm not sure what got people foaming at the mouth at the top of the thread but, uh, i like all these books and would have a hard time picking one

i guess i agree w/ noodle vague that "brave new world" is the one i feel like i understand least and might benefit me most from a rereading

"catcher in the rye" and "animal farm" i guess i like in the same way i like my baby blanket that's still in my parents' closet

"of mice and men" is not *that* great i guess

so "1984" vs "lord of the flies" for me

imo having children read "1984", "lord of the flies" and "animal farm" in high school is vital to ensuring the future of our glorious democratic system

all right all right i'll read lord of the flies

it has a mystical aspect that i think the other books lack

are you suggesting wuthering heights lacks a mystical aspect??? >:[

actually wtf i just forgot about IT

IT just got my vote for "lord of the flies"

if by mystical aspect you mean a talking head on a stick, then yes

*spoilers*

also make 15 year-olds read Middlemarch imo

― Tartar Mouantcheoux (Noodle Vague), Monday, July 16, 2012 8:03 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

was assigned mill on the floss in 11th grade and it was one of those deeply upsetting, life-changing reads. (reception in my class split neatly along gender lines.) it was a huge relief to read middlemarch a few years later, partly because it's the best, but also because it doesn't annihilate its protagonist. i would have loved to read middlemarch instead but i think my english teacher thought if he taught middlemarch he would have had no time to teach anything else.

xp haha

but i will stan for catcher in the rye all day long.

― horseshoe, Saturday, July 28, 2012 8:22 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

surprised by this! i havent read it since i was 15, hated it then, maybe its worth another go...

I read most of these in college if not HS.

I really love Jane Eyre. Also, I really hate Eliot which makes me feel bad because so many people I love stan hard for her but my senior seminar class was entirely about her and it made me want to never read again. And die.

the confounding conversation I had with classmates when we got to Huck Finn and they proudly proclaimed Jim's depiction to be racist and I was all "actually, you all letting a dialect blind you to his intelligence, good sense, and innate heroism is what's racist"

good times

― PITILESS LIVE SHOW (DJP), Monday, July 16, 2012 1:57 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this reminds me of an insane and horrifying conversation i had with a professor whom i ta'ed for in grad school. i had chosen a zora neale hurston short story as one of four stories students could choose from in writing their final essay. we were going over our grades together and all of a sudden he was expostulating on how terrible the hurston story was (he didn't know i'd chosen it; there were two other ta's.) he was particularly disgusted by the dialect spoken by the protagonist in the story, calling it degrading and low-class and he actually said zora neale hurston could have learned a thing or two about writing black dialect from william faulkner. he is white btw.

xxp i am kind of a salinger stan. used to think catcher in the rye was the immature one but i reread it last year in an english ed class and it still hits me where i live tbh /snuggles baby blanket.

btw the dialect in the hurston story was the whole point; it was incredibly rich and poetic. but he unintentionally revealed a lot about himself during that impromptu rant.

I've never read WH and feel like maybe I should do that.

it is wonderful! but you just broke my heart with your eliot-hatred so take that recommendation with a grain of salt! (it's not like an eliot novel.) <3

would like Abbs to return to this thread and tell me about lord of the flies

I know, I'm sorry! I remembered that you love her from past threads. I mean this was a LONG time ago and I was sort of an idiot who didn't know anything back then so I might feel differently now but at the time I was so not into it. Hmmm. Maybe I'll give her another shot too.

I remember liking LoTF but little else about it. It's been even longer for that one.

you don't have to be sorry; i am a bossy schoolmarm

nah

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

these results should be the other way round really

hm i'm surprised at such a low showing for LOtF (my #1) but i'd rank 1984 my #2

you know nowadays the kids read the hunger games in school