Will any books of the last forty years become 'standards' for high school lit classes? If so, which ones?

When I was in 12th grade English in 1999-2000, the most recent books we read were The Stranger (1942), All the King's Men (1946) Death of a Salesman (1949), Invisible Man (1952), Lord of the Flies (1954), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966) Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) - and one outlier, The Joy Luck Club (1989). We didn't do Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) or Animal Farm (1945) (although we had the latter in 8th or 9th grade), both of which have often been subjects of book-banning campaigns, similarly The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

Did I go to an outlier school? Have things changed much in the last few decade? Just wondering because new novels keep getting published but I'm not sure if there's a clear enough canon of the 70s, 80s and 90s for this to get monkeyed with much. Partly I'm asking just out of curiosity - what other 'recent' books did y'all have to read in school? At this point even the fear of having to deal with some big parental backlash, and the limited space in a year to add new material versus test-prep and/or the classics, seems like it'd be enough to convince most teachers that there's no time and it's not worth the hassle. But I'm also wondering if there's anything about the current status of books in our culture, or the way they're marketed/packaged/distributed/talked about, that makes it harder to come to consensus that something is an Important Book, enough to overcome all the forces that would push back against adding to the canon.

Blood meridian

Might be different in the UK but the syllabus here almost always contains a fairly healthy amount of recent-ish books. The God Of Small Things and Half A Yellow Sun can probably be expected to stick around for a while.

I read The God of Small Things and Life of Pi in high school. Others too. Jennifer Egan's "the keep" but that was for a class explicitly focused on contemporary literature.

I think there's a reasonable amount of middlebrow literature I can see being taught in schools - Life of Pi, Curious Incident, Cloud Atlas etc... all have aspects of high technique without being too challenging, right?

xp

God of Small Things otm

I know that Joe Simpson's Touching The Void is a common set text in the UK, cos he often sends pissy messages back at schoolkids that have directly tweeted abuse at him (most of those seem to be along the lines of "your book is so boring, I wish you had died")

Ian McEwan's Enduring Love is a current set text too I think.

We read cloud atlas in my contemporary lit class too xpost

If anyone's interested in seeing the current UK set texts, the Edexcel and CIE English Lit specifications should be online.

I could see Black Swan Green becoming a standard in high school, early college classes. It's definitely become one among my friends here who teach at local colleges, I don't know if it's taught elsewhere.

Unless I'm misremembering, the only post '75 we read in high school were Beloved and Cold Sassy Tree, this was in the southeastern US. No wait, we also read Pillars of the Earth but that was for history class and not English class so I'm not sure that counts.

The House on Mango Street seemed to be a staple for a while.

Something or other by Toni Morrison, I expect.

Oh yeah, we read The House on Mango Street! But I can't remember when. It might have been in college though I can't imagine for what class.

ya xp Beloved is everywhere in Britain. haven't read it mind

Can see this happening to Netherland tbh

"house on mango st" is a standard text in california