School Books

[Tony C]

School Books

The kids in my Year 11 classes tend to really like 'Of Mice and Men' - aided of course by the stimulus from excellent Gary Sinise movie adaptation (which I've mentioned before on here).

'R & J' is generally well received, too. Again I give the kids a visual introduction (via the Baz Luhrmann film) but the themes and effects are timeless.

My favourite kids' book to teach is Louis Sachar's fabulous 'Holes' which is for my Year 8 groups. Very well written, lots of subplot/flashback action that displays a good sense of literary technique to the pupils without ever becoming flashy or wordy. Lovely, compelling stuff.

[matt j]

School Books

Holes is a fantastic book. Decent movie too.

[erwin]

School Books

.

Isn't 'Catcher in the Rye' an American schools staple? Or maybe you've moved on ...

.

[Reed John]

School Books

We didn't read Catcher in the Rye in school. Maybe because all kids like it but Alan Bloom thought it was shit, so now the academics have put the kybosh on it and told teachers only to teach books kids hate.

I didn't read it until I was 25 or 26 and didn't like it that much, actually. I think I was biased because I'd just read something about Salinger that made him seem like a total asshole.

In my school, we didn't really read that much. I mean, we were alsays reading something but we tended to drag it out and not crank through as many books per year as they do at most schools. My school's English curriculum was more about learning how to write. This made it harder in my freshman English course in college because everyone else had read Chaucer except for me, but overall, the kids in my school were much better served. Kids have the rest of their life to study the symbolism in Wuthering Heights, but learning how to write properly and communicate effectively is invaluable skill for anyone to have.

My mom taught technical writing at Penn State, including the writing classes for students who dididn't want to write, and found that the kids from my high school were always better than average student writers.

BTW, this seems appropos of this discussion.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39205

[Incandenza]

School Books

Forgot I read Catcher in high school, because I had read it the summer before starting 9th grade. They sent out a list of recommended books to read, and I read that, and tried to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, but gave up on that.

Reed, I thought you were going to go with this:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/37346

[Mighty Mudhsuden]

School Books

"My friend Lisa did hers on Middlemarch," Durst said, "and I was like, 'Are you crazy?' That thing is like 10 times longer."

I love The Onion.

[Jon]

School Books

At University I always choose the courses on poetry or plays rather than novels, for exactly the same reason as Durst's friend Lisa.

[Crusoe]

School Books

I don't remember much from GCSEs (Lord of the Flies was okay), but A-levels were much better. I loved The Great Gatsby (and still do, although not the soft-focus Redford film version we watched), quite liked One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and enjoyed the satisfaction of getting to the end of Riddley Walker. We also had a very good teacher for Shakespeare, who made it an enjoyable and involving experience to read Henry V.

On the other hand, the thought of reading any more of that bloated, turgid DH Lawrence rubbish still makes me violent.

[Ginger Yellow]

School Books

You guys only had to read five books at school? What's that about?

Anyway, here's a selection:

Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Romeo & Juliet, Richard III, Twelfth Night. Loved them all apart from Twelfth Night. Shakespeare is pretty much my ideal writer. I don't get on with Shakespeares's comedies though.

Paradise Lost: one of my favourite books of all time.

To Kill A Mocking Bird: Meh.

As I Lay Dying: Really opened up my eyes to narrative possibilities.

The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner: Fantastic. One of the funniest, darkest books I've ever read.

Chaucer: General Prologue and The Knight's Tale. Didn't really appreciate it at the time, but loved it when I did Chaucer at uni.

Translations (the Brian Friel play): Utterly brilliant. He combines Stoppard's linguistic wit and intellectual playfulness with a poignancy that's uniquely his own.

Arcadia: Not one of my favourite Stoppard plays, but, hey, it's Stoppard. Awesome.

Mansfield Park: Great, great stuff. Austen's prose style is incomparable.

Martin Chuzzlewit: I don't get on with Dickens. His prose style is insufferable.

Candide and Rasselas: Two wonderful, remarkably complementary books which despite near contemporaneous publication were apparently written without knowledge of each other.

[Guest]

School Books

Some of these posts are making me think that they shouldn't teach anything good in schools as it seems to put people off really excellent books.

Erm what do I remember best.
Rebecca (great); Animal Farm (great); The Crucible and Death of a Salesman (great when you are 14 I guess). R&J like everyone else. They tried to make us read Sons and Lovers once but I was having NONE of it. I remember also I refused to appreciate Ted Hughes and insisted on writing about Tennyson instead - haha, how obnoxious of me. There must have been more though. Oh I remember I was the only one in class who made it all the way through David Copperfield.

in French we did Le Noeud de Viperes - which I thought was fabulous, Catholic angst of the best kind.

in Russian we read Three Sisters and a couple of stories by Turgenyev (Asya) and Pushkin (the Queen of Spades).

in Greek I remember doing Medea and the Oedipus Tyrannos and there must have been some prose but I have no idea what now.

and in Latin, erm, Aeneid 4 and Sallust's thing about Catiline and I'm sure there was something else but again I forget.

This thread has also made me realise what an astonishingly poor memory I have.

[Ginger Yellow]

School Books

Oh yeah, foreign languages. Mine were quite similar to Lyra's: Queen of Spades, Aeneid IV, and Noeud de Viperes were all in there. Also: The Bronze Horseman, Mozart & Salieri, The Death Of Ivan Ilyich, Pliny's letters, Aeneid XII, Cupid & Psyche, Metamorphoses I, Ars Amatoria I, Horaces Odes, a fair bit of Catullus, Les Mains Sales, one of Guy de Maupassant's short story collections, Andorra.

[Guest]

School Books

I was limiting it to A-level, I can't think what GCSE Latin asked us to read now. Oh, definitely Met IV. Some Catullus cos I remember doing 64. Some letters, I think Seneca's though although I do remember Pliny banging on about the price of fish nowadays or whatever.

[Ginger Yellow]

School Books

Christ I hated Seneca. What a sanctimonious prick. Tedious prose style as well.

[Guest]

School Books

Yeah. The tragedies are fantastic though, they really are. I don't think I ever read the Apocolocyntosis and it's probably not as much fun as it sounds.