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some_stars) wrote2011-02-21 08:30 am
some_stars) wrote2011-02-21 08:30 am
books in HS (or the local equivalent)
So a couple discussions I've stumbled across recently got me curious about this--in your high school (or equivalent schooling that covers the mid-teens) English class(es)*, what books did you read, and about what year was it? Also, what kind of school did you go to? (Public/private/religious if you're in the U.S., any special programs, single-gender, etc.) Oh, and the city or region you were living in at the time, if you don't mind sharing. I'm very curious about the current state of the high school canon and how it's been evolving.
*poll only for people who took literature classes in English, since it is to satisfy my curiosity and I...don't know pretty much any non-English literature by name/reputation. Although I would be interested to hear about how the secondary-level education canon is or isn't shifting in other countries.
My list, all in Houston:
1. 8th grade, 98-99, public school with vanguard program: The Scarlet Letter, Twelfth Night, A Separate Peace, other stuff I don't remember
2. 9th grade, 99-00, private secular school on the IB curriculum(or pre-IB for first and second-year students): Julius Caesar, A Tale of Two Cities, other stuff I don't remember
3. 10th grade, 00-01, same: this was a weird year. We did Macbeth--and, for some reason, a boring translation of Antigone--but the rest was all ~cool~ modern-ish stuff. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Shoeless Joe, more along those veins that I can't remember. They had nothing in common except being from the sixties or later. It was fun, but kind of unsettling.
(This was a peculiar school, honestly, though mostly in awesome ways. It was so, so, so tiny--my would-have-been graduating class had about forty people--and with a K-12 program so a lot of kids had grown up there, and it specialized in international students so like a quarter of the kids had been in the U.S. for less than five years, and the whole culture was just really different from anything I'd ever encountered.)
There was definitely no 19th century stuff in 9th or 10th grade except some poetry. I would have been ridiculously bitter and sulky if I'd had to read something that bored me and I'd remember it.
...and then I quit school a couple months into 11th grade, so I never learned what the actual IB English curriculum is like. Or any high school curriculum. Hence, curiosity.
*poll only for people who took literature classes in English, since it is to satisfy my curiosity and I...don't know pretty much any non-English literature by name/reputation. Although I would be interested to hear about how the secondary-level education canon is or isn't shifting in other countries.
My list, all in Houston:
1. 8th grade, 98-99, public school with vanguard program: The Scarlet Letter, Twelfth Night, A Separate Peace, other stuff I don't remember
2. 9th grade, 99-00, private secular school on the IB curriculum(or pre-IB for first and second-year students): Julius Caesar, A Tale of Two Cities, other stuff I don't remember
3. 10th grade, 00-01, same: this was a weird year. We did Macbeth--and, for some reason, a boring translation of Antigone--but the rest was all ~cool~ modern-ish stuff. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Shoeless Joe, more along those veins that I can't remember. They had nothing in common except being from the sixties or later. It was fun, but kind of unsettling.
(This was a peculiar school, honestly, though mostly in awesome ways. It was so, so, so tiny--my would-have-been graduating class had about forty people--and with a K-12 program so a lot of kids had grown up there, and it specialized in international students so like a quarter of the kids had been in the U.S. for less than five years, and the whole culture was just really different from anything I'd ever encountered.)
There was definitely no 19th century stuff in 9th or 10th grade except some poetry. I would have been ridiculously bitter and sulky if I'd had to read something that bored me and I'd remember it.
...and then I quit school a couple months into 11th grade, so I never learned what the actual IB English curriculum is like. Or any high school curriculum. Hence, curiosity.
no subject
9th grade (honors): Great Expectations, Romeo and Juliet, Lord of the Flies, Anthem, To Kill A Mockingbird, Jane Eyre.
10th grade (honors World Literature) : Cry the Beloved Country, Things Fall Apart, Siddhartha, Candide, The Stranger, choice of Night or All Quiet on the Western Front
11th grade (AP American Literature) : Huckleberry Finn, All The King's Men, The Great Gatsby. I think we probably did a Nathaniel Hawthorne that I refused to read.
12th grade (AP English Literature) : Heart of Darkness, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
...Wow, I realized how white the list was, but I didn't realize how few women I read.
Okay, I will stop dropping messages in your inbox. I kept remembering more books.
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At GCSE (14-16), IIRC, we did:
Romeo & Juliet
Lord of the Flies
To Kill a Mockingbird
Alan Bennett's Talking Heads
I'm sure we must have done more but I can't remember them.
At A-level (16-18), IIRC, we did:
Midsummer Night's Dream
Winter's Tale (*spit*spit*phtooey*spit*)
The Alchemist
Heart of Darkness
Emma
Again, I'm sure we must have done more but I can't remember them.
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- 9th grade, honors English: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and a lot of short stories that I mostly don't remember. I do remember "The Most Dangerous Game" and "The Fall of the House of Usher", though - that last because we got to watch part of the Roger Corman film.
- 10th grade, honors English: Midsummer Night's Dream, Lord of the Flies, Tartuffe, and more various short stories I mostly don't remember. Also some poetry, maybe? I don't know.
- 11th grade, honors English: Raisin in the Sun, Hamlet, Ethan Frome, and...I know there was another books, but I don't remember it at all. Also, we read Of Mice and Men, Our Town, and The Great Gatsby as summer reading beforehand.
Then we moved to western Washington for my last year in high school so, AP English in Poulsbo, WA: Catch-22, a lot of essays on the death and the atomic bomb, Night, Cry the Beloved Country, Invisible Man, Crime and Punishment, King Lear, Oedipus Rex, The Cherry Orchard, JB, and Streetcar Named Desire. Also poetry, the most memorable of which was "The Death of a Toad" by Richard Wilbur, in which a toad is mangled by a power mower, and "The Groundhog" by Richard Eberhart, in which the poet pokes a dead groundhog with a stick. In retrospect, it's a rather easy to trace my early college aversion to poetry.
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GCSE (equivalent to grades 9 and 10): Lord of the Flies, Far From the Madding Crowd, Macbeth, some really weird modern short stories, WWI poetry and a selection of pre 1900 poems (including Porphyria's Lover, My Last Duchess, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, something by Christina Rosetti, Sonnets 18 and 116, a sonnet from Samson Agonistes, and probably some more that I've forgotten).
AS Level (equivalent to grade 11): The Merchant of Venice, Tennyson (all the other classes did some Chaucer, but my teacher really liked Tennyson), Hard Times, The Shipping News, A Winter's Tale, Heart of Darkness.
A2 (equivalent to grade 12): King Lear, the first two books of Paradise Lost, My Antonia, Tess of the D'Urbevilles, Middlemarch, and extracts from lots of other Victorian literature.
I've probably forgotten a few but I think that's most of them!
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Ninth grade: (Honors English) To Kill a Mockingbird, the Odyssey, A Doll's House, Mythology, A Tale of Two Cities, Huck Finn, and Anthem by Ayn Rand (UGH)
Tenth Grade: (Honors English) Grapes of Wrath, Into the Wild, Catcher in the Rye, Great Gatsby,
Eleventh Grade: (AP English Language, I think? It might have been Lit) Hamlet, Things Fall Apart, The House of the Spirits, Annie John
Twelfth Grade: (AP English Lit) Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Invisible Man, Heart of Darkness, Catch-22, 1984, Macbeth, Tartuffe
no subject
James Baldwin, Go to Tell It on the Mountain
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities
Doestoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
William Golding, The Lord of the Flies
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Ernest Hemingway, short stories and a couple of novels, I forget which
Henry James, Daisy Miller and another novella -- not sure which. Washington Square?
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1984
Mary Renault, The King Must Die
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, prob. some more I am forgetting
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Richard Wright, Black Boy, Native Son
... I know I am forgetting stuff. We might have done Jane Austen. I don't think we did much poetry, except for verse drama.
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98-99, public high school in a reasonably liberal/affluent small Massachusetts town
selections from the Odyssey
Romeo and Juliet
Taming of the Shrew (WTF)
Clan of the Cave Bear
a book about a woman in India, whose title and author I alas don't remember!
And probably some other things I'm forgetting entirely.
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7th grade: Hamlet (abridged), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (selections from), lots of poetry--James Thurber and Langston Hughes, I remember particularly. I am sure we read other stuff in there. Animal Farm? Maybe?
8th grade: Steinbeck's The Pearl, which I hated. More poetry. I am certain we read other things but that's what stuck.
9th grade: An abridged version of The Odyssey, Iiiii want to say Romeo and Juliet, and I can't say any more specifically.
10th grade: Lord of the Flies, Macbeth, some... other things? Night, by Elie Wiesel, I think.
11th grade: This was the grade level where we were allowed to pick different tracks, so a bunch of my peers went and took American Literature Honors. I took British Lit. We read more Shakespeare, some contemporary novels (I read something called The Sterkarm Handshake), I know the American Lit class read The Great Gatsby. Oh! We read Pride and Prejudice. I remember because I was in a REALLY weird head space.
12th grade: I took AP Literature, which meant lots of books. 1984, Brave New World, Animal Dreams by Kingsolver, Hamlet, Heart of Darkness, and another heap of poetry. We must have read more than that, it seems like...
So there's my imperfect recollection there.
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Year 7: Lord of the Flies in gifted ed, Romeo and Juliet, The Cay, and The Awakening Water in mainstream English.
Year 8 (year 11 literature class) The Importance of Being Earnest, The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Year 9: Romeo and Juliet again, The Go-Between, The Cherry Orchard
Year 10: The Merchant of Venice
Year 11: Macbeth.
Year 12: Baynton's Bush Studies, Poe's Tales of Mystery and the Imagination, What's Eating Gilbert Grape (yes, really,) David Copperfield, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe (which made up for all the rest.)
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Year 7: Can't remember, possibly nothing
Year 8: The Outsiders
Year 9: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Outsiders again
Year 10: Macbeth, The Old Man and the Sea, and "a book of your choice"
Year 11 (now in Literature, which was optional): Hamlet, Tirra Lirra By the River, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe, Australian modern poetry
Year 12: Mother Courage and Her Children, Ariel (Sylvia Plath), Lillian's Story (Kate Grenville), A Streetcar Named Desire, a dreadful YA book of which I can't remember the title but parents decided that the syllabus was "too girly" and we had to read something about BOYS.
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Of Mice and Men, Twelfth Night, um…
Actually it occurs to me that I only ever took one year of English, due to wackiness.
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This is all in the Canadian public school system.
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* Scarlet Letter
* A Separate Peace
* Of Mice and Men
* Grapes of Wrath
* Death of a Salesman
* Everything Oedipus except Rex (I got in trouble for this one, ask me how!)
* A Doll's House
* The Pearl
* A Tale of Two Cities
* Great Expectations
* Things Fall Apart
* The Sound of Waves (I have NO MEMORY of reading this, yet random trivia about Mishima stuck in my head. Go figure.)
* Anna Karenina
* Chekhov was, I swear, in there somewhere
* Antigone (Jean Anouili)
* Son of the Revolution
* The Bible as Literature
* Edith Hamilton (Greek Mythology)
And many, many more.
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