Add to DS American Literature list

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<p>irishmary - I love comparing notes on what they are reading in their lit classes. When DS had world lit, I read most of the books they were covering when he wasn’t using them. The British lit last year not so much, since I’ve read my quota of Shakespeare, and some of the others didn’t appeal to me. Looking forward to picking up a couple of his American Lit books (the modern ones at least). </p>

<p>Heart of Darkness is rather tortured. They ended up skipping that one last year in Brit after it was planned, and picking up something else instead. Apparently even the teacher didn’t like it all that much.</p>

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<p>I am amazed that any high school English Department considers The Awakening essential reading. Presumably because it is one of the first pieces of literature by an American woman to examine gender issues from a proto-feminist perspective.</p>

<p>As for the Little House books – I read a number of them to my kids, and I thought they were awful (although not uniformly awful – I think I remember thinking The Long Winter was tolerable). I have no idea why they are popular. We read a similar pioneer quasi-memoir called Caddie Woodlawn at the same time, and the Little House books suffered horribly by comparison to that really well-written book. In any event, they don’t belong in a basic American literature course. Maybe they can have their own course, alongside The Wizard of Oz (all umpteen books) and Twilight – Bad Books and the Good Kids Who Love Them.</p>

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<p>I remember not liking the Little House books as a kid, but I re-read the first one (Little House on the Prairie) to my kids and thought it was quite good and surprisingly forthcoming about tensions between settlers and Native Americans.</p>

<p>In any case, this is what I remember of my son’s junior year American Lit class reading list:</p>

<p>The Scarlet Letter
Huckleberry Finn
The Awakening (which I agree is godawful)
The Great Gatsby
The Grapes of Wrath
Invisible Man
Catch-22
Slaughterhouse Five
Streetcar Named Desire
Catcher in the Rye
Bless Me, Ultima
Beloved
Walden
Self Reliance (and other essays)
Poems by Whitman, Dickinson and others
Stories by W. Irving, Poe, Faulkner, Hemmingway, and others</p>

<p>Not a bad list, I think. If there were world enough and time, I’d add Moby Dick, Age of Innocence, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Absalom Absalom!, and All the King’s Men.</p>

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<p>I read The Awakening for a women’s history class not an English class, which I think put the emphasis in the right place. :slight_smile: You can be an important novel without being a great novel.</p>

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<p>^^ Good point. Along the same lines, I think Uncle Tom’s Cabin should be read for its historical importance, even though I don’t think it’s a very good novel.</p>

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<p>Tartt-- The Secret History
Twain–Huck Finn
Whitman–Leaves of Grass
Wallace Stevens–Collected Poems
Jorie Graham–The End of Beauty
Hemmingway-- His short stories are really his masterpieces, or A Movable Feast
O’Brien–The Thngs They Carried
Morrison–Song of Solomon
Walker–Jubilee
Angelou–Letter to my Daughter
Carver–Where I’m Calling From
Franzen—The Corrections</p>

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<p>I haven’t read much Twain or Hemingway, but my suggestions</p>

<p>Catch-22, Joseph Heller
If he hasn’t read either Farenheit 451 or 1984 those are musts.
Jesus’ Son- Denis Johnson -Not part of the Canon or anything, but every English teacher I’ve had so far in college has referenced this book multiple times. It’s amazing.
Catcher In The Rye, which I didn’t find amazing, but it is something everyone should read.
The Outsiders–more of a high school level book, but still a great story. Also, not widely known but S.E. Hinton is a woman.</p>

<p>I know I 'll think of ten more when I post this.</p>

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<p>Here is a link from this summer:</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/949188-required-summer-reading-incoming-college-freshmen.html?highlight=summer+reading[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/949188-required-summer-reading-incoming-college-freshmen.html?highlight=summer+reading&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>I’ve seen a couple people recommend the Scarlet Letter. Can I just say, I love the Scarlet Letter, but I don’t think it should be read for the first time in an independent setting. An English teacher can help you draw much much more out of the text than the casual (or even dedicated) reader would be able to find. I don’t think a high school student on their own will pick up on the neat framing of the story, the symbolism, or be able to really decipher the imagery well. It’s really good, but my college English professor always said it is really the perfect book for English teachers because it so neatly and easily made itself into lessons and examples of different techniques in novel writing. </p>

<p>Ditto with Moby Dick. Great book, but very hard to handle on your own. You might still enjoy it, but I don’t think you’ll get as much from it without a teacher or professor to draw it out for you.</p>

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<p>A few more “out-of-the-box” suggestions:</p>

<p>Add Philip K. Dick to the sci-fi suggestion. Man in the High Castle. Many of his stories have been made into popular movies. </p>

<p>The Giver is probably considered more of a young adult offering, but a thought-provoking read. Lois Lowry spoke at an event sponsored by Oregon Children’s Theater a few years ago. Her talk about the writing process was outstanding.</p>

<p>Killer Angels, about the battle at Gettysburg, is highly recommended by D1. It’s her favorite book.</p>

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<p>Mea culpa, JHS! I was at work and rushing through the lists on S2’s school website. In looking at the lists here, I’m realizing that S’s pre-IB English (9th and 10th) covered a LOT of the books listed. What I do recall is that he and most of his classmates took AP Lit as juniors absolutely stone cold, using what they had read in previous years for their essays.</p>

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<p>Last night, I remembered that my mother’s list definitely included Melville’s Billy Budd, one of her favorite books, and that the Frank Norris book she taught was McTeague, not The Octopus.</p>

<p>I love poetgrl’s list! I don’t think I could have appreciated much of Wallace Stevens in high school, though, and I was about as poetry-oriented a kid as you will find. It took me almost a year of work in college to feel comfortable with him and to appreciate what he was doing. My daughter did memorize “The Idea of Order at Key West” voluntarily when she was in 10th grade, but that is possibly his most accessible stand-alone poem.</p>

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<p>I haven’t caught up on this thread since last night, but how about some Chaim Potok - perhaps My Name is Asher Lev? Many of us will live our lives without personally knowing any Hasidic Jews, so it’s interesting to learn a bit about these Americans.</p>

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<p>Interesting, JHS. I loved Wallace Stevens in high school, perhaps naively not understanding how much of him I didn’t understand. I just liked his voice, the combination of crazy boldness and subtlety in it. His poetry was so much more powerful and colorful than those two dreadful arch-bores, Frost and Williams, that my teachers were so keen on. I think there are lots of Stevens’ poems that a smart high-schooler would eat up: “Bantam in Pine-Woods,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” “Domination of Black,” even “Sunday Morning,” which was the poem of his I first read and fell in love with.</p>

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<p>For those who asked why so many schools use The Awakening – I hate to sound cynical, but it’s short.</p>

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<p>Totally agree with Catch 22 – a great book and one that boys in particular are drawn to.</p>

<p>Some other more out of the box books</p>

<p>O.E. Rolvagg, Giants in the Earth,-- a pioneer epic that I always find stronger and more compelling then any Cather.</p>

<p>Robinson, Giliad – modern American fiction, by a woman, that deals with classic themes in American literature, family, religion, race, our sense of our self.</p>

<p>Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, a great book that really changed the American Novel. Or if you want something short, A Christmas Memory, a truly wonderful short story, mostly autobiographical.</p>

<p>And two classics that are must reads</p>

<p>Melville, Moby Dick – One of the great American novels, you can read it multiple times and get something new out of it every time. Some people love it, some hate it, the only way to do this book is to jump in and see how far you make it. My oldest son first read it at the age of 12 and he stayed up all night to read it straight through. He has since read it three more times. Says he is still not done with it.</p>

<p>Twain, HUCK FINN – if he hasn’t read it he should. People want to shy away from the language, the troublesome ending, etc., etc. but it is an amazing book that again deals with some of the most important themes in American life in a very American way – it’s messy, complex and at times kinda of stupid. A lot like Americans.</p>

<p>Women writers </p>

<p>Carson McCullers – Member of the Wedding, an easy read that might appeal more to girls. </p>

<p>Flannery O’connor - The Violent Shall Bear it Away, A Good Man is Hard to Find. She is one of the most underappreciated writers in America.</p>

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<p>True. It’s like all of Henry James. You can’t really appreciate the sheer amount of genius in his work until you are probably too old to be doing anything other than defending your dissertation.</p>

<p>The poetry I really loved in HS was Keats, Yates, Whitman…never really liked the short line, but I could appreciate Dickinson, who should probably be on “the list.”</p>

<p>Keats, Yeats, Shelley, Wordsworth, are not American.</p>

<p>Of course, if it was ONLY a list of poets:</p>

<p>Hart Crane!
Frost
Amy Lowell
Robert Lowell
William Carlos williams
Eliot
Pound
tate
Roethke
Bishop, (who should be on the list, anyway)</p>

<p>Well, I’ll stop there. I could go on, endlessly as I am one of the last 10 remaining people on the planet who still would pay for a book of poems. :(</p>

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<p>I want to join the chorus that Huck Finn has to be on the list–if there is a Great American Novel, that’s it.
I think Ellison’s “Invisible Man” is great, too.
For Hemingway, I would suggest a collection of short stories instead of a novel.</p>

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<p>My son had to read A Farewell to Arms for his AP English Lit class this summer and chose to listen to it as an audio book. We took it with us when we went to visit a college a three hours drive away, since it was just under a six hour read, that was perfect. But, have any of you read that book recently? Ugh. It was painful. “My darling, I love you so much.” “No, I love you…” and on and on. Halfway through we were hoping that he would dump her, and by the end we were both extolling her to die quickly. I ended up thinking that there must have been just a few authors to choose from in that time period so Hemingway was most interesting. Not a big Hemingway fan.</p>

<p>These were the five son had to read for the summer:
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway</p>

<p>And these are the books they will read this year:</p>

<p>Medea by Euripides; Greek Drama; Bantam Books; 1965; Bantam Classic edition
2. Beowulf by Anonymous; Signet Classic; 1999; Translation by Burton Raffel
3. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer; Washington Square Press; 1971; Translation by R.M. Lumiansky
4. Othello by William Shakespeare; Washington Square Press; 1993; Washington Square Press New Folger Edition
5. Macbeth by William Shakespeare; Washington Square Press; 1992; Washington Square Press New Folger Edition
6. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; Perma-Bound Classic; 1988; Introduction by Keith Neilson
7. Hard Times by Charles Dickens; Signet Classic; 1997; Introduction by Frederick Busch
8. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde; Penguin Books; 1985; Edited by Peter Ackroyd
9. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; Signet Classic; 1997; First Signet Classic Printing; Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates
10. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; HarperPerennial; 1998; First Perennial Classics edition
11. “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke, 1948
12. “The Ruined Maid” by Thomas Hardy, 1866
13. “The Unknown Citizen” by W.H. Auden, 1940
14. “A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman, 1881
15. “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” by William Shakespeare
16. “Turtle” by Kay Ryan, 1994
17. “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks, 1960
18. “Eight O’Clock” by A.E. Housman, 1922
19. “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by E.E. Cummings, 1940
20. “Death, Be Not Proud” by John Donne, 1633
21. “The Lamb” by William Blake, 1789
22. “The World is Too Much with Us” by William Wordsworth, 1807
23. “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron, 1814
24. “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817
25. “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats, 1816</p>

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<p>Brave New World is best read as part of a dystopia-themed series also including:</p>

<p>1984
Animal Farm
Lord of the Flies</p>