<p>One issue with the IB lists is that you can’t just suggest something else. Some of the books read will be referenced on the IB test-- so there has to be some universality for International High School around the world, yes?</p>
<p>mathmom: The theater group our kids worked with expected to do abridged versions of the plays. The kids wanted “the real thing” so in the interest of time, sometimes they just did scenes and not whole plays. </p>
<p>Abridged literature for children is an interesting topic. I have LOTS of opinions ;)</p>
<p>D read A Prayer for Owen Meany and liked it so much that I read it - and now I have my book club reading it for the June selection. Awesome book - and a departure from the typical John Irving style.</p>
<p>mathmom, since you like Connie Willis, I highly recommend the pair of books Blackout and All Clear. Brilliant! Brilliant! Brilliant! (I could keep writing, “Brilliant!” . . . )</p>
<p>These are set primarily during WW II, and mainly in London and Southeast England. They are by turns uproariously funny and very, very deeply moving. Deftly plotted, inspiring, fantastically wonderful books by a writer with a great soul.</p>
<p>They might not stand up to mythmom’s tests for great literature–I am unable to judge that. But they are emphatically “good reads.”</p>
<p>They came out much more recently than The Doomsday Book, so perhaps that is why they are not on the IB list.</p>
<p>A good short story by Willis to read first is Firewatch. This sets up the basic elements of the time-travel component of the fiction.</p>
<p>I love To Say Nothing of the Dog! A real pleasure to read. I am also fond of Passages, though that may not appeal to everyone.</p>
<p>Bellwether is okay, but in my opinion not at the level of the other books–although the scene involving Taylor at the birthday party is hilarious and all too true.</p>
<p>I am really looking forward to catching up on the comments on this thread! I have a few others to make myself, previously planned.</p>
<p>A few other quick comments on the IB list:</p>
<p>Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel is on the list. I was told by my 10th-grade English teacher (one of the major influences on my life, although I went into science) that one should either read Look Homeward, Angel when one was fifteen, or wait until one was forty. I have overshot the mark by (ahem) a few years, and so can’t offer any comments on it.</p>
<p>Stephen Jay Gould wrote a really wonderful opinion column in The New York Times, addressing the question, “How can everyday, garden-variety goodness have an effect in the face of evil?” It appeared about two weeks after 9/11, with the title “A Time of Gifts.” I find this column uplifting every time I think about it. It includes the line “Twelve apple brown bettys into the breach.”</p>
<p>Also, I am tearing up thinking about it. Luckily, you can find the whole column easily using Google.</p>
<p>Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried made The New York Times Book Review’s list of the most important books of the Twentieth Century. It is also on the IB list.</p>
<p>I feel that this book must be good. People with good literary judgment say so. But I disliked this book when I read it when QMP had it as an assigned book.</p>
<p>On the one hand, the degradingly awful side of the Vietnam War was covered. Check. The coverage of the aftermath was good–maybe the best element. But really, the character of Kiowa deserved better.</p>
<p>My main complaint about the book was that as awful as the incidents were, I felt that it did not adequately convey the full horror of the war, for those of us who saw the nightly news and read about it, let alone for the participants. I thought the Viet Cong were practically air-brushed.</p>
<p>I never supported the war in Vietnam. And I understand that the book in part challenges the nature of “truth.” But it fell too far short of the truth for me.</p>
<p>Finally, Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: “Nobody comes. It’s awful.” I just have to classify this as a work of literature I don’t get.</p>
<p>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was not on the IB list (as I recall), but was among the required readings locally. This is hands down my least favorite work by Tom Stoppard.</p>
<p>Re alh, #93: I read D. H. Lawrence when I was 24. On returning to some books I once loved, I have found them very hard to re-read. I can’t say whether Sons and Lovers would be in this category.</p>
<p>(James T. Kirk quotes D. H. Lawrence in the fourth Star Trek movie. I suppose I have to regard this as a bad sign, from a literary standpoint.)</p>
<p>Also re mathmom’s post #94: I have read a moderate number of books by Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game seemed to me like a book for children, when compared with the sequel Speaker for the Dead. The latter I think of as a serious work in terms of its theme (although again I can’t really speak to its level of literary merit).</p>
<p>Here is my take on this subject - if they don’t read these books in high school and are not planning to be an English major in college they will never read them and their chances of being on Jeopardy are between slim and none. ;)</p>
<p>My private school followed the Great Books curriculum (I still have nightmares) but we also read Jong’s Fear of Flying and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Breakfast of Champions to spice things up.</p>
<p>Lord of the Rings would be a terrible choice for a high school lit class, IMO. His style was dry, unnecessarily verbose, and sort of . . . lifeless. For a good fantasy genre book, I would look at American Gods by Neil Gaiman.</p>
<p>I recall Lord of the Flies being one of the more popular books on the high school reading list.</p>
<p>My middle school gave us A Day No Pigs Would Die, which was a really depressing book about how a kid is forced to slaughter his own pig he raised from a baby. Now that seemed like a bit much . . . I was really disturbed and depressed by it.</p>
<p>I read Lawrence in my 20s also and will always be grateful for Gundrun and Ursula’s colored stockings. I wear colored stockings to this day. I have got to finish the Star Trek series.</p>
<p>Orson Scott Card
some grim, some not, imho</p>
<p>“Lost Boys” = one of the most unsettling books I have ever read. Again, I’m with King on the idea that the scariest books are those where children are in danger.</p>
<p>The Ender Series was beloved by all the children of my acquaintance, but at that time no one would have considered them “literature” or imagined them on a school reading list. The Alvin Maker series was popular with many adults I know. It seemed an interesting idea to me but I lost interest after the first few books. I was reading them while he was writing as I recall.</p>
<p>Now of course, lots of people wonder about the subtext of all his writing and question whether we should read them because of his political leanings. I wonder what mythmom will have to say about that. Should we avoid writers whose personal views are “wrong”?</p>
<p>Also, are we what we read? Does it sort of make us who we are? Can the “grim” have negative affects on development? (it is sort of another version of the whole violent computer game debate, right?) I definitely have different ideas about this now than I did 30 years ago. </p>
<p>mythmom - mythmom- mythom ??? :):)</p>
<p>I think literature is between a history and music. It is not what it about, it is what it evokes. Therefore, it’s not about what it says, summarizes, covers, or moralizes, but rather about how the mind and spirit receive it. </p>
<p>That is not to say that one can’t say, “I don’t like that,”, but for me, it doesn’t make sense to say, “I don’t like the Things They Carried” for what it doesn’t cover.</p>
<p>I love The Things They Carried but not as much as Going After Cacciato, a novel by Tim O’Brien that nobody reads.</p>
<p>I love Becket. </p>
<p>I love Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are dead but not as much as Arcadia, also by Stoppard.</p>
<p>I don’t find any of these works depressing or grim or negative or life denying.</p>
<p>I love Becket for his humor. I’m a Jew. If anything gets from awful historical moment to awful historical moment, it’s humor.</p>
<p>I love Stoppard for surprise. Haha. 1000 heads in a row? Haha.</p>
<p>I love Cacciato for humility. I don’t think the Things They Carried is just about the Viet Nam War. I think it is about how we can be known in humble ways, like what we are carrying. It’s a riff on a epic catalogue and talks about what we bring with us.</p>
<p>Literature starts with words but ends in experience, and creative literature is not “about” things in the way an essay is.</p>
<p>If the “magic” of the piece doesn’t work on a reader, well then, sure, it’s not successful for that reader.</p>
<p>Paradise Lost was lost on Virginia Woolf, but not on me.</p>
<p>Moby Dick is a lot of work for its payoff, and sometimes I am sure it’s worth it, and sometimes I don’t think so.</p>
<p>Only a small coterie of people thing Finnegan’s Wake is worth its work, but they’re convinced. I am not an initiate, though I do love the first page and the last page, haha.</p>
<p>My dad was convinced that Tschaikovsky was a greater composer than Bach. I wondered if he had ears, but the emotions in Tschaikovsky were more accessible than those in Bach. I thought he was really missing something, but he didn’t.</p>
<p>Thanks, mythmom–I need to think a long time about each of your posts.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So could this be an argument in favor of a traditional dead white males canon, which educates us about epic and how it is used in later writings, or not? Does it matter if we don’t get what the writer intended?</p>
<p>maybe poetgrl can point us to some lit theory :)</p>
<p>Haha. I answered your call without even knowing it was being made.</p>
<p>The thread seems a forum to discuss, “I like this book and not that,” whereas another I says, “I like that book and not this.”</p>
<p>Fair enough. We enjoy this.</p>
<p>However, teacher’s can’t predict these responses.</p>
<p>Teachers need only provide the tools so that someday a student can find a work and say, “I like this” and be able to read it.</p>
<p>We don’t like or dislike a math problem. Perhaps we should instruct students to withhold those judgments and learn to be better readers.</p>
<p>However, I repeat that parents can intervene with curricula.</p>
<p>Teachers follow trends, and we can change these trends.</p>
<p>A book like Bridge to Terabithia does seem unnecessarily sad for little ones and so does the book just described when the kid kills the pig, but someone once thought they were perfect, and then everyone agreed.</p>
<p>I still can’t stand that the kid gets killed by bees in My Girl, though the movie stays with me.</p>
<p>I hated the ending of The Bridge to Terabithia, though it’s true that children do die, even though we are fairly insulated against that these days. I remember it.</p>
<p>The “grim” argument I don’t get. That some things are too sad, I do get. </p>
<p>King Lear destroys me when he says, “Cordelia, stay a little” when she is already dead" and I pray that is never, never me with my own child.</p>
<p>Lord of the Flies doesn’t make me feel to sad to do my homework the way King Lear does.</p>
<p>But we’re all different, and that’s the point. Reading lists are attempts to find books that will make most kids feel something, and books that most kids can at least get through.</p>
<p>Should we read things by writers with awful views? Yes for me. We can talk about those views and talk about why we like the books anyway.</p>
<p>I was proud of the Israelis when they didn’t outlaw Wagner and also for the fact that they play him. The Easter Music in Parsival is like a grove of blooming apple trees, and I want to hear it again and again. And Isolde die, struggling to resolve that last chord.</p>
<p>Since I teach college, my reading lists are circumscribed by the considerations of the course.</p>
<p>This semester I taught the second half of the American lit survey. We read, O Pioneers (Cather – uplifting, I guess), As I Lay Dying (Faulkner, not I guess), On The Road (Kerouac, cheerful quality undecided) and Beloved (shocking, harrowing and uplifting to me) as well as short stories by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. We started with Whitman and Dickinson and read heaps of other poems.</p>
<p>We did not read Huck Finn because it was about the pre-Civil War period, and I wanted to focus the course on the works that described the post-Civil War world. I made an exception for Whitman and Dickinson because, well, they’re Whitman and Dickinson.</p>
<p>It was a very successful course. And by that I mean that the kids read the books. Period. They did talk about them and write credible papers.</p>
<p>The most successful class was one in which I read them “Howl”. They liked my reading (a little boon for me), and liked the extremity of Ginsberg’s imagery and understood the culture of the fifties that prompted it. I wanted to show the James Franco movie of it, but I couldn’t get a hold of a copy within my time frame.</p>
<p>I also showed Scorsese’s Age of Innocence from the Edith Wharton novel, which was also well received.</p>
<p>I should say no one was an English major. My school requires four English classes to graduate, two composition classes and two electives. Most kids take this course because it transfers best. (I am at a two year community college.)</p>
<p>Everything anyone writes is built on what someone else has written. I teach mythology in which I teach the great epics. They are the basis for what follows in Western literature, that and the Bible.</p>
<p>But as you can see from above, my course was not overloaded with dead white men.</p>
<p>A really great place to start is Madwoman in the Attic. Of course, there we learn that Jane Eyre is not uplifting because Rochester’s first wife, like feminist thought and strong women in general, is imprisoned throughout the novel, and thus, Jane Eyre is the interloper. </p>
<p>Elizabeth Hartwick, Carolyn Heilbrun are also good writers to look at for seventies critiques of “the canon.” Bloom is an interesting defense of it. That’s Harold Bloom, not Alan Bloom who is a right wing crank, IMHO.</p>
<p>You have to realize though that a literature class is built on exposure. As a student gets into higher levels of English, they are expected to break through social restraints and read literature that is controversial, dark, and doesn’t end well. Grim literature has a special point to it; after all, the author wouldn’t have made it so dark without a good reason. </p>
<p>An excellent point I think should be made is that all of the books you mentioned (OP) have been included on AP book lists on the AP English Literature Exam. Clearly these books have value beyond just being dark, and AP tests students’ abilities to look past the style of a book and dig deep enough to its relation to the author’s message. </p>
<p>As far as personal experience goes, my high school AP English Lang class read Gatsby and we all loved it, and we were able to connect the ending and melancholy feel of the ending as a condemning of aspects of the 1920’s. Another great example is Nineteen Eighty-Four: yes, that ending is absolutely shaking in how movingly depressing it is. However, it is sad for a reason. When I read it, I felt called to make sure such a government system doesn’t arise. This was the effect. No author writes solely with the intent of depressing their audience.</p>
<p>I certainly question whether a book being on an AP or IB reading list means it is worth reading. </p>
<h1>117. I would love that class! What fun.</h1>
<h1>118 I know what those writers think:Gilbert, Bloom et al. - just wondering what you and others on the thread think. Maybe it is too elementary, boring a discussion for most. I do get that. It doesn’t hurt my feelings 
I’m used to it.</h1>
<p>Last year one son and I read Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” I understood it was “Howard’s End” and thought - how clever. He didn’t until he read reviews after finishing the book. It was a totally different experience for us. I kept asking him to describe what it was like without that layer of perspective.</p>
<p>When my sons were young, I had a very difficult time convincing them that for many works of fiction they read, full of modern foot notes to explain the author’s meaning, that the works just made sense to readers at that time, like Seinfeld allusions made sense to them. Now, for many, Seinfeld is unknown.</p>
<p>I am pretty sure most readers of books in English benefit from a basic knowledge of the bible and epic. I used to think Shakespeare but am currently undecided.</p>