Posted on 05/30/2014 12:34:14 PM PDT by EveningStar
You probably SparkNoted these books before, but now's your chance to read them.
(Excerpt) Read more at buzzfeed.com ...
Catch 22 is an operating manual for today’s government.
What about Orwell’s ‘1984’?
Oh wait. Forgot. We’re living that one.
I was assigned most of those in high school, and some of them are good reading. The list is biased towards the new stuff. Shakespeare and Dickens don’t make the list?
They included two from Orwell and “Brave New World” (Huxley’s only decent book), so that helps.
However, two I did read, “The Bell Jar” and “Waiting for Godot” promote despair and nihilism, respectively.
I hope Plath’s poetry is better than her awful book. In “The Bell Jar”, Plath stated that during her depression she liked to pick up those little saddle-stitched (stapled) pocket books at the grocery store check-out (often of the self-help variety). If you followed her advice, you’d likely have a better read than “The Bell Jar”.
“Waiting for Godot” is a great high school book because you can figure out the whole thing if you haven’t read it yet in about 30 seconds of class discussion. Absurdism is best written by someone who isn’t so self-indulgent as a writer.
Recommended only for those who want to pick up a 60s vibe. It is already quite dated even as Dickens enjoys a renaissance.
Really? I’d say 1984 is the new standard.
Ooops.
1984 is # 8 on the list.
Read all by age 22 except for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mrs Dalloway, As I lay Dying (teacher slapped a Faulkner paperback out of my hand and said Don’t ever bring that trash near me!), and Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Don’t I get a prize for participating?
R2z
Not Catcher in the Rye again!
I had to suffer through it, and with hindsight I realize the teachers thought it was great, for whatever reason! Those books have no business in a school, IMO! We also did read Orwell, Huxley, etc...great stuff...but I am convinced that those crap books were just a money making scheme between the publishers and the school unions. Seriously...The Good Earth? I had to endure that crap for a whole semester. This dumb teacher woman I had actually thought that has some redeeming value.
I’ve read 13 from that list.
It certainly would have helped for me to understand what the hell Sting was singing about in "Don't Stand So Close to Me."
I read 14 of those in high school.
Unfathomable how much precious life is wasted on that stupid book! there should be a law!
I read all but two of these in high school or college. I don’t think this list is trying to be the only books to read; I certainly read a number of Shakespearean plays/poetry, and my high school aged son is reading them, now. Some of these books were enjoyable, but many were not.
Part of my HS curriculum and I graduated in 78 -- from Catholic school.
Vonnegut was/is a Marxist. Nothing more.
Arthur Miller clearly hated capitalism and resented the blacklist(s) so he thought he’d have an elitist pop at the working class.
Catcher is an entertaining tale as far as it goes and somewhat unique in the age/perspective of the narrator but it’s also very much of its age and badly dated.
Beowulf is in an archaic form of our language. Whoopee. A 1927 Ford is archaic but I don’t want to drive one every day. Set archetype for heroic saga etc. etc. It’s still tedious.
Night - one of those testimonies that deserves to be heard but Wiesel was highly annoying in subsequent interviews and appearances.
Gatsby - overhyped. Another not-so-veiled attack on capitalism with self-aggrandizement of academics thrown in. Can we assume Fitzgerald thought the Depression was an improvement over the Roaring 20s?
Mockingbird - finally, a solid story and characters. However, most kids never have a chance to read it and instead are beat over the head with the book in order to fully grasp its ‘message.’ Lefties can’t resist the dignified black/white trash cliches.
How things have changed. We read 4, 8, 12, & 15 in high school. Advanced Placement (what they call it now. It was “Enriched” when I was in school) read 1 & 18. at least IIRC & probably 2, 17, & 20 also.
I read Slaughterhouse Five (& other Vonnegut novels) in high school & saw the movie several times to glean as much as I could from it, & Frankenstein because my senior term paper in english was on Percy Bysshe Shelley. We read Godot (which I detested) & Beowulf in college.
One book that (imho) didn’t make the list (that we read in high school) was Cry,
The Beloved Country. I had used Cliff’s Notes in school, but my co-worker, a couple of years later, was reading it & liked it, so I finally read it. It was really, really good. Probably my first “marathon” read.
It’s in the list.
Well, I’ve read every one of them, except “My Eyes were Watching God.” They were all certainly significant books, and worth reading.
But if I had to recommend a list of books that probably aren’t read in school any longer, I’d start first with Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Racine, Goethe, and that sort of thing.
And Jane Austen.
Had to read in the late 60’s too
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