I can haz Mme. Bovary?
A brief exchange on Facebook with one of my sorority sisters on Facebook about To Kill a Mockingbird has got me thinking about the books I read for class in high school and college. A few thoughts:
1. There are a few books on my shelves around the house that are there because of those classes. Namely, The Handmaid's Tale, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and (somewhere) Madame Bovary. There are a few Shakespeare plays somewhere around here, as well, along with most of the books from my comparative politics classes in undergraduate school, that yes, nerd I am, still read from time to time.
2. Still hate reading anything by Ernest Hemingway. I had to read The Sun Also Rises during my sophomore year of high school and it made me want to shove firecrackers into the author's corpse. Tried reading a couple other of his works to give him a fair shake and had the same reaction.
2a. Still not a big Steinbeck fan either.
3. If I ever taught an English class, you can bet money that at least one book by Sherman Alexie would be on the curriculum. None of my teachers included works by a Native American or Hispanic author and while it didn't bother me growing up, looking back, it would have been a welcome perspective. (Anyone who went through IB English at BTW: my class didn't do Allende. We had a Japanese author instead, whose name escapes me at the moment.)
4. Still have a soft spot for Yeats. Thank you, Doc.
1. There are a few books on my shelves around the house that are there because of those classes. Namely, The Handmaid's Tale, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and (somewhere) Madame Bovary. There are a few Shakespeare plays somewhere around here, as well, along with most of the books from my comparative politics classes in undergraduate school, that yes, nerd I am, still read from time to time.
2. Still hate reading anything by Ernest Hemingway. I had to read The Sun Also Rises during my sophomore year of high school and it made me want to shove firecrackers into the author's corpse. Tried reading a couple other of his works to give him a fair shake and had the same reaction.
2a. Still not a big Steinbeck fan either.
3. If I ever taught an English class, you can bet money that at least one book by Sherman Alexie would be on the curriculum. None of my teachers included works by a Native American or Hispanic author and while it didn't bother me growing up, looking back, it would have been a welcome perspective. (Anyone who went through IB English at BTW: my class didn't do Allende. We had a Japanese author instead, whose name escapes me at the moment.)
4. Still have a soft spot for Yeats. Thank you, Doc.