"I think I speak for everyone when I say that vegetarian pigs in a blanket are bullshit."

[ninamazing]

As far as high school English class goes, the only books I actually considered classics -- the only ones that were really worth being forced to read -- were To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

(My supercool senior-English teacher also had us read Maus and then ran a fake-ish side class with me called "Women and

Comments

[kurukami]

*sigh* I feel old, in that I can hardly remember most of the things I had to read for high school English. Which probably means I'd recommend even fewer of them...

To Kill a Mockingbird stands out, of course, largely because of both reading it and watching the film adaptation with Gregory Peck. Boo Radley, strangely, seemed a touch more sinister and creepy in the book before his true reveal, but isn't that so often the way? Lord of the Flies I recall because I made some kind of weird, intuitive realization about it and got an A on my paper. : )

I recall reading The Jungle, but that was in history class as a kind of highlight of the Depression-era.

Shakespeare's plays were usually fun, but I suspect I missed a great deal of the subtext. I loved, and to this day still admire, the novel Frankenstein. I recall reading The Agony and the Ecstasy and thinking it intriguing, but that was in Humanities class (kind of a catchall for literature, art, and so forth),

Catcher in the Rye bored me, as did Utopia. Virgnia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness fiction bored me immensely. I'd imagine that most of the rest that got assigned bored me as well, or I'd have much better recollection of it. I vaguely recall reading Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark in college, and thinking it vaguely interesting because my mom teaches music and voice. *grin*

*eyes bookcase* All of this forgotten memory, I suspect, comes from my fascination with fantasy and science-fiction, of which there's little to be found in high school classes. (Also from being, well, your standard distracted teenage guy. I was a HORRIBLE student in high school and through most of college.) When I was in high school, I read more to escape -- which meant Tolkien's The Hobbit, Stephen King, Joan Vinge's novels like Psion and Catspaw (which were all about being a mistrusted outsider),

I'm sure I would've found A Canticle for Leibowicz fascinating back then, but I was never assigned to read it and ended up picking up a copy from a used bookstore because I'd vaguely heard about it. I can't recall ever having read any of Hemingway, and hadn't heard the name other than by knowing that he'd committed suicide with a shotgun (known from, of all places, Isaac Asimov's F&SF). I can't think of much on my shelves that might qualify as "English literature", as most of it dates from the last 40 years and the vast majority from the last 30.

For me, books were always about finding a way to dream of elsewhere or elsewhen, even if only for an afternoon. Not so much with the deep social meaning that literature's reputed to have. I mean, I could throw out some more recent titles that had social undercurrent beneath their plotlines and brilliant prose, but they're the sort of thing that most likely wouldn't be approved by teaching boards.

... I suspect this means my English classes generally sucked. (And it should be noted that I shifted from an English major to a creative writing minor because I was more interested in trying to TELL stories than in analyzing what this particular passage on page 73 indicated about the author's adolescent childhood... *grin*)

Ooooh! Last one -- something that should go highly recommended. Pamela Dean's "Tam Lin". Maybe on the dividing line of lit/not-lit, but a fantastic read all the same, and deeply about adolescence and growing up. Definitely the sort of thing I'd assign students to read were I to run an English course.

(I feel almost like I should create a list, now, of sci-fi and fantasy books I'd put on my own reading list of this hypothetical class. : ) )

[kurukami]

Oh! Almost forgot. Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows. I loved reading that book when I was in jr. high/high school. Of course, I don't think I was ever assigned to read it in class, mind you.