[Jenna_Bird]

Good news folks; Ethan Frome has been dropped from the reading list! Hooray! I've also added some free choices to our 4th quarter literacy circles. It looks like this year is shaping up quite well. Any further ideas are still appreciated.

-Jenna

[emperor penguin]

Free choices are always a great idea. In Grade 11 we got to pick 2 books that had to be over a certain number of pages, and one of them had to be by a Canadian author. I chose It's Never Over by Morley Callaghan, which was o.k., and The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry, which I thought was excellent. We also had to read the usuals, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Separate Peace and Lord of the Flies, and like most others who've replied I found them all to be really enjoyable. In grade 12 we had to read The Wars by Timothy Findley which was an excellent book.

I've always been a big documentary reader and its a shame that students aren't really allowed to read those in school. Also, another problem I've found is that all of the books on the reading lists seem to be really old. I think its time they started updating some of these lists and including ones that are a little more modern.

[Jenna_Bird]

Also, another problem I've found is that all of the books on the reading lists seem to be really old. I think its time they started updating some of these lists and including ones that are a little more modern.

I completely agree. I've had so much success in the classroom when students were given more current texts which reflect their tastes. That isn't to say that I don't think that there's value in books like To Kill a Mockingbird. However, a literary diet should be balanced, not force fed. Book selection is one of the reasons that I've often leaned toward private education -- they aren't as likely to have a school board that gets all ruffled over a few profanities or "innappropriate themes". Hurumph.

-Jenna

[mojo_mattv]

It just came to me that I and many of my friends, including the majority of those that I was surprised to hear even knew what a novel was, really enjoyed Catcher in the Rye. It spoke to the biterness and angst that alot of us were feeling at that age.

[skippy the wonder dog]

Did you catch this story? Teacher suspended for letting pupils read bestseller.

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150 parents had no problem, but the objection of a single board member did it. Presumably, that board member thinks kids don't know how to swear.

How about Richard Ford's Wildlife? Ford's longer novels would bore the pants off high school kids but this one is from the point of view of a teenaged kid whose parents are splitting up. Kids can then write essays about the overarching symbolism of the forest fire.

Roddy Doyle's The Commitments, and tie it in with the movie, but that would be on thin ice given the sex and swearing and other things teenagers know nothing about.... Any other suggestions from me would just cause trouble. How about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or Bright Lights, Big City? Best just ignore me.

[NegPhil]

In my lifetime I have read some great modern literature. However, the only modern novel that I could recommend to the Pantheon of High School literature is....




A Confederacy of Dunces
By John Kennedy Toole

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A Confederacy of Dunces is a novel written by John Kennedy Toole, published in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide. The book was published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who also contributed a revealing foreword) and Toole's mother Thelma Toole, quickly becoming a cult classic. Toole posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. It is an important part of the 'modern canon' of Southern literature[citation needed].

The title derives from the epigraph by Jonathan Swift: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." (Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting)

The story is set in New Orleans in the early 1960s. The central character is Ignatius J. (Jacques) Reilly, an intelligent but slothful man still living with his mother at age 30 in the city's Uptown neighborhood, who, because of family circumstances, must set out to get a job. In his quest for employment he has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters.