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/lit/ - Literature

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21802823 No.21802823 [Reply] [Original]

If you could assign five books that US high schoolers would be required to read, which five would you pick?

>The Great Gatsby
>To Kill a Mockingbird
>Heart of Darkness
>In Dubious Battle
>Slaughterhouse-Five

>> No.21802839

High School bad. Don't send your kid to HS. To answer your question, one book, Robinson Crusoe.

>> No.21802853

>Moby Dick
>Invisible Man
>A Confederacy of Dunces
>Brave New World
>To Kill a Mockingbird

>> No.21802857

>>21802823
"Would" is the wrong modal verb to use here. You should've used "should," as in "should be required to read." As for answering your question, I would assign them only one: Ulysses.

>> No.21802864

>>21802823
Something ribald but versatile enough to leave a mark on them.

>Rustico and Alibech
>Petronius Satyricon
>Socrates trial dialogues of Plato (La Rouchefoucauld translation translated again into English)
>The Reeve's Tale
>Metamorphosis of Kafka

>> No.21802872

>>21802857
"would" is correct you retard

>> No.21802879

>>21802823
I didn't take school seriously but even so, the kind of stuff we read from the OP list actually took me off the idea of reading because it wasn't written all that interestingly and didn't appeal to me. The theme of naive adolescent love like "Rustico and Alibech" is something which will much more likely appeal to teenagers experiencing hormones and love while being well written and also being cutting edge satire of Christianity and traditional moral institutions. That is why I would assign it if I were a teacher.

>> No.21802888

>>21802879
Gay

>> No.21802891

>>21802872
It's not you illiterate, ESL piece of shit. Read more.

>> No.21802897

>>21802888
Your average teen is going to get more enjoyment out of the ribald tales of Boccaccio or Chaucer than out of To Kill a Mockingbird.

If I had pills and a better home, most of the stuff I read today besides probably Proust, I could have handled as a teen.

>> No.21802899

>>21802897
What a sad and pathetic life you must lead

>> No.21802906

>>21802899
Holy fucking projection. Not him but you're an asshole and I'd ten times rather be him than you.

>> No.21802913

>>21802906
Who envies roasties, no one.

>> No.21802916

>>21802899
Rustico and Alibech would be perfect for age 14 because the girl in that is 13/14 and experiencing opposite sex attraction for the first time. This leads into a cutting edge parody of Christian morality and "putting the devil back into Hell."

>> No.21802917

>>21802891
High schoolers WILL be required to read it, it's not that they SHALL be required to read it. Would is correct.

>> No.21802923

>>21802917
Now that you spelled it out, I can see that both work. Thanks.

Have a good day.

>> No.21802925

>>21802916
Ey ey, gotta loose that virginity real quick. After all, sex is the only thing that matters in life. Why teach teenagers about anything else?

>> No.21802939

>>21802923
only "would" works. "assign" and "should" are oxymoronic in this context.

>> No.21802949

>>21802925
That's not what I was saying...

It is useless to argue with you.

>> No.21802957

>>21802925
At that age, having feelings for the first time is a major experience for children and being unable to communicate feelings like that to the other gender is a major stepping point. The story uses that as a backdrop to satirize the uptight morality of the church and Christendom. It has a deeper meaning while using a common experience everyone at that age goes through as a backdrop.

>> No.21802964 [DELETED] 

>>21802957
Falling in love after the first orgasm is impossible.

>> No.21802969 [DELETED] 

>>21802964
*organism

>> No.21802974

>>21802939
It's not oxymoronic. I'm using "should" here as an auxiliary meaning "ought to": "if you could assign..." (subjunctive mood), "that US high schoolers SHOULD be required..." (ought to be required).

>> No.21803009

>>21802957
Love doesn't exist.

>> No.21803012

>>21802823
>If you could assign five books that US high schoolers would be required to read, which five would you pick?
None of them. Required reading is what makes high schoolers uninterested in reading in the first place. They learn nothing. You either get into literature through your own interest or you don't get into it at all.

>> No.21803019

>>21803012
To an extent, that's true but classes can still be fun if you have good material and a good instructor. I remember Paul M's class was my favorite English class in HS both because the material (we read American poetry like Thoreau and watched the Crucible) and also I thought he was a swell guy.

>> No.21803033

>>21803019
Totally agree. Still remember Mr. T's class (wherever you are, you rock, sir!) and how I got exposed to so many authors whom I would come to love in my later years: Keats, Joyce, Donne, etc. Probably the best period of my life.

>> No.21803035

>>21802823
>If you could assign five books that US high schoolers would be required to read, which five would you pick?
Condition of the Working Class in England
Family, Private Property and the State
Anti-Duhring
Capital
Hungry Hungry Caterpillar

>> No.21803055

>>21803033
I liked Mr M's personality quite a bit because he was depressed and "disgruntled" but in a sort of affable kind of way where he didn't come across as a dick for no reason, even though he put up with a lot of shit. Props to him.

>> No.21803068

>>21802823
JD Salinger - Franny and Zooey
Flannery O'Connor - Wise Blood
Dante - The Divine Comedy
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska - Diary: Divine Mercy In My Soul

>> No.21803075

>>21803055
Mine was sort of "disgruntled" and jaded too but in a cheerful sort of way. I remember he used to drink from a large-sized McDonald's cup and we (the students) would joke that he was casually sipping on booze the whole class. Good times.

>> No.21803636

>>21802857
>>21802891
ESL begone.
Should implies the ideal, which may not happen. You SHOULD get 8 hours of sleep, but in reality you may sleep more or less. Would implies it will be done.

>> No.21803661 [DELETED] 

>>21803636
>Would implies it will be done.
would implies hypotheticality

>> No.21803668

>>21803636
Shut the fuck up, ESL.

>> No.21803669

>>21802891
would implies a hypothetical, which is necessary by virtue of the "If" in the preceding clause

>> No.21803680

>>21802823
First of all, The Great Gatsby is a terrible book and the only reason any of you like it is because it's one of 5 books you had to read in high school.
Second, here is my list.
>Notes from Underground
>The Complete Dialogues of Plato
>Sirens of Titan
>Anarchy State and Utopia
>The Denial of Death

>> No.21803684

I would force them to read five books I wrote.

>> No.21803687

>>21803669
What I'm saying is you should honestly replace "would" with "should" because the latter implies advice, what one ought to do. It especially fits with the passive formation "be required." It has nothing to do with the preceding subjunctive clause. You could also replace "should be required" with "must be required" or "have/had to be required to read" and the sentence would still work.

Get fucked.

>> No.21803690

>>21802823
>>21802823
Bible
Illiad
Odysee
Aeneid
Beowulf

>> No.21803693

>>21802823
Investing for Dummies
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Defending the Undefendable
Economics in One Lesson
The Virtue of Selfishness

>> No.21803696

>>21803687
no, we're expressing a hypothetical, so we SHOULD use would. End of story.

>> No.21803710

You guys need to understand that whatever you assign, if the students think it's boring or too long the're not going to read it. As much as I like The Great Gatsby, and as short as it is, the majority of high schoolers just read the sparknotes. There's no fucking chance they'll read Infinite Jest or The Divine Comedy unless the student actually has an interest in it.

It would be better to assign novellas and short stories and tell them "you should be able to read this in 30 minutes." There's a chance they might actually read it. Currently we've got students going into college who can't read.

>> No.21803751

>>21802823
It's weird because no high schooler could fully appreciate something like Moby Dick even if they are capable of reading it. I'd probably just give them Shakespeare. I remember we would read some parts out loud in class (probably when the teacher couldn't be fucked to have a lesson plan that day) and it was fun. So I'd probably assign the Shakespeare plays with the most characters in it and just have class read them out loud, assigning characters to different students, since I know most of them won't read at home, and this would force them to at least read for once in their lives.

>> No.21803913

>>21802823
>US high schoolers
>four years
That requires a lot of mileage for people unlikely to read anything other than twitter timelines for the rest of their lives, so certainly not fiction.

>Fed/Anti-federalist papers
>Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution + Democracy in America
>Shelby Foote Civil War history
>Anthony Sutton Wallstreet trilogy + America's Great Depression (Rothbard)
Not five technically, but it's the bare minimum primer in a zero-civics or non-court history curriculum.

>> No.21803928

>Steppenwolf
>Moby Dick
(this would be the most focused on one with dissections of how complex themes function in literature. Most highschoolers in the US learn how simple themes work in kindergarten and don't inquire further afterward)
>Crime and Punishment
>100 Years of Solitude
>some light philosophy covering greeks, early modernists, and late modernists

>> No.21803993

>>21802823
i think you shouldnt read books in school at all. we always had these classroom editions of classics that had ugly covers and tons of annotations and notes that robbed them of their autonomy as works of art and transformed them into vehicles of education. there always was a focus on interpreting the authors intention instead of focusing on the beauty of the literary work. reading books in school made my mind associate literature with an air of snobbery and it made books seem like these cold and calculated and soulless things where the author just made up some boring story to make one single, offen political, point. thank god i started reading again for some reason after finishing school to find out that this isn't true at all