July 2021 Group Challenge

Conversazioni1001 Books to read before you die

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July 2021 Group Challenge

1JayneCM
Giu 15, 2021, 12:28 am

This month let's read a book that is/was a high school text.

It can be one that you have studied, or one that has been assigned to your kids, or just one that you know is studied in schools, either currently or in the past.

2JayneCM
Modificato: Giu 15, 2021, 12:34 am

I will be rereading Lord of the Flies as my son has been assigned the book for year 10 English and I have not read it since I studied it in Year 10 English.

3puckers
Giu 15, 2021, 1:16 am

Hopefully none of my remaining books are or ever were high school texts!

Lord of the Flies was also one I recall from high school, and Sunset Song was another list book we did at school. Our English at school was more play-oriented - I recall Macbeth (inevitably, being a Scottish high school), The Merchant of Venice and Death of a Salesman, while poetry included Meg Merrilies (Keats), Charge of the Light Brigade (Tennyson), and of course a lot of Rabbie Burns.

4JayneCM
Giu 15, 2021, 2:01 am

>3 puckers: We also studied quite a few plays, which they don't seem to do in high school any more - at least, not here in Australia. Qute a few Shakespeare plays, as well as The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, A Doll's House and The Club.

There are quite a few of the 1001 Books that I studied over my years of hgh school.

5ursula
Giu 15, 2021, 6:38 am

We did a Shakespeare play a year when I was in high school in the US. Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, ... hm, I went into honors English in my junior year and AP my senior year so I read different things than the "regular" classes I think, but we did King Lear and Hamlet.

1001 Books that we read in school that I can remember: Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, The Stranger, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, Candide.

6gypsysmom
Giu 15, 2021, 5:56 pm

One of the books I took in high school English and was not turned off by that experience was Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Thomas Hardy remains one of my favourite writers and a few years ago I did a read-along on line of all of his novels. When I reread Tess I discovered that the version we took in high school was somewhat edited which I hope is a practise that has fallen by the wayside.

Most of the books mentiond by other people I have already read or they don't seem to be on the list. I'll see what else turns up.

7JayneCM
Giu 16, 2021, 12:41 am

I thought I'd go through the 1001 and make a list of possible books.

Through my high school years, I studied:

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
Wuthering Heights
The Scarlet Letter
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Madame Bovary
The Mill on the Floss
Great Expectations
Anna Karenina
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Howards End
Ethan Frome
The Great Gatsby
Brave New World
Independent People
The Hobbit
Of Mice and Men
Rebecca
The Man Who Loved Children
Animal Farm
Cry, The Beloved Country
Nineteen Eighty-Four
A Town Like Alice
Lord of the Flies
The Tree of Man
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
A Kestrel For A Knave
Schindler's Ark
The Color Purple
The Handmaid's Tale

I did do extra literature classes all through high school!

Some others from the list that are in the current year 11 and 12 Australian syllabus are:

Atonement
The Catcher In The Rye
Frankenstein
Heart of Darkness
In Cold Blood
The Namesake
North and South
Things Fall Apart

I almost wish I was doing year 12 this year as I see they are doing a section on Ancient Greek texts. In my day, we didn't really venture any earlier than the 18th century! Except for Shakespeare and poetry.

I know there are some who will find it hard as they are nearing the end of their 1001 journey but hopefully everyone can find something to read for this challenge.

8lilisin
Modificato: Giu 16, 2021, 2:57 am

For the French curriculum you guys can try the following, although again, most have probably already read these.

(Equivalent to American 12th grade)
Une Vie de Maupassant
Bel Ami de Maupassant
Candide de Voltaire
L’étranger de Camus
Madame Bovary de Flaubert
En attendant Godot de Beckett
Rhinocéros de Ionesco

(Equivalent to American 11th grade)
Honoré de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert
Guy de Maupassant, Boule de Suif
Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des dames
Fiodor Dostoïevski, Le Joueur
Franz Kafka, La Métamorphose
Jean-Marie-Gustave Le Clézio, L’Africain
Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder
George Orwell, 1984
Alexandre Soljenitsyne, Une Journée d’Ivan Denissovitch
Une nouvelle de Stefan Zweig (en particulier pour ceux qui ont aimé Le
Joueur d’échecs) : par exemple, Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d’une
femme ou Lettre d’une inconnue

(Equivalent to American 10th grade)
William Golding, Sa Majesté des mouches
Ernest Hemingway, Le Vieil Homme et la mer
Jerome David Salinger, L’Attrape-coeurs
Dai Sijie, Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise
John Steinbeck, Des souris et des hommes

9annamorphic
Modificato: Giu 20, 2021, 12:34 pm

10DeltaQueen50
Modificato: Giu 16, 2021, 3:57 pm

I have a few more to add that were on our Canadian curriculum:

Oliver Twist
A Christmas Carol
The Bell Jar

I remember struggling through a Faulkner (I've blocked the title from my memory), and falling in love with Of Mice and Men, To Kill A Mockingbird and Lord of the Flies.

11puckers
Giu 16, 2021, 5:53 pm

I see Native Son mentioned by >9 annamorphic: above so I’ll make that my July challenge read.

12JayneCM
Modificato: Giu 17, 2021, 8:10 pm

>11 puckers: You found one! Great!

Thank you for all the lists - very helpful to us all.

13DeltaQueen50
Giu 18, 2021, 4:07 pm

I am going to go with The Spy Who Came In From the Cold from the list in >7 JayneCM: above.

14BentleyMay
Giu 18, 2021, 4:48 pm

I will read either The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or The Tree of Man. I have a copy of both at the ready. I'm leaning towards le Carré, since I have not yet read anything by him.

Thanks to all who posted lists.

15annamorphic
Modificato: Giu 20, 2021, 12:44 pm

It's really interesting to see what other people read and didn't read. I don't know why we didn't do To Kill a Mockingbird or The Grapes of Wrath -- so universal and important. On the other hand, really surprised that everybody did not read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which seemed so fundamental to me. I also remember loving The Sound and the Fury and Great Expectations. And as far as I can recall, we read Native Son and Invisible Man without ever talking about race and justice. We just talked about things like plot and character development. It makes me wonder why we were reading them and if we were supposed to just pick up on the social issues ourselves. I grew up in a really conservative community and I actually wonder how some of our books made it onto the reading lists! I think that parents didn't pay quite as much attention to political messaging then as they would now.

I added a bunch more books to my list above, by the way. Remembered more things when I thought about it.

16DeltaQueen50
Lug 12, 2021, 1:23 pm

I have completed The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and it was a five star read. I wish we had studied this in high school so that I would have picked up John le Carre's excellent books before now!

17JayneCM
Lug 12, 2021, 11:41 pm

>16 DeltaQueen50: I remember loving The Spy Who Came In From The Cold when I studied it in high school. I was totally expecting not to like it as I had never read any spy novels, or really any books that seemed so distinctly 'male'. I agree that I am glad that we were assigned it in school as I would probably never have picked it up otherwise.
Glad you enjoyed it!

18JayneCM
Lug 19, 2021, 5:48 am

I finished my reread (last read in high school) of Lord of the Flies. Yes, it is fairly simplistic and lacking in any deep character development or dialogue, but that is the point of the book. It was written as an allegory for early teens. And it develops a book that prompts much discussion.

19Yells
Lug 19, 2021, 10:29 am

I finished Swann’s Way - it was mentioned above but not something we read at my Canadian high school. I pity the student who had to make sense of it! I liked it but can’t imagine muddling through the dense text back then.

20annamorphic
Lug 19, 2021, 1:56 pm

>19 Yells: It was excruciating in high school. In French, yet! That, and Moby Dick (in English), were the only 2 assigned texts I was actually unable to read in their entirety and instead used the Cliff Notes.