Required Reading Lists

As summer comes upon us, (terribly strange to think that summer is nearly here with all of these thunderstorms and rainy days....) the myth of lazy days with nothing to do float to the surface.

Of course, we know those are just myths and imaginations. Summer actually gets busier. And if you're a student, you have to do the required reading, in addition to the school term reading.

But the doom of the required reading list is that you are cursed to ahte the books. Why? Because you HAVE TO read them, and then listen to someone tear them apart and make them mean things that you have no idea how they go to that conclusion. Sometimes a book is just a book. Soemtimes it's a metaphor for everything. And sometimes it's whatever the teacher wants it to be. (Those are the most dangerous ones - teachers and books.)


Here's the school's summer reading list as copy and pasted from their page. How many have you read? How many of thenm did you like or dislike?



Tunkhannock Area High School English Department
Recommended Summer Reading List
AUTHOR TITLE
Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart
Agee, James A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert The Stranger
Cather, Willa Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chekhov, Anton The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen The Red Badge of Courage
Dante Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man
Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry Tom Jones
Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust
Hardy, Thomas Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Heller, Joseph Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest A Farewell to Arms
Homer The Iliad
Hugo, Victor The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale Their Eyes Were Watching God
James, Henry The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong The Woman Warrior
Lewis, Sinclair Babbitt
Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman Moby Dick
Morrison, Toni Beloved
O'Neill, Eugene Long Day's Journey into Night
Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar
Proust, Marcel Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William Macbeth
Shakespeare, William A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shaw, George Bernard Pygmalion
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath
Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David Walden
Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan Fathers and Sons
Voltaire Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith The House of Mirth
Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard Native Son




I ask you this question:

What would your required reading list be for summer or for school? What books do you think ever student should read by the time they graduate with their diploma?

Are there any books you think inappropriate or that aren't worth reading? Perhaps the book is too 'old' for the student (meaning the students typically lack a maturity or experience level needed to fully appreciate or comprehend the book)? Were there any books that you absolutely loved? Why (for all the questions)?