The Student Reading List

How does your high school reading list stack up?

In junior high and high school, I had my favorite reads, but I also had books I just couldn’t stand. I graduated high school in the mid-seventies, before internet and books on tape. Even if I didn’t like the book’s topic, point of view, or story; I had to READ the book. The only short cut that actually existed for me were the “Cliff’s Notes” pamphlets or maybe the one labeled “Spark Notes”.

When I turned to teaching high school, I made sure that I read the pieces that I had to teach. I even learned to dig through the novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction pieces that I found difficult to read or enjoyable to read.

I learned early in my teaching career that I couldn’t fake running a discussion or teaching about some literary aspect if I hadn’t read the piece. (NOTE: I had been able to bluff my way through essays and participating in discussions in high school and college when I hadn’t read the piece.) I also learned early in the game that I needed to keep my opinion of each piece to myself. If the literary work was part of the department or district syllabus, it had to be taught.

I taught in a time where common core curriculum did NOT exist. We taught novels. Novels like Great Expectations, Brave New World, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Plays like Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Glass Menagerie. Poems like “The Raven,” “Thanotopsis,” and “The Road Not Taken.”

I visited my teacher friends the year after I retired and was alarmed to find that they had been in school for 10 weeks and had spent the better part of 8 weeks in test preparation or testing. In addition, the district had a preference for excerpts and short selections in the anthology series the district had purchased.

How can we begin to expect young adults to have a sustained reading ability if we only give them short, easily digested pieces to read?

Recently, in working to downsize the paper chaos in my files, I found the list I was given in seventh grade. In 1970, my English teacher gave us a list of books we would be expected to read before graduating from high school.

I don’t remember reading all of these works, and my suspicion is that sometimes we were grouped to read and present a selection to our classmates. (I put an asterisk in front of the ones I taught over the years.)

But, I had an idea.

I am contemplating using my list as part of my 2020 reading list. Many of them are available to read for free online, and if I can’t find them there, I can seek out the library copy or check out one of the secondhand book shops in town.

Care to join me?

READING LISTS ADOPTED BY ALL DEPARTMENT HEADS

JUNIOR AND SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL

Seventh Grade

Captains Courageous (Rudyard Kipling); The Call of the Wild (Jack London); Billy Budd (Herman Melville); Black Beauty (Anna Sewell); The Incredible Journey (Sheila Burnford); Old Yeller (Fred Gipson); Rascal (Sterling North); Recollection Creek (Fred Gipson); White Fang (Jack London); Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame); A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens); Roosevelt Grady (Louisa Rossiter Shotwell); Amos Fortune (Elizabeth Yates)

Eighth Grade

Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain); Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson); Across Five Aprils (Irene Hunt); *Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain); *The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane); Robinson Crusoe (Daniel DeFoe); Swiss Family Robinson (Johann David Wyss); Shane (Jack Schaefer); Thomas Jefferson Brown (James Oliver Curwood); The Diary of Anne Frank (Anne Frank); I Remember Mama (John Van Druten and Kathryn Forbes); Johnny Tremain (Esther Forbes)

Ninth Grade

*Great Expectations (Charles Dickens); Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens); Les Miserables (Victor Hugo); The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo); David Copperfield (Charles Dickens); Gods, Heroes, and Men of Ancient Greece (W. H. D. Rouse); Green Mansions (William Henry Hudson); The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle); Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson); *The Pearl (John Steinbeck); *The Odyssey (Homer); Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte); Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll); West Side Story (Irving Shulman); Hiroshima (John Hersey); Karen (Marie Killilea); Kim (Rudyard Kipling); Animal Farm (George Orwell); The Yearling (Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings); A Light in the Forest (Conrad Richter); As You Like It (William Shakespeare); The Merchant of Venice (William Shakespeare); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (William Shakespeare); The Hobbit (J. R. R. Tolkien); A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Mark Twain)

Tenth Grade

Nibelungenlied (Penguine Books translation); Song of Roland (Penguin Books); Dandelion Wine (Ray Bradbury); The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury); The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck); The Cid (Pierre Corneille); The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers); Life with Father (Clarence Day), A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens); The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas); The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas); *Silas Marner (George Eliot); Crash Club (Henry Felsen); Hot Rod (Henry Felsen); *The Miracle Worker (William Gibson); *Lord of the Flies (William Golding); A Bell for Adano (John Hersey); Kon-Tiki (Thor Heyerdahl); Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes); *A Separate Peace (John Knowles); Laughing Boy (Oliver La Farge); *To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee); Swift Water (Emilie Loring); A Physician in Spite of Himself (Moliere); Cry the Beloved Country (Alan Paton); All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque); Ivanhoe (Walter Alva Scott); *Julius Caesar (William Shakespeare); *Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare); *Antigone (Sophocles); Travels With Charley (John Steinbeck); Hie to the Hunters (Jessie Stuart); The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien); Master and Man (Leo Tolstoy); The Invisible Man (H. G. Wells); The War of the Worlds (H. G. Wells); The Once and Future King (E. B. White); The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder); The Red Pony (John Steinbeck);Wilderness Clearing (Walter D. Edmonds); Banners at Shenandoah (Bruce Catton)

Eleventh Grade

Portrait of Jennie (Robert Nathan); Jamaica Inn (Daphne du Maurier); Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson); *The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams); Three Sisters (Anton Chekhov); Mrs. Warren’s Professions (George Bernard Shaw); The Master Builder (Henrik Ibsen); Red Roses for Me (Sean O’Casey); All My Sons (Arthur Miller); A Lantern in Her Hand (Bess Streeter Aldrich); My Antonia (Willa Cather); The Ox Bow Incident (Walter Van Tilburg Clark); *Leatherstocking Tales (James Fenimore Cooper); *The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane); Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky); Spotted Horses (William Faulkner); The Old Man (William Faulkner); The Bear (William Faukner); Show Boat (Edna Ferber); *The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald); The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin(Benjamin Franklin); The House of Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne); *The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne); The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway); Wreck of the Mary Deare (Hammond Innes); The Turn of the Screw (Henry James); Daisy Miller (Henry James); Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler); Arrowsmith (Sinclair Lewis); Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis) ; Main Street (Sinclair Lewis); Billy Budd (Herman Melville); Moby Dick (Herman Melville); *The Crucible (Arthur Miller); *Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller); Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell); The Octopus: A Story of California (Frank Norris); Ah, Wilderness! (Eugene O’Neill); The Oregon Trail (Francis Parkman); Giants in the Earth (Ole Edvart Rolvaag); The Tempest (William Shakespeare); Twelfth Night (William Shakespeare); Abe Lincoln in Illinois (Robert E. Sherwood); *The Jungle (Upton Sinclair); Walden (Henry David Thoreau); *Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain); *Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton); *Our Town (Thornton Wilder); Skin of Our Teeth (Thornton Wilder); *The Matchmaker (Wilder); The Caine Mutiny (Herman Wouk)

Twelfth Grade

Beowulf; Emma (Jane Austen); Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen); Dear Brutus (James Matthew Barrie); Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte); The Pilgrim’s Progress (John Bunyan); The Stranger (Albert Camus); Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes); Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad); Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad); The Secret Sharer (Joseph Conrad); Inferno (Dante); The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens); Murder in the Cathedral (T. S. Eliot); Joseph Andrews (Henry Fielding); A Passage to India (E. M. Forster); She Stoops to Conquer (Oliver Goldsmith); Beyond Sing the Woods (Trygve Gulbranssen); The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy); The Return of the Native (Thomas Hardy); Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy); Maria Chapdelaine (Louis Hermon); Iliad (Homer); *Brave New World (Aldous Huxley); An Enemy of the People (Henrik Ibsen); A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce); J. B. (Archibald MacLeish); Of Human Bondage (William Somerset Maugham); The Razor’s Edge (William Somerset Maugham); Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell); Sea of Grass (Conrad Richter); Cyrano de Bergerac (Edmond Rostand); Hamlet (William Shakespeare); King Henry IV, Part 1 (William Shakespeare); King Lear (William Shakespeare); *Macbeth (William Shakespeare); Othello (William Shakespeare); Candida (George Bernard Shaw); Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (George Bernard Shaw); Major Barbara (George Bernard Shaw); *Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw); Frankenstein (Mary Shelley); The Rivals (Richard Brinsley Sheridan); The School for Scandal (Richard Brinsley Sheridan); Journey’s End (R. C. Sheriff); Electra (Sophocles); *Oedipus the King (Sophocles); Queen Victoria (LyttonStrachey); Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift); Black Boy (Richard Wright); Native Son (Richard Wright); *The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde); The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde); Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)

Rebecca (Becky) spent 34 years in a teaching career, but when she retired in 2014, she picked up her pen and pursued her passion to write. As a high school English teacher, Becky held the philosophy that she wouldn’t give any writing assignment that she personally wouldn’t or couldn’t do. That philosophy strengthened and broadened her own writing.

In addition to publishing her writing on various platforms, Becky also blogs at Life is for Living, a blog to encourage, motivate, and help others live the best life possible. As an extension of Life is for Living, she also publishes a weekly newsletter, Let’s Chat. (Check it out HERE.) Life is for Living also has a social media presence with the group Coffee on my Porch. (Check it out HERE.)

After teaching writing for 34 years, Becky began Ink & Keyboard, a blog for writers at all levels. She supplements what she writes on the blog with a subscription newsletter, The Writer’s Notebook (Check it out HERE.) and the social media group Ink & Keyboard (Check it out HERE.)Thanks for reading.

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