Tasked with picking 10 books to be read in local high school

The novel is an archaic medium. Nothing meaningful has been produced in print since about 1966.

If you truly want to prepare them for college and the real world beyond that, you should make a list of the Top 10 Buzz Feed Articles That You Have To Read to Believe, Number 6 Will Shock You!

Cat's Cradle is interesting, and I think I might have liked it in high school. Infinite Jest, though, I'd say no.

Prep for college can really be anything that sparks creative and analytical thinking, but when tasked to pick 10, it is hard not to pick big, well known, 'must read' kind of books.

Here is a diverse list that I enjoyed reading in class or teaching.

The Professor's House, Willa Cather

Disgrace, JM Coetzee

White Noise, Don DeLillo

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

Daniel Deronda, George Eliot

Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert

Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankel

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

Just a few that quickly came to mind. There are so many, and you will never please everyone with your list. Most likely you'll piss more people off than please, which is too bad. For me the goal would be to get a diverse list of books the kids can enjoy and hopefully get them excited to be readers for life. It takes a long time and a lot of books to start to get things. That is decades of reading.

As I Lay Dying

In my school we read And Their Eyes Were Watching God, In Cold Blood, Into The Wild, Huckleberry Finn, and a couple others I forget.

There is really only 1 book you ever need........... The Holy Bible.

LOL LOL LOL... but seriously... You should read the standards. Huck Finn, Tom Sayer, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc...

Book lover and writer here. A few I'd highly recommend for that demographic:

Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The Unvanquished by William Faulkner

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Oral History by Lee Smith

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

Infinite Jest is one of my favorite books, but they won't get through it. You could do Brief Interviews with Hideous Men if you want some DFW, but it's a short story collection, not a novel.

The Tests of Time: Readings in the Development of Physical Theory, ed. by Lisa Dolling and Glenn Stabile

Things Fall Apart, by China Achebe

Vermeer's Hat, by Timothy Brook

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond

Tools of the Empire, by Daniel R. Headrick

The Everyday Writer, by Andrea Lunsford and Robert Connors

A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Bartolomé de Las Casas

1491, by Charles Mann

Bruchko, by Bruce Olson

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, by Sandy Tolan

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, by Oliver Sacks

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Excellent read, sad story about the author's struggle to get it published. He was declined many times by many companies, killed himself, then his mother managed to get the manuscript published years later. Can't believe that someone would turn down being a publisher for this novel.

English major wrote:

Book lover and writer here. A few I'd highly recommend for that demographic:

Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The Unvanquished by William Faulkner

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Oral History by Lee Smith

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

Infinite Jest is one of my favorite books, but they won't get through it. You could do Brief Interviews with Hideous Men if you want some DFW, but it's a short story collection, not a novel.

I remember reading 5 or 6 of these in 8th grade, and we didn't have AP classes at that level.

What else would you recommend? Hop on Pop?

Knut Hamsun - Hunger

Dostoevsky - Notes From the Unferground

Also, the AP/College board people have lists of books that show up frequently on AP Question #3, the open-ended essay.

Infinite Jest would be fun if you were guiding them through it. I read it shortly after HS but could have handled it my senior year. Many would struggle, but you'd get to see who the smart kids really are.

A few of DFW's essays would be great for them though. This Is Water should be reqired reading for everyyone (link =

http://www.metastatic.org/text/This%20is%20Water.pdf

). Consider the Lobster, A Supposedly fun thing, and Incarnations of Burned Children are all very good and short enough to assign over a day or two.

Some very good lists on here. Based off of what I read in HS and thereafter I'll give my suggestions

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

Dickens in general, although once you've read one thing by him you get the gist

The Trial/The Metamorphisis - Franz Kafka

The Stranger - Alber Camus

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

Plays

Hamlet if they haven't already. Oedipus Rex, Antigone as well

A bonus - TS Eliot's poetry. The Waste Land, The Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufrock, and The Hollow Men

I teach American lit at a univerzity. I like the list the other guy made. I do think students in America should be grounded in American literature first, then Latin American and European literature, before reading a lot of literature from the Eastern hemisphere.

Try to space your texts out across American history so that the kids have to understand the historical context as well. Here's 11.

Colonial/revolutionary era:

Pilgrim's Progress

Antebellum:

Benito Cereno

Late 1800s:

Huckleberry Finn

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Modernism:

Light in August

Collected short stories of Hemingway

3 Lives

WWII era:

Invisible Man

Catch 22

1960-:

Song of Solomon

The Corrections

The Big Short by Michael Lewis - high schoolers, especially in West Virginia might as well start to understand that Wall Street and the financial industry isn't working for them... but rather for themselves.

Nice list. This would be a great multi century survey of American lit/history.

And I almost put the Corrections in my list. I think high school kids would love the crazy, wild ride of that story.

I think suggesting not as commonly read in high school books for seniors is always a good idea. Cat's Cradle would be a lot of fun, but maybe balence it with books that are considered classics but never seem to make the lists of most assigned high school readings. All the King's Men is one example.

These are more or less what my AP literature class read in high school.

Ulysses - I read it as a high school senior and loved it. It may be a little too intimidating for some. Infinite jest migh be a better option.

Portrait of the artist as a young man - excellent coming of age novel, very pertinent for high school seniors

There eyes were watching god - excellent novel that discusses race and gender

One flew over the cuckoos nest - I imagine some have already read it and it is a pretty easy but very fun.read. Maybe something they could read at the end of the year when everybody has zoned out.

Oedipus, Antigone, or one of the other Greek tragedies.

Some funny British play from 100+ years ago, we read the importance of being earnest

The adventures of huckleberry Finn - most have probably read it but it is definitely worth revisiting in great detail. My class spent at least a month on it and got a lot from it.

They may want to spend a few weeks on poetry - Maybe a book of famous english language poetry

Pardon me? wrote:

English major wrote:

Book lover and writer here. A few I'd highly recommend for that demographic:

Infinite Jest is one of my favorite books, but they won't get through it. You could do Brief Interviews with Hideous Men if you want some DFW, but it's a short story collection, not a novel.

I remember reading 5 or 6 of these in 8th grade, and we didn't have AP classes at that level.

What else would you recommend? Hop on Pop?

I guess you're just a savant.

To read IJ properly, you have to really want to read IJ. I wouldn't make it an assignment, personally. Give them a taste of DFW and let them come to IJ on their own.

The Corrections is great. I almost put that on there, too.

Portrait of the Artist is also a classic book.

I'd check to see what's on the curriculum for previous years to make sure you're not being redundant. IMO, they should be grounded in the classics that have inspired much of the following literature. So if they haven't read The Great Gatsby by then, they should read it. Same for Portrait of the Artist, Sun Also Rises, Unvanquished (or Sound and the Fury if they're smarter than the average bear). Maybe Mrs. Dalloway. Invisible Man is inventive stuff stylistically inspired by Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, but it also incorporates AA experience. Oral History is a great book about the WV mountains written by a woman, so some good diversity there, too. Look Homeward Angel is a brilliant bildungsroman about a small town southerner. It'll resonate. Then you move onto the good shit that's come later that people will get excited about. Maybe Delillo, DFW, Franzen, Cormac, Junot Diaz, Chabon, Roth, maybe Burroughs.

IMO.

Pardon me? will no doubt disparage my list, being a savant who read Infinite Jest and Ulysses simultaneously, one in each hand, in the 8th grade.

Nothing since 1966?

How about Don DeLillo's "White Noise," Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Vineland," David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera," and probably others by him were after that date, Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," "The Road," "No Country for Old Men," etc., Toni Morrison's "Beloved," Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities," Saul Bellow's "Ravelstein," and many others?

You can read stuff early without getting any of the profundity.