Dream High School Reading List

I've always wished high schools and middle schools would make more use of young adult novels, so some that I would include are:

The His Dark Materials series, which covers interesting questions about religion and morality.
Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy to teach about philosophy. 
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian 
Feed by M.T. Anderson, for it's questions about consumerism and connectedness.
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, because goddammit youths need books about consent
Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan or Am I Blue? by various authors to combat homophobia.
A Great and Terrible Beauty for something that centers on young women. Graceling, Fire, and Bitterblue would also be great for this. 
American Born Chinese
Persepolis
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, or something else for a non-NT perspective.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which has a lot of great stuff on feeling lonely and different in high school. 
Little Brother to teach 'em to question the government. 

And it's not YA, but I would have them read Contact, to teach them about atheism.

So, yeah, I don't think I have a single thing on my list that wouldn't likely be banned or highly contested by idiot schools and parents in the states. 

Speak, I think, is something a lot of young girls would really NEED to read, so anytime I hear about it being contested I'm sad. 

On genre fare, Butler and LeGuin would both be great! I was thinking of putting the Annals of the Western Shore series on there. The second book, Voices, would be particular good both as genre fare and something written by and about women. Lavinia would also tie in nicely to any class reading The Iliad. 

While I totally agree with trying to bring in a voice from the autistic spectrum, I'd strongly disagree that this book is the one. The best comparison I can come up with is trying to teach a class about schizophrenia using the movie A Beautiful Mind. It just isn't an accurate portrait of the illness, and it manages to be massively offensive to boot. I only wish I could come up with a good alternative, but most books with this theme are just as trite as Curious Incident.

A simple yet elegant way to show you are a good teacher. 

MrsLangdonAlger I totally understand, there really is a poverty of good books about autism. I'm just especially sensitive to that book because I read it on the suggestion of my boyfriend, who himself read it on the suggestion of his parents because his brother is autistic. My boyfriend hated it, and wanted to see if I agreed with him or with his parents, all the more because I have an autistic brother as well. Unsurprisingly, I agreed with my boyfriend, and I'll take any opportunity to complain about that book.

I would love just once for a book about autism to have no mentions of mathematics. JUST ONCE.

Onto my actually high school reading suggestion, though: if I were to teach a class about gender, and how perceptions of gender color our views of things, I would assign "The Screwfly Solution" by James Tiptree and "The Women Men Don't See" by Raccoona Sheldon and have the students discuss the various differences between the ostensibly male and female inclinations of the two different authors, before revealing that Tiptree is Sheldon's nom de plume. I imagine that would create some very interesting conversations, at the very least!

Ooh, that was a good essay—really got to the core of reading (and most other narrative art): the experience of something beyond oneself. I was very sympathetic.

If I were an English teacher I’d probably concentrate on works that would give one a solid grounding to read other stuff in the future, so it would probably be very classics/defining English literature-oriented. I actually felt like I got a fairly good English curriculum in my junior year Ancient World-to-modern world literature sequence, starting with Gilgamesh, going on to Aeschylus and Euripides, Roland (an experiment, and IMO not a successful one—they used to do Chaucer, and since I still haven’t read Chaucer I feel like I’ve been left out) and finally Othello for the first semester and then Austen, Faust Book I, Frankenstein plus a bunch of Percy Shelley poems, Balzac and splitting up into different groups for more contemporary world literature (so a ton of twentieth-century Chinese lit for me). It’s not necessarily a perfect curriculum—late nineteenth-early twentieth stuff got put off to AP English and not all of the selections, but I feel like I had a basic understanding of the essential stuff—especially in terms of cultural reference—that later writers use to build their works. Plus it was exciting, unlike freshman English, even though it never really tried for “relevance.”

Ice Cream Planet - Thank you for the recommendation! I added The Trick... to my Goodreads list. 

Consulting the same list--as well as my English major brother, who loves to talk about this stuff--I would recommend the following for high schoolers:

The Iliad* by Homer
Medea* by Euripedes
Hamlet by William Shakespeare - NOT Romeo & Juliet*!
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Great Expectations* by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte  - or Wuthering Heights* by Emily Bronte
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
The Picture of Dorian Gray* by Oscar Wilde
Bartelby the Scrivener* by Herman Melville - or Billy Budd
Crime and Punishment* by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Heart of Darkness* by Joseph Conrad - but with supplemental readings by African authors, such as Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Orlando* by Virginia Woolf - it wasn't assigned reading, but I picked it up for AP English and it's my favorite book of all time
Maurice by E.M. Forster - or Howards End
The Grapes of Wrath* by John Steinbeck - or East of Eden*
The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene - or For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years by Thomas Mann - since it's unfinished, students can imagine their own endings
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
1984 by George Orwell - or Animal Farm*
Catcher in the Rye* by J.D. Salinger - or Franny & Zooey
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Life of Pi by Yann Martel

*books I read in high school

I'm leaving off The Great Gatsby because, while I endorse Fitsgerald's writing, I think you have to be a little older to get something from it. Same with Catch-22. Of course, there are kids in high school reading Pynchon, but if we're talking general curriculum, I think the selections above strike a good balance. 

A lot of this is just the stuff that I personally remember liking in high school (or which, regardless of if I appreciated it at the time, is too important to really be skipped).  A couple of these are books that I read as an underclassman that I'm really glad were assigned to me because I think they're kind of perfect to teach to high school underclassmen, in part because there's a lack of subtlety that I think can appeal to high schoolers but doesn't hold up as well to adult readers (like To Kill a Mockingbird, Ninteen Eighty-Four, and Les Miserables).  My list is probably too close to an actual generic high school syllabus, since, again, the vast majority of it is stuff that I read in school.  Also, I'd prefer a list that wasn't as overwhelmingly straight, white, and male as the one that I've assembled.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Odyssey by Homer
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich  by Alexander Solzhenitsyn 
Light In August by William Faulkner - Faulkner is one of my favorite authors, but my first exposure to him was by having to read As I Lay Dying in high school, and I did not much enjoy 250 pages of Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness.  But then I was assigned Light In August, which also has some stream-of-consciousness-y stuff, but it's so much more accessible than AILD.  It's also way more dramatic which made it a lot more compelling to the high school-aged me.  And by the time I was done with Light In August, I realized that Faulkner was actually really great and I was able to appreciate AILD a hell of a lot more.  I think that AILD is probably a better book overall than Light In August, but the latter is far better entry point to Faulkner.  Also, in spite of the fact that Faulkner held some frustratingly contradictory views on racism, Light In August is in a lot of ways pretty relevant to the current public discourse surrounding racism.  He also does a fairly decent job of depicting how deeply misogyny is ingrained into society (although, as with racism, Faulkner could also be frustratingly sexist).
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zola Neale Hurston
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Books I Didn't Read For High School English
Middlemarch by George Eliot - I think that this could appeal to students in the same way that the similarly openly idealistic Les Miserables does.  Middlemarch is less exciting, and a bit less melodramatic, and I might not have properly appreciated it in the tenth grade when I read Hugo, but I think by senior year I'd have liked it quite a bit.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath - moimoi makes a good point about high school syllabi needing more books from a girl's perspective, and The Bell Jar is a great choice.  And my only exposure to Plath in high school was through a couple of her poems, which are much harder to grasp than her prose, and I think it's generally best not to present authors at their most enigmatic to high schoolers. 
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf - Do high schools not usually teach Woolf's stuff?  Because I never had to read anything of her's in high school, which seems pretty crazy.  I get that her more stream-of-consciousness stuff can be kind of confusing and that Mrs. Dalloway isn't super straightforward, but it's nowhere near as difficult a read as As I Lay Dying.  Also Woolf is much better at writing prose than Faulkner is, or really anyone writing in English in the last century, in my opinion, at least based off of Mrs. Dalloway.
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

My senior year I took a class called Men & Women in Literature, with one of the best teachers I ever had.

I don't remember all the books we discussed, but we did read Like Water for Chocolate, which was excellent.

Ice Cream Planet - Thanks! I could probably use some more contemporary selections on the list, but to be honest, I haven't read much contemporary fiction. Also, I never read Thomas Hardy And I'm glad we agree on Forster. Howard's End is probably a less controversial choice, but I think Maurice is a great coming-of-age story about self-acceptance that wouldn't scare off straight kids, if taught correctly. It reinforces the fact that homosexuality is a part of the human condition that has existed in every place and time--not some new tactic of the 'liberal agenda'. It's also a good example of how social repression (in this case, the criminalization of homosexuality) can fuel art. I had never heard of Villete, but it sounds awesome. That's going on my to-read list as well :-) 

Screaming Lion King Slippers - I am in absolute agreement about Hedda Gabler, Middlemarch and Cat's Cradle, and you put forward fine arguments for A Light in August and Mrs. Dalloway 

Reading that essay now. We agree about a lot of things, that author and me! Not about Night. And then also she's all, students come out of high school unable to parse "the most basic information in a story by Henry James." Um, no one can parse shit in Henry James, that dude is a pain in the ass. (Sorry moimoi - Turn of the Screw is at least a pretty good one as far as James goes, although it too suffers from, like, you know when slime got poured over kids in that Nickolodeon show? Imagine words instead of kids, and punctuation instead of slime, and there's Henry James.)

And when she starts complaining about diversity...look, we didn't just make up the idea that students should read books by diverse authors. It's because we're teaching diverse kids, and it sucks when they go through high school without ever encountering anyone who came from where they come from. It sucks for real, and these are real kids, and people just like them have actually written great books. Complaining about Maya Angelou is fine, but you can't just throw up your hands and be like "White guys it is then!" (She briefly mentions James Baldwin - good idea - but that's it.) The first two thirds of Native Son are terrific; Ann Petry's The Street, also good; Passing or Quicksand by Nella Larsen are both accessible and brilliant.

She's got a point with Flannery O'Connor, that's a great idea. And I'll throw in our perpetual favorite, Shirley Jackson - I know The Lottery is often taught and I liked it in high school. We Have Always Lived in the Castle should go over well.

During the brief period where it seemed to be acceptable hereabouts I was lucky enough to get into advanced English followed by taking the Literature* class my last two years. The curriculum for this class was a lot more open and other than our assigned shakespeare unit for the year we got to avoid most of the bullshit assigned reading most high school kids face. We generally covered at least 2 books for every one that the non-advanced class covered in grade 10 and for 11/12 it was probably more like 4. The extra cool thing was that for the the last two books of the year our assignment was to read something from his giant stack of books at the back and write an essay about what themes it had and why he should or shouldn't read it/add it to next year's curriculum. Even on some of the assigned stuff it was "read one of these 5 books on topic X, I don't care which one."

I've gone back and read some of the other stuff due to cultural conversation/reference stuff but man am I glad I didn't have to spend 2 months discussing Flowers for Algernon.

Off the top of my head for cool stuff I got to read even if I didn't love all of them, also definitely got to read more female authors than most:
(Note: Definitely some canada-centric stuff)

The Fionavar Tapestry (Actually just the summer tree but I devoured the last two the next weekend after my paper was done) - Guy Gavriel Kay, still one of my favourite authors
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Generation X and Microserfs - Coupland
The Stone Angel - Margaret Laurence
The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields
Surfacing - Margaret Atwood (and a couple others but I can't remember what was for what)
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
King Leary - Paul Quarrington
The Cure for Death by Lightning - Gail Anderson-Dargatz -- A book I can imagine being super popular with american school boards given it features a bestiality scene
Like Water for Chocolate - Laura Esquivel
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Catch-22
The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
Various Extra Shakespeare (some of that blends in with first year uni courses but I'm pretty sure I read King Lear and Merchant of Venice for sure.)

In a lot of those cases I may not have necessarily endorsed the author/book for future inclusion in mandatory reading but man did it open up some windows I wouldn't have had until much later otherwise.



*We had a stupid mandatory core English as well that was supposed to be 'english for the real world' and was taught by an teacher who was really into pop psych and basically taught me how NOT to write a university level essay. She actually called out my disdain and eye rolling to her for my parent teacher interview. She spent the whole year telling me I'd fail the provincial standardized test if I didn't write her way. I ended up with I think the 3rd highest grade in the class because I wrote the way I did for my lit teacher who I respected a ton. It must have been soooo galling for her to hand me that mark and because it was provincially mandated that the Standard Test make up like 65% of your mark she couldn't fuck with me too much on the end of it.

I haven't read Price of Salt or Maurice, because I'm the worst, so I'm not sure what I'd throw in for "gay stuff". (Now that I've taken Moby-Dick off the table. *WINK*) I'm not at all a fan of Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, which is on a lot of syllabi. I think it's corny.

Maybe Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin? Especially if I'm to take whats-her-name's suggestion to just give 'em good literature and trust them to figure it out. I worry that it's too rooted in the heavily closeted 50s and Europe and shit, and too oblique, but it's at least very short- which I think is a good consideration for high school reading; more, shorter perspectives, rather than spending a month on one book that may only work for some people. And it talks a lot about the danger and agony of the closet, which is likely to be of interest to gay high schoolers.

Baron von Costume wow, I haven't even heard of a lot of those books. Which I take as an impressive sign, not sure why.

Not sure I'd throw Catch-22 at high schoolers - it's hard! Long, episodic and not always clear about what's even going on. Y'know, for war books I'd be tempted to go with the recent Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain. It's extremely readable (although the fucking of cheerleaders, while it might make some of the lads happy, is not well-written or conceived). It specifically refers to Catch-22's core message, which is that they're trying to murder me and I don't like it, and it gets into "Who gets to tell this story - the media who would like heroes and villains and noble acts of war, or me, the guy whom they're trying to murder and I'm not at all into that?"

I still need to read Maurice and Giovanni's Room, so that makes two of us. I cannot The Price of Salt highly enough; it's a masterpiece and one of the new novels I would say deserves the honor of being called a Great American Novel™.

Regarding the books being rooted in a heavily closeted, pre-criminalization aesthetic, it's an important point to consider. I would argue what sets those books apart is they show non-straight sexuality existed long before the 60s (no surprise to us, but to a few hypothetic kids in the class, it could very well be) and how by being forced to be more careful with how said sexual identities were presented, the novels featured wonderfully complex characters and were more about their personalities instead of the genitals and related proclivities. Granted, it also helped that Baldwin, Highsmith, and Forster were so talented and had a knack for creating complicated characters in their works. 

For more recent examples, Tales of the City, Hotel Living, and the majority of Sarah Waters' works could/should be studied. As for queer YA fiction, I know there is a ton of it, but I haven't read any myself. 

MrsLangdonAlger: What LGBT-centric YA books would you recommend?