Y’all know what I love reading?? This thread!! It’s like a gathering of literature lovers and thoughtful people! Sadly, I find it hard to be able to discuss literature with people. My kids are grown and gone and I am not in the homeschool circles anymore! I did teach literature back in the day - to both high school and jr. high and this is a wonderful trip down memory lane!

Absolutely include Hunger Games - the emotion, the way characters are presented as multi-layered complex making hard decisions, an more. I've long thought these should be included in the classics.

My daughter ADORED the Scholars Seminar class with The Well Trained Mind Academy. I think she read a book a week in that class. She is still a voracious reader after High School.

Hamlet, Macbeth etc. by Shakespeare are not novels, they are plays. There's a serious problem when a critic cannot distinguish a novel from a play.

No Joseph Conrad. Please. I do think everyone should read Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights.

I could say much, but I'll just say this: Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you . . . And, yes. We want them to read, and to enjoy reading.

I don’t know how many times I read Dante’s “Inferno” in Highschool. I couldn’t get enough of it. And Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca”. I read it within 24 hrs. Couldn’t put it down.

HOLY COW YES!! I’ve been saying this for years, but I thought it made me not-a-true-classical-ist. This is lovely, lovely to read. ❤️

I have to say my students love Fahrenheit and Lord of the Flies! I think they are SO applicable to today. That said, I’ve always wanted to teach The Hunger Games, they are brilliant on many levels. And we just finished Things Fall Apart in World lit (I teach at a homeschool co-op).

Thank you for this!

I graduated from high school in 1986 and I'll give my school credit. We read a lot of complete novels/plays/works. I don't recall using a textbook for a Lit class after 9th grade. A lot of what we read were the classics mentioned. My own kids who graduated in 2011 and 2015 also read complete books in school. I read a lot of those books after they were finished with them. They read some of the classics mentioned and also some more contemporary works. The complaint I had with school reading was centered around AR. I have very mixed feelings about it. I was a special education teacher and some of my students were motivated by AR points. My own children were/are avid readers and AR hindered their recreational reading. My daughter loved the Harry Potter books and she was about the same age as the kids in the books. The books were still coming out as she was growing up and she was interested in all of the book parties and such that surrounded the releases. But at school, they would not allow her to count HP for AR in middle school because the books were below her reading level. Her reading level in middle school was beyond 12th grade but that's not where her interest level was. I encouraged her to read what she wanted to for her recreational reading and not choose books based on AR points.

For Asian lit, Everything I Never Told You by Ng. It touches on intersectional identities and the need to fit in in a powerful way.

I was pretty lucky I think to have a well designed English Department at my public school, way back in the late ‘80s. After our sophomore year, if you were at the college prep. level, you were able to choose 9 week themed English courses. Different courses were designed by each English teacher, usually around a passion area they had. We would generally read 2-3 books each 9 weeks and write a paper or do a project after each book and of course have class discussions about each book. I can still remember a particular set of class discussions about a book called Praise the Human Season in a nine week course called “From Green to Gold”. Every student also took a semester American Lit. class junior year and a nine week British Lit. Course senior year. As a student way back when, I felt it was a good way to study literature and be introduced to books I may have never chosen to read. It also prepared me really well for college level reading and writing.

Yeah my 9th grader finished The Great Gatsby this semester and I could tell understood almost none of it. We were also studying the 1920s in history but I think it didn't even help him there really.

ALL OF THIS, SUSAN, MY HERO. All of this. Back to back years of semester-long intensives of Great Expectations SLAYED any interest in Dickens for decades for me.

Also, for dystopia, I’m not against Hunger Games, but what about Octavia Butler? And let’s use Vonnegut more. Short, weird, fun.

I read Fahrenheit on my own, because I had watched the movie and it looked interesting. I graduated from high school in 1969 (for reference). We had anthologies each year, along with one or two extra novels (I assume; it's hard to remember!). I remember reading Macbeth and R&J, as well as some sonnets during our poetry unit. Wuthering Heights in my senior year, which I had already read on my own, more than once; it was the only time I ever participated in classroom discussion. 🙂 We read the Scarlet Letter sophomore year; terrible book. I have no idea when I read 1984; maybe my junior year. I think I was already reading own my own (mostly horse books) such that my English classes couldn't mess that up. But when we're talking on the forums, or on social media, I usually tell people to read a variety of genres each year, not just novels, whole works instead of excerpts. The author of Writing Strands, Dave Marks, abhorred products which only included excerpts in their reading/writing instruction. It is probably he who influenced my thoughts in way. 🙂

I homeschooled my 8th, 5th, 3rd, and 1st graders for 3 months while we were out of the country, but since we were coming back to school, I just used their school curriculum. Some of the selections in the Wonders books were great, but I really didn't like the corresponding questions. "What is the author trying to convey by using this word/sentence?" "How doed the diagram help you understand the text?" I think it's important for kids to master reading comprehension and recognize unreliable narrators, but these questions were such a slog!

I had a child in 7th grade public school last year (having been homeschooled through elementary). Her class read The Outsiders and then NEVER discussed it. They simply filled out online questions and submitted their answers. I was appalled! One of the main points of reading a book together is to have common discussion about the book. My kid had discussions about the book with a different teacher at her own incentive and got more out of this discussions that the actual class.

My students loved doing close reads of great books: Great Expectations, Fahrenheit 451, The Brothers K, Lord of the Rings, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Dorian Gray, several Shakespeares, Homer...the list goes on. I think it depends not only on the book but also the love the teacher has for a particular work. If the teacher presents it as relevant and enriching to their lives, presents a story not merely as a written work but also as something to hear and to see the students will more often than not respond in kind. ((IMO)) Shakespeare should be EXPERIENCED, Of Mice and Men is a wonderful listen, others can be read and / or received by audio. I myself am dyslexic and so I came to the table with an "if I can do it you can do it" mentality, and they usually did.

While I can appreciate the need to reevaluate and revamp the suggested/required reading list, I appreciate that I’ve read some of the titles you mentioned, mostly because I had a good teacher that lead excellent discussions, but also because it allowed me to be part of the “great conversation” in a way I wouldn’t have chosen myself. If I talk with a person in their fifties and a high schooler now, we’ve all read The Great Gatsby and can bring it up in a meaningful conversation. So is it perhaps worth requiring some books to be read if is is a book that has achieved enough renown in our culture that it binds us together? If the lists gets revamped for the sake of helping kids adopt reading as a life long persist, which ideally would make us all more well read and able to take part in that Great Conversation, I’d like you to be on the board who gets to decide which ones to keep and which ones to replace. 🙂

I agree and as I am in the US, I would add some Native lit in there. I don’t have great suggestions, but I know they exist.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry in middle school, please!

I'm going to disagree on Of Mice and Men. Both of my kids read it in high school and were pretty taken with it. The Outsiders was a big hit too. My elder son usually read against his will, and he read it twice.

And for heaven's sake, let that Shakespeare play not be Romeo and Juliet. My nephew came home last year spouting off about how Romeo and Juliet is a love story. The poor boy had to hear my lecture about how it is a TRAGEDY and everyone dies FOR A REASON! He thought is was super entertaining, but why didn't they let the kids read Taming of the Shrew? Or A Midsummer Night's Dream? Those plays are just plain fun. I would also add Harry Potter to your list. And they should just be reading them and talking about form. Not analyzing them. Sigh.