View Single Post
Old 02-10-2013, 12:14 AM   #123
Shushan
Bibliophile
Shushan ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Shushan ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Shushan ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Shushan ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Shushan ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Shushan ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Shushan ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Shushan ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Shushan ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Shushan ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Shushan ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Shushan's Avatar
 
Posts: 75
Karma: 695816
Join Date: Jan 2011
Device: Nook Simple Touch, Pandigital Novel, PC
Post

Quote:
You're pretty well read

You're familiar with words like 'Bildungsroman,' 'synecdoche,' and 'anagnorisis,' but perhaps not with today's updated literary curriculum.


I agree that there are HUGE holes in this list - Classics that many of us would have been assigned, and are probably still truly on the English Lit menu in the US. Mark Twain, Pearl S. Buck, Whitman, Orwell, Chaucer, Thoreau, Dante, Joseph Conrad, Melville, Jack London, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and many more classics were on my school's list, and are still regarded as major classic authors, but I don't see any of them here. Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage was the book we had to go along with Civil War lessons. Where is that?

I read a number of the books on their list in college, not high school. I think Molière was assigned at the college level too. Honestly, those plays were a bit naughty for my High School, even conceding that many MTV videos back in the 80's were already worse.


Spoiler:
"The Odyssey," by Homer
I've read it

"Metamorphoses," by Ovid
I've read part of it

"The Nose," by Nikolai Gogol
I've read it

"Candide," by Voltaire
I've read it

"Fathers and Sons," by Ivan Turgenev
I've read it

"The Gift of the Magi," by O. Henry
I've read it

"The Metamorphosis," by Franz Kafka
I've read part of it

"The Grapes of Wrath," by John Steinbeck
I've read it

"Fahrenheit 451," by Ray Bradbury
I've read it

"I Stand Here Ironing," by Tillie Olsen
I've never heard of it

"Things Fall Apart," by Chinua Achebe
I've never heard of it

"To Kill A Mockingbird," by Harper Lee
I've read it

"The Killer Angels," by Michael Shaara
I've never heard of it

"The Joy Luck Club," by Amy Tan
I've read part of it

"In the Time of the Butterflies," by Julia Álvarez
I've heard of it

"The Book Thief," by Marcus Zusak
I've heard of it

"Oedipus Rex," by Sophocles
I've read it

"The Tragedy of Macbeth," by William Shakespeare
I've read it

"A Doll's House," by Henrik Ibsen
I've read it

"Master Harold ... and the boys," by Athol Fugard
I've heard of it

"Sonnet 73," by William Shakespeare
I've read it

"Song," by John Donne
I've read it

"Ozymandias," by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I've read it

"The Raven," by Edgar Allan Poe
I've read it

"We Grow Accustomed to the Dark," by Emily Dickinson
I've read it

"Loveliest of Trees," by A. E. Houseman
I've heard of it

"Lift Every Voice and Sing," by James Weldon Johnson
I've never heard of it

"Yet Do I Marvel," by Countee Cullen
I've never heard it

"Musée des Beaux Arts," by Wystan Hugh Auden
I've read part of it

"Women," by Alice Walker
I've read part of it

"I Am Offering This Poem to You," by Jimmy Santiago Baca
I've never heard of it

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," by Maya Angelou
I've read part of it

"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West," by Dee Brown
I've read it

"Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn," by Evan S. Connell
I've heard of it

"The Story of Art, 16th Edition," by E.H. Gombrich
I've read it

"Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World," by Mark Kurlansky
I've heard of it

"Black, Blue and Gray: African Americans in the Civil War," by Jim Haskins
I've heard of it


IMO this quiz is hopelessly skewed toward the 'mod.' In fact, I have seen a number of these books promoted recently (Cod, SOn of the Morning Star, the Civil War books) which makes me wonder how many are fairly new? That wouldn't test general familiarity to classics
Shushan is offline   Reply With Quote