02-06-2013, 12:11 PM | #16 |
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Same here. You've captured my main impression from the quiz, which was comparing the difference in curriculum now versus when I was in 10th grade. I've read 6 of the books but some as an adult. I was especially surprised that the list was missing Dickens and Twain! We read Shakespeare every year but not Macbeth. Other books that I can vividly remember reading in high school were Lord of the Flies, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Chosen, The Great Gatsby, Catch-22 and Invisible Man. Also I distinctly remember that Grapes of Wrath was my least favorite book read in school!
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02-06-2013, 12:15 PM | #17 |
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If I can find a 15 year old today that could carry on a conversation about reading, I'd be amazed, let alone a 15 year old who could out read me!
I've read a couple of the books on the list, but hadn't heard about most of them. |
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02-06-2013, 12:18 PM | #18 | |
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In no particular order, I bolded ones that I actually took in grade school (up to grade 12): If On a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino Cannery Row - John Steinbeck Jack London - The Call of the Wild Zusak, Markus - The Book Thief H.G. Wells - The War of the Worlds Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five John Updike - Rabbit, Run Natsume Soseki - Kokoro Mary Shelley - Frankenstein William Shakespeare - Hamlet or Macbeth Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy Rohinton Mistry - A Fine Balance Tom Robbins - Another Roadside Attraction Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead Annie Proulx - The Shipping News Robert Priest - The Man who Broke out of the Letter X Yann Martel - Life of Pi Franz Kafka - The Trial Ha Jin - The Crazed Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House Aldous Huxley - Brave New World Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities Kevin Lynch - Image of the City Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee - Inherit the Wind Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time S. E. Hinton - The Outsiders William Golding - Lord of the Flies Steven Galloway - The Cellist of Sarajevo Roddy Doyle - The Snapper (or the Barrytown Trilogy) Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities Douglas Coupland - Generation X Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice David Weinberger - Everything is Miscellaneous Ted Hughes - Birthday Letters These are books that shaped my life. |
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02-06-2013, 12:21 PM | #19 |
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A good quarter of them hadn't actually been written when I was in school .
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02-06-2013, 12:23 PM | #20 |
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^For my list yes. But I'm a firm believer that we need to read a little more current than we do in school.
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02-06-2013, 12:24 PM | #21 | |
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Rubbish, I tell you, absolute rubbish! If it's not one of the 37, it might as well be Captain Underpants! Seriously though, I'd be very curious to see how 10th graders would do if they took this test. They couldn't have been assigned them all. And in any case, having been made to read them doesn't necessarily mean that they retained a great deal. Someone who reads a book by choice might well recall more than someone who was required to read it. |
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02-06-2013, 12:31 PM | #22 |
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No Jane Austen, but a book about cod???
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02-06-2013, 12:34 PM | #23 |
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Cod is very important.
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02-06-2013, 12:39 PM | #24 |
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Read 10
Read part of 4 Heard of 8 Never heard of 15 Did I win? |
02-06-2013, 12:44 PM | #25 |
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I've heard of the book about Cod because I have read (well, read part of) the same author's book about Salt.
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02-06-2013, 12:44 PM | #26 |
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I gave up after about a dozen because it was clear I hadn't heard of most of them.
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02-06-2013, 01:20 PM | #27 |
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Yeesh, what a dreary looking collection of books. I've read 7 of them, and never even heard of a large chunk of them. Oddly, I never read a lot of the books that people seemed to be required to read in high school even during the time I was going through high school. I can't remember which, but I know there's several that were pretty common that for some reason we never did.
Interesting to see Killer Angels on the list. That's probably one of the books that most affected me in high school (and it wasn't even a required reading, as I recall it was one of several different books we had an option of, and wasn't an english class). Up to that point, I had zero interest in civil war history, and had absolutely despised getting dragged around by my parents to see all the various civil war sites around where we live (We lived in Virginia at the time). Gettysburg especially was pretty boring to me. After reading that book, things kinda clicked for me, and I suddenly found myself far more interested in what had happened. Ironically, I've never really made it back to too many of the civil war sites since then, but I'd really love to make it back to Gettysburg some day, because I'd have a far better appreciation for what happened there now. My worst reading experience in high school was Their Eyes Were Watching God. Out of a number of books that I despised reading (including The Great Gatsby, Sons and Lovers, and some Doestyevsky (however it's spelled) book), that one rises to the top as one I never want to ever see again. |
02-06-2013, 01:44 PM | #28 | |
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Books I really enjoyed reading (SciFi and action-adventure) were generally rejected by my teachers, so I suffered through English lit. To this day, I hate reading the likes of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Maugham, etc. |
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02-06-2013, 01:50 PM | #29 |
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When it turned out that I had to click "next" for EVERY SINGLE BOOK [after I had already clicked my selection], I stopped.
So I have no clue if I'm as well read as a 10th grader. I'm certainly not patient enough to put up with badly setup polling... |
02-06-2013, 01:57 PM | #30 |
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I hear ya. Even though I started this thread, I have no intention of taking the test. No way am I clicking my way through 37 pages.
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