Are you as well-read as a 10th grader?

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

They sure have changed what you read in high school. I was in honors and AP English in high school, I received college credit for my English classes in high school. I am not recognizing a good number of the books.

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!

[AlbertaCowboy]

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.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

Perhaps we should all pick out own list of 37 books, rather than someone else's. It's funny not to get "credit" for classics that aren't on this list. No points for Don Quixote! No points for Triant Lo Blanc! :-) At worst, I'm not reading the same books that are being assigned to 10th graders. That doesn't mean I'm less well-read.

I like that idea. Name 37 books you've read that you think others should read:

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.

[HarryT]

A good quarter of them hadn't actually been written when I was in school .

[HomeInMyShoes]

^For my list yes. But I'm a firm believer that we need to read a little more current than we do in school.

[QuantumIguana]

Originally Posted by Tshoe

Very good point. I think Gone With the Wind and Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina should count for something...

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.

[dandelioncottage]

No Jane Austen, but a book about cod???

[HomeInMyShoes]

Cod is very important.

[DiapDealer]

Read 10
Read part of 4
Heard of 8
Never heard of 15

Did I win?

[QuantumIguana]

I've heard of the book about Cod because I have read (well, read part of) the same author's book about Salt.

[tecweston]

I gave up after about a dozen because it was clear I hadn't heard of most of them.

[piper28]

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.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

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.

That describes me in school. Books I was forced to read were never read thoroughly. I skimmed through the book and browsed CliffsNotes for just enough info to survive class discussions and tests.

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.

[Ravensknight]

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...

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Ravensknight

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...

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.