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

[crich70]

My results:

You might be well read, but not according to these standards

It's certainly possible to be a well-read person without having cracked a single one of these books, and to be fair, these novels might not have placed on your tenth-grade reading list back in the day.

Spoiler:

"The Odyssey," by Homer

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

I've heard of it
"The Nose," by Nikolai Gogol

I've never heard of it
"Candide," by Voltaire

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

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

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

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

I've heard of it
"Fahrenheit 451," by Ray Bradbury

I've read part of 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 heard of it
"The Killer Angels," by Michael Shaara

I've never heard of it
"The Joy Luck Club," by Amy Tan

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

I've never heard of it
"The Book Thief," by Marcus Zusak

I've never heard of it
"Oedipus Rex," by Sophocles

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

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

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

I've never heard of it
"Sonnet 73," by William Shakespeare

I've heard of it
"Song," by John Donne

I've never heard of it
"Ozymandias," by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I've never heard of it
"The Raven," by Edgar Allan Poe

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

I've never heard of it
"Loveliest of Trees," by A. E. Houseman

I've never 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 never heard of it
"Women," by Alice Walker

I've never heard 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 heard of it
"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West," by Dee Brown

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

I've never heard of it
"Black, Blue and Gray: African Americans in the Civil War," by Jim Haskins

I've never heard of it

A lot of them I've at least heard of though my reading tastes haven't led me to read them in the past.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by crich70

A lot of them I've at least heard of though my reading tastes haven't led me to read them in the past.

Thanks for posting the list. Now I can go through it and see what I've read.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Your resultsYou might be well read, but not according to these standards It's certainly possible to be a well-read person without having cracked a single one of these books, and to be fair, these novels might not have placed on your tenth-grade reading list back in the day.

You're sort of well read
You could probably hold your own in a literary conversation, but perhaps not with today's 15-year-olds.

Read: 14
Partly Read: 1
Heard Of: 9
No Clue: 13

[voracious71]

I took the quiz and received a "you're pretty well read". Some of the books I hadn't heard of..

[voracious71]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

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!

Ha! Between high school and college, I read that book three times. I actually liked the book but by the third time, I was sick of it.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Thanks for posting the list. Now I can go through it and see what I've read.

You're welcome tubemonkey.

I am not as well read as a 10th grader, mostly because I have very different tastes in books. Actually, that's not true. I once said, "sometimes, just sometimes, grass is green," to a group of grade 10 students and they practically fell over laughing. They got the Great Gatsby reference immediately and we had an interesting discussion about symbolism in literature thereafter. (A discussion, incidentally, that would have been banned from a grade 10 English class for being so blasphemous.)

[Iznogood]

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

Your resultsYou might be well read, but not according to these standards It's certainly possible to be a well-read person without having cracked a single one of these books, and to be fair, these novels might not have placed on your tenth-grade reading list back in the day.

I too seem to be sub-standard. But do I care? Not one bit! I read for fun, not to be as well-read as an american 10th grade.

[DianNC]

I went through all 37 pages (goes pretty fast) only to find out that I'm 'sort of' well-read

Considering how many I'd never heard of, I expected a big old...

"You're just plain dumb!!!"

[Billi]

How compulsory is this list? Has every 10th grader nowadays to read this list or does it only apply to special courses for (English) literature or language?

(I am a little bit ashamed when I'm thinking back of my list or compare it to the books my daughter had to read.)

[dreams]

I ended up with

You're sort of well read

You could probably hold your own in a literary conversation, but perhaps not with today's 15-year-olds.

I seriously doubt there are that many High School students that have read or have heard of many of those books.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by dreams

I seriously doubt there are that many High School students that have read or have heard of many of those books.

I agree. In the last conversation I had with someone around that age the books they were reading in school were pretty much the same ones I had read years ago.

[tubemonkey]

Since many here aren't as well-read as a 10th grader, how many are smarter than a 5th grader?

[Latinandgreek]

I have read 16 books on the list. I found it a bit of an odd list for a 10th grade curriculum, to be honest.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I've read three or so, but I've never heard of most of them. Inevitable, I suppose.

I've heard of most of them. But I am very happy not to have been forced to read them in school. I have to say, if this is the sort of stuff kids in grade 10 are reading, no wonder kids don't like to read.

Most of them are heavy dull works and to add on top of it the way most teachers dissect the books, it gets even worse.