From my email
I am a librarian at a high school and the superintendent of my school district tasked me with creating a great books program for ambitious high school students which culminates in an award at graduation. We talked about 4-5 books a year for four years. Students would read the book and then discuss it with me for an 30 mins-1hr as the accountability component (no tests or essays was my preference). I was wondering what some of the titles you might pick for this age range (14-17).
Here is my list. What do you all recommend? (I don’t know much about High School curricula, and I assume you all read Little Women and so on…)
UPDATE: I should add, there needs to be an American emphasis, hence why I have Moby Dick, not Anna Karenina (though that would be a marvellous choice for the 17 year olds).
14 years old
Frederick Douglass Narrative
The Handmaid's Tale
Asimov, Foundation
Matthew's Gospel
Exodus
15 years old
Henry James The Turn of the Screw
Poe The Raven, Fall of the House of Usher
Selected Emily Dickinson
Solaris Stanislaw Lem
Macbeth
16 years old
Marquez Love in the Time of Cholera
Wharton The Age of Innocence
Plato's Symposium
Song of Songs
Ecclesiastes
The Winter's Tale
17 years old
Moby Dick
King Lear
The Odyssey
Borges, Ficciones
Kafka, short fiction
Book of Job
Others might be Autobiography of Malcolm X, Walt Whitman, Psalms, Atlas Shrugged, Harriet Jacobs.
I should add, there needs to be an American emphasis, hence why I have Moby Dick, not Anna Karnenina (though that would be a marvellous choice for the 17 year olds)
In Ireland, we have what's called a "transition year" at 15/16, where students are off an exam-based curriculum, do lots of personal development work, have no homework etc. I spent part of mine reading War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Vanity Fair. On that basis, I would definitely recommend Anna Karenina as a possibility. I liked the idea from the poster of giving students a choice of books to select.