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Books I think everyone should read. Enrollment for this class is limited. If you're on the waitlist, be prepared to wait, for about twenty years! Alumni tuition discount will apply.
2003-04-18 - 4:58 p.m.


I'm bored as all hell, so here is the answer to one of seastreet's questions, which I stumbled upon by way of pandionna.

(2) If you're to design a semester's curriculum for a literature course, and your students can buy and read ten books, what do you put on the list, and why? What's your course called?

Oh man, I am about the farthest thing from the teacher type you could get. I'm too scared to even teach flute to ten year olds. But, hypothetically, were I to be teaching a literature course, I would call it "Books I Think Everyone Should Read", of course. Intellectual, isn't it? But there will be no essay writing in my class, that's for sure. That always killed any enjoyment I got out of reading books in school. Instead I would assign creative projects like drawing pictures, composing jingles, making elementary school-esque dioramas, that sort of thing. Good times.

Anyway, here is the list of required reading:

1) "Jane Eyre" - Charlotte Bronte

and

2) "Wuthering Heights" - Emily Bronte. I can never decide which of these books I like better. So I won't. "Reader, I married him." "Nelly, I am Heathcliff!" I think it can be said that Jane and Mr. Rochester, and Catherine and Heathcliff were just different aspects of the personalities of Charlotte and Emily, respectively. I read that somewhere, I swear. But then again, aren't a writer's characters always, in some indirect way at least, representations of their personality? Ouch, this thinking is making my head hurt.

3) "On the Road" - Jack Kerouac. America, and her love affair with the open road, through the eyes of the chronic wanderers Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity. I wish it still existed.

4) "A Streetcar Named Desire" - Tennessee Williams. This isn't technically a book, but still. Stella! I can't help but thinking how perfect the casting of Vivien Leigh was in the movie. This is the story of how Scarlett O'Hara turned into Blanche DuBois. And it was parodied on "The Simpsons". What could be better?

5) "To Kill a Mockingbird" - Harper Lee. The one book that I liked unconditionally from eleventh grade English. Probably because we weren't required to overanalyze every single word (*ahem* "The Scarlet Letter" *cough cough*). Anyway, we need more Boo Radleys in the world.

6) "High Fidelity" - Nick Hornby. Sure, it's not a "classic". But it will be. Honesty. Good music. Love. That sort of thing.

7) "A Prayer for Owen Meany" - John Irving. There is nothing I can say that would do this book justice. So, were I to be standing in front of a hypothetical class after having them read this book, my lesson plan would probably consist of a lot of sitting in silent contemplation.

8) "The Secret Garden" - Frances Hodgson Burnett. So it's a children's book. So what? It has all the 19th century Gothic elements of my first two selections (junior Gothic heroine-in-training, large, mysterious house, seemingly bleak Yorkshire moorland setting, etc.), with an unabashedly happy ending that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. "I shall live forever and ever and ever!"

9) "Crime and Punishment" - Fyodor Dostoevsky. My favorite book from AP English. I really should read this again. Sometimes good people in terrible circumstances do terrible things. So who is the bigger villain in this circumstance, the "criminal", or society itself?

10) The "Lord of the Rings" trilogy (in one of those big thick versions so it all counts as one book, as intended) - J.R.R. Tolkien. In this class, we can not leave my inner geek unappeased. Good vs. evil. What else can you say?

What a good way to alleviate boredom for an hour. Now I guess I'm off to go do nothing! :-P

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