Posted on 05/30/2014 12:34:14 PM PDT by EveningStar
You probably SparkNoted these books before, but now's your chance to read them.
(Excerpt) Read more at buzzfeed.com ...
I went to Catholic school in the 70s. My daughter is in public school and her reading lists are not so different that what mine were back then, including many on this list.
My parents gave it to me to read when I was 14, and it began the development of that process for me-as well as my understanding of why my parents were politically the way they were...
I’ve read it several times since then, and now I’m working on going galt to the max ...
I wouldn’t want to waste so much time reading a bunch of novels; I prefer reading about real people.
“They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast.”
I do remember things from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (”The evil that men do lives after them - The good are oft interred with their bones”) and Macbeth. From Macbeth, the witches tell him early on “No man of woman born shall harm Macbeth” but at the end as he lay mortally wounded Macduff informs him “I was from my mother's womb untimely ripp’d” meaning he was brought into the world by Cesarean, not “born.”
A lot of the lines they give the books are pretty insipid, though. When books become assimilated into the culture they may not really make people "question" much of anything. Catch-22 is hardly likely to make anybody feel good about US politics. Are you really going to be jealous of George and Lenny's friendship in Of Mice and Men? Is reading Kafka really going to make you change how you treat people?
I read history and biography. Only novels I read are Louis L’Amour westerns. I love westerns.
Clarke's Childhoods End is a great book.
100% with you! Me too..... :(
Also on the list should be:
The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask by Dumas
The House of the seven gables—Hawthorn.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tom Sawyer—Mark Twain
30 Seconds over Tokyo
The Longest Day.
I too. Real events.
However, some of those required books were OK, some not, many overrated.
But I have read some fiction myself, including Gone with the Wind and lighter “child” classics such as Little Women and Black Beauty. Great reads!
Good reading list.
I know, huh?
A most excellent story-teller.
Bloody socialist/Marxist - but a great read.
VERY thankfully, I imagine. DH went to Catholic school. Something about it must have taught him to really be a whiz at studying. It amazes me. I have to *work* at learning things. It’s like he just reads & it’s in there.
Public school must really vary a lot by school. He has been substitute teaching (& just passed his EC6 to teach/ also passed ESL- which you have to have to get a job on an alternative certificate)...anyway, he is in the district where he went to high school & I attended all 12 years. I’ve been impressed. So far, he hasn’t seen the usual indoctrination stuff & they do have a moment of silence & are required to stand up for it. Even the schools that pay more per hour (because of the make up of the students, I guess) have not been bad. Mho is that parenting plays a huge role in how kids do. He’s had 1 real problem child. It was a little second grade girl in an affluent school & she was White. Even the “alternative school” has impressed him.
(I’m in Texas, so no Common Core & depending on where they are, it’s still a pretty traditional place)
He would love to teach at his parish school. (I am Church of Christ, so that’s why I say “his”. I enjoy it, too, though)
The Great Gatsby, To Kill A Mockingbird, 1984, Slaughter House Five, Frankenstein, Animal Farm and Metamorphosis are great books and should be read by all intelligent and informed adults.
The rest range from ok to overrated. Read them if they interest you but there are better books out there.
I always thought Catcher in the Rye was very overrated. I wonder if it is just a coincidence that several troubled young men who went on to kill people read the book and were influenced by it.
Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley, Sirhan Sirhan and others were said to have read it several times and been heavily influenced by it.
Instead of these tired examples of pop books, here is a more challenging list:
1) The Long Ships, by Frans G. Bengtsson (1943). An adventure of the Viking Era, set in the late 10th Century. It has been translated into 23 languages.
2) Selections from Les Misérables (1862). Called the greatest novel ever written, it takes readers to emotional lows and highs far beyond what most people could experience.
3) I, Claudius, by Robert Graves (1934).
4) Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury (1953).
5) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1962).
6) The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain.
7) The Happy Return (Beat to Quarters in the US), the first of the Horatio Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester (1937).
8) The Federalist Papers.
9) The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane (1895).
10) The Green Berets, by Robin Moore (1965).
On one Navy deployment I read all of the Tarzan novels.
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