Today's
Road Trip Wednesday from
YA Highway is a topic near and dear to my heart:
This Week's Topic is: Back to school time! What's your favorite book that you had to read for a class?
See, it
is back-to-school time. But not for me, for the first time since I was four years old! It is...weird. And kind of awesome. I joined millions of Americans today in the time-honored pastime of folding laundry while watching an afternoon talk show (my 4pm favorite? Ellen!).
But before I get school out of my system altogether, here are some books I loved when they were assigned to me (sorry,
Gatsby and
Wuthering Heights; I hated you in high school. Silly me.)
This was the only book from 9th grade English that I actually enjoyed. This was deeply disappointing, as I loved to read, and had middle school teachers who assigned awesome books like:
This one seems tame by the standards of modern "all the adults have dropped dead and the kids are in charge" books (do we have a more concise name for this genre? "Oldpocalypse"? "Gerondemic"?) but when I was in 7th grade, this seemed nothing short of revolutionary. I wanted to move into my school with a cute boy and loot grocery warehouses!
Ok, to be fair, by the time this was assigned by my beloved 8th grade English teacher, I had already read it. But I was so excited that everyone else was going to read it, and I wrote an essay about it that I still remember because it was called "World Without Love" (Like the song, which I had recently learned from watching
Ally McBeal. In retrospect, it feels really squicky that I was watching
Ally McBeal at the same time that I was being assigned to read
The Giver. Y'all, that show was
racy. But my friends were watching it, and it marks the ONE AND ONLY time that "everyone else is________" EVER EVER EVER worked on my mom. EVER. Sorry, I digress.)
Of course, if we extend this all the way through grad school, then I have to include one more...
I took a class on YA Lit in ed school, and while I liked most of what we read, this was the clear standout. It's also the only one on this list I haven't re-read (and re-read, and re-read...) so I think it's probably time. (Oh, wait, if you listen hard, you can hear my TBR pile forming into a giant book-zombie and crashing towards me. Ok, ok, never mind, that re-read will have to wait a little while.)
Great choices! I remember liking The Giver as well. I don't remember it *too* clearly, but it seems like it was kind of a dystopian YA before the wave of popularity hit.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it was. I actually built a "dystopian lit" class around that, The Hunger Games, and Animal Farm a few years ago--RIGHT before the dystopian wave crested. Like, the first trimester I taught it, none of the kids knew that word. The second trimester--three months later--I had to turn kids down because it was suddenly the new hot thing.
DeleteGreat picks! My daughter keeps tell me I MUST read The Giver. It does sound like my kind of book. I just recently read The Book Thief and loved it, as well. To Kill a Mockingbird... how can anyone not love that book?!
ReplyDeleteAnd you'll read The Giver in no time! Pick it up some weekend, it will take you like four hours. It's so great. And there are sequels--the fourth of which is coming out this fall, I think--but I have mixed feelings about them.
DeleteSuch great choices! I haven't read The Girl Who Owned a City, but all the others are at the top of my list. Guess it means I should pick up TGWOaC immediately!
ReplyDeleteLike I said, it will feel pretty tame now, but it's a fun, quick read. Definitely interesting to compare to like, the Gone series by Michael Grant. They're VERY different in tone.
DeleteI actually just barely read The Giver for the first time and it was really fantastic! Have you read any of the "sequels"?
ReplyDeleteYeah, I've read the two that are out (but only once each, in comparison with...I don't know, at least twenty times for The Giver?) I like them as books in their own right; I'm iffier about holding them in the same place in my head as The Giver. I know that's kind of a weird thing but I had my own idea about what happened at the end of The Giver, and I lived with that idea for almost fifteen years before reading the sequels. That said, I'm pretty excited to read Son when it comes out. I might go back and read all four together and see what that does.
DeleteI loved TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Seems like everyone's mentioning that one. THE BOOK THIEF is a great book, too!
ReplyDeleteTKAM is great, also, because I love it now for totally different reasons than I did in high school. It was accessible to me then, but I find something else in it every time I re-read it.
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