Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Road Trip Wednesday: No More Required Reading For Me!

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.)


10 comments:

  1. 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.

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    1. Yeah, 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.

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  2. Great 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?!

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    1. And 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.

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  3. Such 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!

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    1. Like 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.

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  4. I actually just barely read The Giver for the first time and it was really fantastic! Have you read any of the "sequels"?

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    1. Yeah, 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.

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  5. I loved TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Seems like everyone's mentioning that one. THE BOOK THIEF is a great book, too!

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    1. TKAM 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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