That's a totally ridiculous question - how is that level of detail even remotely relevant to whether or not you read and understood the book??

This is a sensible question. Do you expect a sensible answer?

I read Brave New World for high school sophomore English, and Clockwork Orange for pleasure no later than freshman year of college.

Of the two, I'd pick BNW. BNW is a good choice. On one hand, it's accessible to an intelligent reader, and on another, it explores very legitimate issues of mechanization and individuality.

CO isn't a bad choice. It explores issues of the individual and society. However, it's less accessible, and I'm very, very glad I had a copy with a glossary in the back. But constant referring to the glossary breaks up the story. (sj, I'm assuming your cousin doesn't speak any Russian. The slang owes a fair amount to the Russian language, and a little background reduces the need for a glossary.)

But I haven't read the others, and any of those may be very good choices, too.

I suspect most of us in this thread were That Kid who read ALL the summer reading books...or never got around to them because we were so busy reading other things.

My cousin is not that kid, his older brother was but him nsm.

CO isn't a bad choice. It explores issues of the individual and society. However, it's less accessible, and I'm very, very glad I had a copy with a glossary in the back. But constant referring to the glossary breaks up the story. (sj, I'm assuming your cousin doesn't speak any Russian. The slang owes a fair amount to the Russian language, and a little background reduces the need for a glossary.)

I am fairly confident he doesn't know any Russian.

Thanks, everyone for the advice!

Tributes in Memorim Lilian Jackson Braun - who passed away last week just short of her 98th birthday. (Her birthday was June 20th and she passed on June 4th.)

Aw, I read a bunch of The Cat Who... books as a teenager.

Brave New World also has the virtue of being short, for people who aren't big readers.

Brave New World also has the virtue of being short, for people who aren't big readers.

A Clockwork Orange is also short, but that's probably its only virtue.

A Clockwork Orange is also short, but that's probably its only virtue.

Pfah! Can you have so little love for the play of language?

Yes.

Oh, I wondered how there were so many Cat Who books. I'm afraid I started going "That cat would have died by now" and didn't read any more.

I don't think we had reading lists in school. Not that any of my teachers would have been concerned about my reading in summer, as I often got in trouble for reading during class. (Ah, the year I was seated in the back corner, next to the classroom book case, that was a good year. Though I did nearly fail algebra.)

One brilliant English teacher had a fatal flaw on his tests, because he mostly tested on the footnotes. I never did read Moby Dick but I read all the footnotes in the edition we were issued, and I aced the test and pop quizzes. Mr. Berryhill was delighted with me, but we never did get into what Moby Dick meant. We did have some great arguments during the poetry section, though he was horrified at how abysmal I was in grammar. I have never been good with identifying the parts of sentences, though I can write a kick-ass one.

That's a totally ridiculous question - how is that level of detail even remotely relevant to whether or not you read and understood the book??

To be fair, these quizzes were not designed to see if we had understood the book, just to test if we had read it. In English class at my school, we would have a book assigned a couple of chapters a day, and then each day, the class period started out with a 10 question quiz to see if we read it. Basically, I think the use was to scare people into doing the reading so we could have a decent discussion in class.

I was always getting burned, though, because I was so used to reading books in one sitting, I would just read the whole book, and couldn't remember what chapter I was supposed to be quizzing for.

Then we would have an actual comprehensive test once we finished reading the book.

I think the objective was also to teach us how to read and what to look for, but we never got a lesson on that, which in retrospect would have been helpful.