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.

Sorry, I'm with Megan here.

I came at Clockwork Orange from being an angry young punker and thinking the movie was 'cool' so when I got around to reading the book it was quite an eye opener how differently the movie presented the world. I'm glad I read it.

The advantage of Henrietta Lacks is also that, were he interested, there are at least three radio interviews with the author that are super interesting as well.

Feed might be a quicker read if he isn't hooded by Henrietta's story.

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

That's probably not going to be a draw for someone who doesn't like reading, though I agree with you. By the end of the book I was thinking in nadsat.