Huh, that's a fascinating list, Kristin! I've read most of those, but I'm a little surprised to see the Jeanette Winterson title on there. The Passion is my favorite of her books, or was when I went through my huge Jeanette Winterson phase -- which, actually, was in high school, now that I think about it -- but I'm pretty sure it has a fair amount of explicit sex. I'd have to reread it to be sure I'm remembering it correctly, though.

I mean, obviously I think there's nothing wrong with high school students being exposed to books with some sexual content, but it still surprises me to see a school recommending the book, as opposed to a teenager just picking it up on their own at the library.

Anyway, there are some great books on that list. The Poisonwood Bible is another of my favorites. Have fun!

A Confederacy of Dunces is still one of my favorite comic novels.

I just unpacked the booty from the $1 friends of the Austin library sale my wife and I hit on Saturday:

• Nabokov - King, Queen, Knave
• Lethem - Men and Cartoons
• Faulkner - Go Down, Moses
• Faulkner - The Hamlet
• Shirley Jackson - Come Along With Me
• Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling/The Sickness Unto Death
• James - Turn of the Screw and other stories
• Ford - The Good Soldier
• Mill - On Liberty
• Chesterton - The Secret of Father Brown
• Melville - Pierre
• The Education of Henry Adams
• O'Brian - The Yellow Admiral
• Coetzee - Disgrace
• Styron - The Confessions of Nat Turner
• Writers at the Movies (which includes Julian Barnes on Madame Bovary, Coetzee on The Misfits, Lopate on Breathless, Francine Prose on The Godfather, Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz, and Charles Simic on Buster Keaton's Cops)
• Cult Rockers, a little encyclopedia that would make a good gift for a 16-yr-old looking to expand his or her boundaries

Interesting list Kristin. I've read about half of them. Also interesting that two of the non-fiction authors have had some press for being less than non-fictional, and Eggers also played with the line between fiction and non-fiction. You know, I always read Sedaris as fictional, even though I know it's mostly non-fiction.

The word fiction has lost all meaning.

I may tried to read Confederacy of Dunces this summer. I have not been reading much at all lately, and I've been feeling a bit illiterate.

The Passion is my favorite of her books, or was when I went through my huge Jeanette Winterson phase -- which, actually, was in high school, now that I think about it -- but I'm pretty sure it has a fair amount of explicit sex. I'd have to reread it to be sure I'm remembering it correctly, though.

I mean, obviously I think there's nothing wrong with high school students being exposed to books with some sexual content, but it still surprises me to see a school recommending the book, as opposed to a teenager just picking it up on their own at the library.

Well we teach our seniors Angels in America, and that's pretty darned explicit, too. One of the benefits of a liberal LA independent girls school, I guess. I haven't read The Passion, so thanks for the warning.

I will be revising the list before the next school year regardless. And this is just summer reading--I've barely started to design the actual curriculum for the school year yet. I'm pretty excited since this is a singleton class. I have complete freedom and can move at any pace without having to worry about staying in sync with other classes. I haven't had that luxury in years.

So far I think I'm going to be teaching Hamlet, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Angels in America, and possibly Kindred and Death of a Salesman. I have a lot of other ideas, but that's where I'm starting.

In high school, I don't think we were allowed to talk about sex OR god, so it made literature fairly boring!

Their Eyes Were Watching God

I was just thinking about this the other day. I loved it when I read it, all of 18 years old, but I haven't read it in so long that I wonder if it's as good as I remember.

It really, really is. The juxtaposition of Hurston's poetic narrative voice and the lyrical dialects of her characters is magic.

I *loved* that book when I read it for high school, and Kindred is another favorite. Great choices, Kristin!

I bought a hardback copy used last year. It's just sitting on a shelf now, but I'm going to cycle it into the reading list.

When I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher passed around a list of books that some expert group had decided Every High School Student Should Read. (Of course, the list was 3 pages long, which meant no high school student would read them all.) The assignment was to read one book from the list and be prepared to discuss it in a small group setting.

I picked Brave New World, which was a bit daring for a town that held a referendum that year on an anti-obscenity referendum that would have defined the term so broadly that most fiction best-sellers would have been banned. (Okay, this was the heyday of Harold Robbins, but still....) The teacher had a problem in organizing the small groups because she didn't want any group to contain more than one person who'd picked Catcher in the Rye.