The Westing Game was the one book that sounded as if it could be interesting to him out of the lot. Of course, I have a knee-jerk reaction to Black Beauty, because it made me sob like a baby.

Main reason I said it was depressing, was that it just seems overall a very limited list when there are so very many books they could choose from.

Seems to me too that I read Black Beauty and Julie of the Wolves in fourth or fifth grade and this is a seventh grade list.

I read The Westing Game around fifth grade, I think.

I'm trying to remember what I read in seventh grade English. Only thing I can think of is Where the Red Fern Grows, which is also depressing.

So many tear-jerker animal stories for the young.

We read The Red Pony and The Diary of Anne Frank in seventh grade.

Lots of tearjerkers.

We read The Red Pony in ninth grade and Diary of Anne Frank in eighth.

Barb, Chatty!Co-Worker's son has to read Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens, and so Chatty is reading it first, and he said it's actually good, seems helpful and written appropriately for that age group, and is even funny. FWIW.

"You're just figuring out at age 16 that most of the world is phonies? Didn't the rest of us realize that somewhere around age 8?"

I didn't. Not that I posit myself as the norm, and I am fairly socially backward. But still. At age 8 I was pretty much "Jump rope, yay!", not "The world is full of people who are presenting themselves falsely in order to gain respect, money, sex, or drugs. Shame on them."

But, again -- socially backward.

One character who (I think) kids were supposed to like, but who I never EVER liked was Phineas from A Separate Peace. Talk about a phony. I never ever bought his cheerful enthusiasm, hail-fellow-well-met schtick.

But perhaps I have issues.

Jeez, maybe I was just ahead of the curve or something, but we read Anne Frank in sixth grade and Go Ask Alice in... ninth, I think. (Although I think we had to get permission slips for that one.)

Ugh. I HATED A Separate Peace. I don't remember it well enough to remember specific characters, but I do remember hating pretty much everything about it.

I'm with Steph on the potential backwardness, but it may also be that I am pretty sure we are very close to the same age, and also grew up closer to the mid-west than NYC (as I think upstate NY has much more in common with Ohio than NYC).

There is, also, I think very distinct break in those who graduated from high school in the early nineties and before and those in the late nineties. As a 1991 graduate, I would almost say the movie Heathers was fairly representative of my high school experience. Later in the nineties, it almost seemed that what was once the ultimate in "uncool" became "cool". This may also be why hipsters seem to dress like the boys whose mother's dressed them to go to school in 1988.

I think Hil and I are the same age (give or take a couple years - same generation anyway), and I remember hating CiTR and thinking Holden was an entitled whiny brat who needed to get the fuck over himself and out of my English class.

I was fairly alone in this opinion, but then, I was also the only person in the class who loved Watership Down (which I'd read approximately fifteen thousand times already).