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).
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 loved the descriptions of the school during the summer. I always point to that as an example of writing that really captures not just the setting, but the *mood* of a specific time and place.
Phineas, though? Didn't get tossed off the branch soon enough.
How do we feel about Ponyboy?
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."
Heh. At age five, I could have told you that Ollie North was a liar. I'm not sure I would have understood exactly what he lied about, but I did know that the man on TV in the fancy uniform that everyone seemed to respect was a liar. A few years later, I was watching the news each evening, and knew all about Gary Hart.
Perhaps I was an overly cynical kid. But it seems like people pretending to be something they're not is a pretty big theme in kids books from the seventies -- Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great comes to mind immediately, but also several of the minor characters in the Ramona books, and probably a bunch of others that I can't think of right now.
I didn't read Watership Down until a few years ago, and I was probably in the totally wrong frame of mind for it, because my reaction was mostly "Bunnies shouldn't be this depressing!"
