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?

Written by a girl.

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!"

How do we feel about Ponyboy?

Emmett read The Outsiders for school this year and LOVED it. One of his favorite books.

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.

Fucking SubPop! I blame them! Have since '91.

Though (class of '92), my high school experience was not very Heathers-like. Middle school, yes. High school, no.

I think it would be interesting (although more in the movies thread) to compare and contract Mean Girls and Heathers as sort of the quintessential high achool experience.

Which, I think Plei is right, really translates onto middle school more than High School now that I think about it.

I am glad to hear Emmett liked The Outsiders, as it was one of my favorites.

My high school experience (class of '85) included cliques, but only in a really mild way. There was no outright malice that I remember.

Then again, I hung around with the stoners a lot of the time, so.