I liked The House of Dies Drear and Julie of the Wolves. I don't remember them as being especially depressing. The Westing Game is great. I do think of them as being for younger than 7th grade, though.

I never saw Holden's appeal.

I was class of '91, and like Plei made me realize, Heathers and Breakfast Club were a little more 7th and 8th grade. And I can't think of a movie or book which really captures my high school or college experience, although, at the time, I thought Reality Bites captured the post-college years fairly well.

I find cater in the rye the most forgetable book in the world. I've read it a number of times and never remember it.

Class of 81 -- and no movie is that boreing. I know some that had heathers lives in my school and others that had dazed and confused lives. but not mine.

Recomending the Westing game. -- good question to think about -- why all the sterotypes? My 4th and 5th aloved it, but had a hard time keeping thing straight. Nate should be just right

I related to the Breakfast Club but I thought I was Clare or Brian, but I think I really was Allison the Basket Case. Now, I'm Carl the janitor.

Breakfast Club.

I'm also class of '85.

I'm class of '86 and Breakfast Club pretty much sums up my high school. I know there were Heathers-type girls there, but my HS was really big and I didn't have anything to do with those girls.

Class of '85. There was outright cruelty in both my high schools, but moving from MI to NC meant that I stopped being the regular focus of it. Breakfast Club resonated a bit, but not to an OMG my life extent. Heathers was way too true to high school and junior high life as I knew it, except there weren't the actual deaths. I did hide under a table or two to avoid people, but I never walked in front of a bus.

Class of '79, and I was a loner. I also lived out in the country and the high school was in town, so I only really associated with the other kids in class. Otherwise I was working in the library.

I don't remember reading any of the books that have been mentioned, and if there were any movies that were supposed to define my high school life, I didn't see them. I was reading science fiction and adventure stuff and pretty much anything I could get my hands on. I remember zero books we were set to read during middle school. It's possible my teachers let me be because I was already reading above the grade level. I'm almost certain anything with a whiff of controversy would have been avoided.

I've not seen or read it, but I did read his play The Invention of Love a couple of weeks ago, and it was excellent. He's a hell of a writer.

He really is. I need to read Arcadia, as there were lines and ideas that passed too quickly on stage, and I want to think about them. Fantastic stuff.

Catcher in the Rye irritated me when I read it, but I was in my 20s and reading it for a class on American literature, and I much preferred everything else that was on the syllabus for that class - I found Holden whiny. My class of tenth grade students, on the other hand, loved it - they studied it with my co-teacher, so I didn't experience it with them, but they told me they really enjoyed studying it.

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.

TOTALLY agree, Barb!

I think 7 Habits is actually pretty good. And Hope Was Here is actually pretty great, but very much a girl book.

It always depresses me to see a list of books for kids that is composed mostly of books from when I was a kid, 25 years ago. So many great books have been written since. Trying a little modernity wouldn't ever kill anyone.

Signed,

The English Teacher who teaches primarily Early Modern Lit and Victorian Lit.

So it turns out, Oliver Twist does not end with Fagin and Dodger dancing off into the sunset to steal and corrupt til the end of their days.

t is disappointed

adds Oliver Twist to her reading pile. Adds ToTC and that other one about that other boy.