by Dukasaur on Sat Sep 17, 2022 3:36 pm
Some of the books I remember from high school are George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Allan Silltoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, the Bible's Book of Job, Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. In addition there was a different Shakespeare every year. Mine were Julius Caesar, MacBeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and one of the books of sonnets.
I remember hearing about all the controversies in the U.S. about books like The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird, but in Canada those were never issues. Some schools did them, ours did not. But in neither case was it a political issue, just the opinions of the teacher.
One book I missed reading was Rumble Fish. Our class was doing Of Mice and Men while the other English class was reading Rumble Fish. I felt ripped off, so I borrowed Rumble Fish and read it on my own time.
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire