Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine International high school reading lists?

I'm just wondering what books all you euros had to read in high school or whatever you call it over there.

I am re-reading the Great Gatsby currently which is a popular one here in the USA for students. It makes more sense now.

I also once read that the Memoirs of Hadrian is among many required reading lists in european schools. I don't know if that is true or not but it was a book I was planning to read. Wouldn't mind hearing of some others just because I'm curious.

Thanks

It's "high school" in Greece too (3 junior high grades or Gymnasion, 3 senior high grades called Lykeion).

Generally speaking most of the books read or studied through textbooks are either ancient Greek classical literature, like Homer, Sophocles, Eyripides etc, or modern Greek literature like Kazantzakis, Loudemis etc.
Those students who prefer a more "classical" education also take Latin and Latin literature classes.
There are short stories or excerpts from foreign authors in the Literature school textbooks. (Literature is a prerequisite in all 6 grades).
Reading extracurricular books or texts is not mandatory but school libraries offer Greek editions of classic authors like Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, Herman Hesse, Lewis Carrol, J.R.R. Tolkien (that's a rather recent addition to school libraries), J.M.Barrie, Jack London, Herman Melville, Jules Vern, etc.

The majority of Greeks under 50 years old speak English fairly well (some speak French, German or Italian too) since English, and French/German language classes are mandatory through all 6 grades of high school.

Most teens and young adults also attend private tutoring language schools in the afternoon (the cost is quite low) and they read a great number of books in the original language they were written, before getting a foreign language diploma.

All this shouldn't give the impression that most Greeks "read" anyway. They prefer watching the news, soccer matches, soap operas or reality tv.
Still, many of us don't have to wait until a book is translated in Greek.
The latest Harry Potter book, for example, will be on sale in Greek in about 10 days, but the majority of teenaged or older HP fans have already read it in English since July.

Cool Dain! I had to read lots of classic Greek literature here in the USA. I actually was a huge classical lit/myth fan even before comics.

How about you guys in UK, France, Germany, Spain or anywhere else?

I like world mythology and folklore too, Jorge, and I'd also like to know what other Europeans read during their school years.

I didn't go to high school in Europe, but perhaps you'd be interested in the books that we had to read in Colombia?

We read a lot of Spanish classics, things like La Celestina (no idea how that's called in English), Lazarillo de Tormes, or authors like Lope de Vega, Miguel de Unamuno and, obviously, Cervantes. I remember that I had to read the Quijote (both tomes) from cover to cover. I hated it. Later on I read the second part again, and I quite enjoyed it.

We also read a lot of Latin American literature. Garcia Marquez, obviously, but also Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Ernesto Sabato, etc., also poetry from Neruda, Ruben Dario and Gabriela Mistral.

As for World Literature, I remember reading both the Iliad and the Odyssey in their entirety. In Philosophy class I had to read Plato's Dialogues. I don't think I understood much of it. We also read Victor Hugo, Petrarca, Steinbeck, Goethe, Schiller, Dostoevski, Twain, Flaubert and yes, Shakespeare. To this day I look for Shakespeare in translation. I just understand it better.

Interesting topic of discussion. I'm looking forward to discovering what is read in high school in Europe. Or in Asia (Philippines, anybody?)

Juan

Neither did I, Doctor One.

What I hated was the Lysias Lectures in school because they were so BORING and repetitive like a bad sermon. I loved Antigone by Sophocles and the Odyssey. Good characters, important subjects that really made you think and...fantasy.

Marquez, Neruda, Fuentes, Sabato and many other Latin American authors and poets are very, very popular here too.

Doc, thanks that a pretty cool list. I haven't read any South American authors but they are on my radar.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Paulo Coelho, & Jorge Borges to just name a few.

Antigone and the Odyssey are probably my favorite of all the Classical Greek Lit, Dain.

Tons of books I read in high school I barely gave a chance and years later really got into them upon a reread (Lord of the Flies comes to mind). Of course, some I felt were 'life-changing' to me, like the Outsiders and Of Mice and Men.

Er...sorry to side track the thread! I'm curious like Jorg is!

One of the reasons I liked Antigone (as well as Iphigeneia) was that in the last grade we studied its deeper and more philosophical aspects. The focus had shifted from grammar, syntax and more grammar and syntax of Ancient Greek to the real meaning of the play.
It's a pity we never studied comedies like Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes but its profane and irreverent language would be shocking (to the School System and the Church. Us kids had already read Aristophanes just for the juicy parts).

Try Jorge Amado, a Brazilian author that is just a delight. Dona Flor and her two husbands is a hoot (but certainly not appropriate for school children, if you know what I mean...)

Come to think of it, since Jorge changed the topic's title to International, why not post what is read in American high schools too?
Are reading lists the same everywhere or do they vary from state to state or city to city? Are they updated? Are fantasy and science fiction books included nowadays in reading lists?

Some books I remember from my highschool days (I'm 32).

The Crucible, The Glass Menagerie, The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice & Men, Grapes of Wrath, the Great Gatsby, The Old Man & the Sea, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Yearling(ugh), The Catcher in the Rye, Slaughter House Five, Death of a Salesman.

Mark Twain, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Arthur Miller, John Irving seem to be cover most of the authors.

Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Bell Jar, Picture of Dorian Grey, Once and Future King, Animal Farm. Just going by memory.

Lots of Shakespeare. Lots of Classics (Oedipus, Seven against Thebes, Antigone, the Illiad, the Odyssey, etc). Dante's Inferno.

I read Science Fiction in high school but it was actually part of my science classes. I, Robot & other Asimov stuff, Robin Cook stuff, H.G. Wells stuff, etc.

This is a really interesting thread!

What I still can remember reading in a German Gymnasium ( = 9 years of secondary education) from 1988-1997 (since I also think it's kind of interesting when you read what you, err, read):


Thomas Mann, Tristan
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Physicists
Friedrich Schiller, Intrigue and Love
Frank Wedekind, Spring Awakening
Martin Walser, Runaway Horse
Hans Peter Richter, Friedrich
Georg Büchner, Woyzeck
Gottfried Keller, Kleider machen Leute
Jakob Wassermann, Das Gold von Caxamalca (I don't know if the last 2 were ever translated into English)
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther & Doctor Faustus
E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Sandman
Max Frisch, Andorra & Homo Faber
Hugo v. Hofmannsthal, Elektra
Heinrich Böll, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
Sophokles, Antigone
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Emilia Galotti
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest
George Orwell, Animal Farm
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
William Golding, Lord of the Flies


We read Golding and Huxley in the German translation (oh God, the Huxley translation - I don't know when it was made, but it took certain liberties with the source material that would be unthinkable nowadays - at least I hope so. They changed names, probably in a bid to make the book more "teutonic" or whatever. So the main protagonist "John" became "Michel", for example. These changes didn't register with us, back then, but the name Michel struck us as so outdated and buffoonish already that it became a constant source of hilarity during reading.)

The only books I remember reading in the original were Animal Farm (I really wonder what the hell else we ever read in English class ) and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince and, well, Astérix (we really were too inept to read anything else in the original French. )

Everything else on the list we read in the original German (well, apart from Sophokles, obviously). In hindsight, we seem to have diligently avoided most foreign-language literature. Kind of a shame, really, but most people here have already hinted at that during high school you're not necessarily at your best when it comes to understanding what you're reading. So maybe it's better to discover most books later on on your own when you have the capacity to comprehend them as well as the interest to read them in the fist place.


Jorge, I sometimes see what you're up to in the "So what are you READING?" thread. You're obviously trying to work your way through the classics of all of world literature!

I would say that specific books read vary quite a bit from one school to the next in the U.S., but the list of authors read is probably fairly standardized (I'll post my own lists later).

One thing that's interesting is that, other than Greek (and a few Latin) classics in translation, we read very little that wasn't originally published in English. So my last two years we focused on American literature one year and English literature the next, but we never read anything like Marquez or Borges or anything like that. Even at the college level, I believe its typical that we only read foreign language literature in foreign language courses.

It's not too different here either EDE. Only in the last two decades were other, non-"classical" books/stories from foreign authors included in school books. With the exception of Greek or Latin literature very little was considered "academic" or "classical" or even "correct" enough for high school students.
And I think many of us in Greece who grew up before the 80s and 90s missed a lot. There's such a wealth of ideas and views in World Lit., modern World Lit. that personally I find it narrow-minded, speaking for Greece, not to make all this available to students.
Back then the general "excuse" for this kind of silent censorship was "dangerous ideas" whatever that meant...
Things have changed somewhat today, but most of us who like reading, discovered authors like those Jorge and Insomniac Girl listed by ourselves either in Greek translations or in English and other languages.

Insomniac Girl said Oh, God! They did that in Germany, too??
That's what they did with many names, even authors' name here too in the distant past to make them sound more "Greek". Even remembering some of the names they changed makes me shudder.

Shakespeare became Sekspiros (Spiro the sex guy?)
Charlotte Bronte became Karlota Vronthe
Jules Verne became Ioulios Verne (this one isn't that bad) and
Uncle Scrooge was Theios(Uncle) Skroutzis!

Hmmm let me try to remember back that far back into life in rural Canada. I know for a fact we didn't read anything not written in the tongue that Shakespeare Spake. Except for excerpts of Greek myth in translation.

Our Canadian Lit was as follows.

Who has Seen the Wind by WO Mitchell
The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

The selections from other English speaking lands included.
A Separate Peace
Lord of the Flies
Of Mice and Men
Catcher in the Rye
The Great Gatsby
The Chrysalids
To Kill a Mockingbird
A Canticle for Lebowitz
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
The Crucible
Twelfth Night
Taming of the Shrew
Romeo and Juliet
MacBeth
Hamlet

Additionally we were allowed to design our own study around a Canadian in our final years. I remember reading Not Wanted on this Voyage, and In the Skin of a Lion.

A lot of our highschool English time was actually spent on exercises to analyze and deconstruct messages from the media. It's quite a useful skill if you can pick it up.

However the fact that they can sell half a chocolate bar at the price a full chocolate bar by naming it a "Thin" and printing "Only 100 Calories" indicates a causative relationship between paying attention in school and the ability to lead around your former classmates like sheep in later life.

Um guys you can get the same result for half the price by just buying a regular bar and eating only half of it you know.

Y'know what strikes me? No one has mentioned reading Marx at all in high school. I know I certainly didn't but now that I'm in college, a lot of his philosophy and work directly corrilates with my studies. I've been assigned to read his manifesto at least half a dozen times.

As for high school I remember reading...
Lord of the Flies by William Golding (which I know more for Simpson's episode based on it than the actual book)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
To Kill a Mockinbird by Harper Lee
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (which I hated-- that paper was the worst essay grade I've ever received)
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg (that was for a film/literature class and I remember we got to pick our novel... I remember The Color Purple was another option)
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson (also for the film-lit class)
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (worst. ending. ever.)
Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
1984 by George Orwell
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinback
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (I wrote that essay comparing Tess and Angel to Rogue and Gambit. Best writing grade I got in high school. )
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I also read at least four Shakespeare plays (Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, the Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer's Night Dream) and some sonnets. We'd also read poetry in class sometimes... like Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken and things of that nature. Oh, and I should note that I graduated a semester early, so I didn't finish out my senior year's reading which was the ever ambiguous "British Literature".

I don't remember reading any classics, which is weird. I read The Illiad and Odyssey in my own right (and in college again) but... yeah. Don't remember ever being assigned any literature of that nature. I might've also had to read Don Quioxte (maybe for Spanish class?), but I can't quite remember.

In case it wasn't obvious from the list, I just want to say ditto to that.

I give my students some of the books mentioned above and others like the Anne of Green Gables series by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery. I wish I had read her books as a child. I really like them.

As for Marx? There was a time when even catching a student carrying a book by Marx would be ground for expulsion from school and if he/she insisted on carrying or giving such books to others would be grounds for expulsion from all schools in the city... (That time has thankfully passed)

Exactly. I am rereading my own required reading books and the ones I missed but I also want to read the basics/classics from other countries. I've been on a lit kick.

The books you listed are now on my LIST! You have any favorites among those?

Changing the author names! Heh, seems nothing is sacred in the wide world of translation. Were those changes made to better accommodate the names to the hellenic alphabet or were they really only made to make the names sound more familiar (sorry, I'm totally ignorant when it comes to the Greek language )?

They didn't do anything comparable in Germany and have thankfully stopped with the renaming of characters. Now the only thing publishers annoy us with are occasional 'modernised' translations of classic works. I'm the proud owner of a weirdly anachronistic-sounding mid-eighties translation of 1984. And I fondly remember how a few years ago Lord of the Rings fans were driven to the point of apoplexy by a new translation in which Sam addresses Frodo as 'boss' and the Hobbit children think Gandalf's fireworks are 'wicked cool' or something to that extent. Makes you really glad you can understand the original.

Oh dear. Half the books I've listed are rather irrelevant - they might have made us read those odd choices, but I'd never call them basics or classics. For example, if you want to read Thomas Mann, you don't read Tristan, you read The Magic Mountain - that's the one generally considered to be one of the most important works of 20th century German literature (so that would be my recommendation ). Then I'd go for Lessing & Schiller for your fill of bourgeous tragedy, Hoffmann if you like Romanticism fantasy-horror tales (which I, back in school, really didn't, but since then I've changed my mind), and Goethe is a must anyway. Dear god, did I ever hate Fontane's Effi Briest, but hey, he is important and your mileage may vary. And for something newer I'd go for Kafka, Frisch's (he is Swiss, btw) Homo Faber and Boell. I think I've bored you enough now.

I think it was the "purists'" idea before WW2. There was something like a disagreement between those who preferred a more archaic form of the language as the official one (something akin to 19th Century British English) and those who wanted the commonly spoken language. So they made the names sound more "Greek" like they'd be in ancient Greek.
The latest, but very rare, example of this was the translation of the first Harry Potter book entirely in ancient Greek as "Arios Pottir kai i tou Filosofou Lithos" (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone)while the regular translation was "Hari Poter kai i Filosofiki Lithos."

The commonly spoken language is the official one today but since we have a different alphabet, some author names are transliterated more or less phonetically, in Greek letters, but they aren't made to "sound" Greek with the addition of suffixes etc anymore.
"Jack London", for example would be written "Tzak Lonton" (in Greek letters).
A French friend of mine saw a book in Greek once by former French President Giscard D'Estaing. His name on the title was "Ziskar Ntesten" and she yelled in horror "Oh, mon Dieu! C'est sacrilege!"
Other publishers leave authors' names in their original language as long as they are in Latin letters, transliterating only non-Latin alphabets. Haruki Murakami's name, for example, can't be written in Japanese on a Greek edition, right? Who'd understand it?

Insomniac Girl, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain I think was the only German book on my "list" to read. So that's good. I will never actually finish my "list" but it's a fun goal.

In France, I don't know what's happening nowadays, but when I was a kid, like a long time ago, you started reading quite early, like at the end of primary school, with authors as varied as Jules Verne, Stevenson (Treasure Island), Jack London (White fang used to be a "classic" at school back in the seventies) that were considered nice for the kiddies. You were also taught poetry from the age of 7, that you had to know by heart and recite during class.

Then you had all the French Theatre classics when you started high school: Molière, Racine, Corneille to name a few. To this, you would add all the Greek classics (Odyssey and Illiade for example), Shakespeare for English classes, and all the French litterature classics : Balzac, Châteaubriand, Zola, Rousseau, Rabelais, Stendhal and more topical French literature like Frison-Roche's mountainering novels.
And they were also broadening your education with authors from around the world: Garcia Marquez, Steinbeck, the Bronte sisters, Kafka... The list is too long


On average, you had to read one of those book between one week or one month depending on the size, with regular tests to check if you had read them and detailed explanations of the contents, political and social context of the books, as well as a study of the author's biography.

But I litterally had to read hundreds of books from the age of 7 to the age of 17, and that's not counting university with 4 years of English, Canadian, America, Irish, Scottish and Australian litterature. :=)

Too much for my poor head, but still very useful today.

Thanks Pariscub! I was especially interested in the French authors you read. I've heard of them but never read their work. (Chateaubriand is a good steak though!)

In school they wouldn't test as hard as you guys. Which isn't good because I got by knowing very little about the book. Books they did test on as we read I enjoyed more and remember to this day.

Thanks again