Reading list

Anything by Ray Bradbury.
Anything by Isaac Asimov.
Anything by Kurt Vonnegut.
Somthing by Toni Morrison.
The poems of Langston Hughes.
Anything by Mark Twain. Make that Everything by Mark Twain.
Any and all comic books, graphic novels, etc. (but especially MARVEL)
Anything by Shakespeare.
The Norton Anthology of English Poetry.
The Norton Anthology of English Prose.
Some anthology of American poetry.
Anything by Wendell Berry.
Ecotopia (can’t recall author).
Saul Bellow is good; Isaac Bashevis Singer is good; Gabriel Marques LLosa (name perhaps mixed up) is good.
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.
Anything by Ken Kesey, but particularly Sometimes A Great Notion & One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The Catcher in The Rye by J.D. Salinger.
Something by Arthur C. Clarke.
Bird By Bird by Anne Lamont.
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.
The Stranger & The Plague by Albert Camus.
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
the Russian & Scandinavian modern playwrights (Chekov, Ibsen et al).
the American modern playwrights (Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, August Wilson, et al).
Biographies of Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, et al.
All Quiet on the Western Front.
Anything by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson.
Nigger by Dick Gregory.
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin.
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.
(this should be good for a trimester or two…)

I would suggest:

One national (native-tongue) and one international author of each important era in literature. Starting nowadays, and going back in time as the students grow older, closing with maybe someone from the middle ages or some latin/greek classic.

Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger

Hard Ball by Chris Matthews

High Crimes and Misdeameanors

and

Slander both by Ann Coulter

Calvin and Hobbes :D

YAY for Calvin & Hobbes!!

Also Doonesbury, supplemented by All the President’s Men (by Woodward & Bernstein).

I would also recomend “Animal Farm” by George Orwell

Calvin and Hobbes also! :wink:

1984 for was mostly anti-communist propaganda. so was animal farm, but it was told much better.

lord of the flies
animal farm
hamlet
carrie (especially in todays high schools lol)
all quiet on the western front

i think that students should be encouraged to read, anything they like, just get them into books.

Yanny - I felt the same way about Jurassic Park (book vs. movie). So much is left out, sub-plots in the movie that just die out…

I need a book (work of non-fiction) from an American perspective on any topic from World War 1 and later. I was thinking of something on the Korean War or Cold War. This is for my American History course. Can anyone here recommend something good?

I just bought Slander by Ann Coulter…excellent read. On the same note, Sean Hannity’s new book was probably better. :P

As for high school students, you’d see me reccomend a book covering politics way before I’d ever reccomend something by Shakespeare.

I’d recommend Empire by Hardt and Negri and some works by Stanislav Lem. Other than that, I’m not so sure.

Emu,

Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger

And Deviant, Coulter is a way better Polemicist than Hannity ever could be.

Has anyone here read Fast Food Nation?

I had no idea slaughterhouse workers were treated so badly.

NO more McDonalds for me. I already didn’t like them, but htis is the last straw.

@Yanny:

I read an article in some newspaper a while back saying how bad Wal-Mart employees were treated :) Forced to work 2-3 extra hours a day without pay or be fired… forced to smile in your sleep…

i quit b/c they wouldn’t let me take off 4 shifts or trade them in order to work on my honors biochemistry thesis.
but at the same time, they weren’t that bad, just weird.

Hamlet
Othello
Bonfire Of The Vanities…absolutely hilarious!!
For history…THe Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote…IMO the best books on the Civil War ever written
and of course…Private Parts and Miss America by The King of All Media!!