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Wow, I think the only genre stuff we ever read in high school was Edgar Allen Poe and "The Sound of Thunder". The rest was all Shakespeare and I guess 'contemporary' American lit from the 1920s-1950s or so (Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, etc.).
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Dec 6, 2022 17:26
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We did Martians Chronicles and I'm pretty sure that was it? We had a research project in 10th grade to read some short stories / find and cite critical analysis and I had a big argument because I wanted to do Philip K Dick and my teacher thought there wouldn't be enough 'real' academic work on him (there was.)
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Dec 6, 2022 17:52
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I know I had the giver, martian chronicles, and a summer reading of crystal cave. Oh and the inferno too, that counts right??
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Dec 6, 2022 17:54
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are you a 1984 kind of person or more of a Brave New World type, hmmm interesting.
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Dec 6, 2022 17:57
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Never really understood why Brave New World was considered dystopian. Everything seemed fine to me, an Alpha
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Dec 6, 2022 18:00
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habeasdorkus posted:I'd be interested in what you think of the second series, set ten years later. I feel like it gets to some more interesting questions about what happens after you "win." I'll check back in when I do. Will probably wait to start until the next one comes out over the summer.
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Dec 6, 2022 19:05
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Can't remember being assigned a single genre novel or story in high school, unless you count "The Cask of Amontillado," Saki's "Tobermory" or Lord Dunsany's "The Two Bottles of Relish" as genre.
Selachian fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Dec 6, 2022 |
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Dec 6, 2022 19:07
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I remember reading The Giver in (Catholic) grade school, and Farenheit 451 in high school. In college one of the lit profs taught a class on Cyberpunk with Neuromancer being the first required reading book but the class filled up before I could sign up for it 
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Dec 6, 2022 21:19
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The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DHJT92Q/
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Dec 6, 2022 23:51
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We didn't do much genre stuff in secondary school but my primary school gave us Matilda and the Hobbit as books that the teacher read to us over a period of time. And one of our like, staged reading books had a Bradbury short story at its highest level. So it was around.
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Dec 7, 2022 00:21
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HopperUK posted:We didn't do much genre stuff in secondary school but my primary school gave us Matilda and the Hobbit as books that the teacher read to us over a period of time. And one of our like, staged reading books had a Bradbury short story at its highest level. So it was around. oh my favorite time in elementary school was my 4th grade teacher reading Ring of the Nibelung to us and then playing some of the Wagner opera later. It was fabulous, I still remember that teacher fondly.
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Dec 7, 2022 00:27
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silvergoose posted:oh my favorite time in elementary school was my 4th grade teacher reading Ring of the Nibelung to us and then playing some of the Wagner opera later. It was fabulous, I still remember that teacher fondly. That kicks rear end:) I distinctly remember my teacher reading the climactic blackboard scene from Matilda. I was *enthralled*.
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Dec 7, 2022 00:34
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News from Steven Brust https://twitter.com/stevenbrust/status/1600270085758898200?s=46&t=VqVXrAABumkqeZLB01In-w
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Dec 7, 2022 00:43
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Let us not forget the OG fantasy school novel, The Phantom Tollbooth.
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Dec 7, 2022 00:58
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I don't recall reading much genre fiction in high school classes, but I remember taking a Utopian/Dystopian Fiction class in college that had some fun stuff. Nausica of the Valley of the Wind's first volume and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin were amongst the assigned reading.
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Dec 7, 2022 01:03
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I didn't get to read much SFF in high school, at least not as part of coursework. But I did get to take a fantasy and SF literature course in college! It was really cool. We read a pretty wide selection, and that's where I first read Stanislaw Lem and Alfred Bester, among others. I also did a bunch of group projects with someone who went on to become the great love of my life, which is not how group projects typically go. We did make a lot of Footfall jokes, as I attended college in the city that builds and launches an Orion ship in the novel (thus ceasing to be a city).
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Dec 7, 2022 01:17
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We did so much Bradbury in school. Soft Rains, Fahrenheit 451, Sound of Thunder, The Pedestrian. Never liked him, and being forced to read him almost certainly contributed to that feeling. We also did 1984 and The Time Machine, zero fantasy from what I recall.
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Dec 7, 2022 01:21
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We did “All Summer in a Day" for Bradbury also.
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Dec 7, 2022 02:08
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My Canadian high school was just Shakespeare, war novels, and some other poo poo I can’t remember. But my grade 12 English teacher let me pick my own novels, and I did Clockwork Orange and Kafka’s Metamorphosis so that was cool
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Dec 7, 2022 02:37
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Closest we got to any SF at my (UK) school was probably The Rain Horse, which might count as supernatural horror, I guess. I suppose A Midsummer Night's Dream should count as fantasy, too. We didn't even do 1984 in my class.
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Dec 7, 2022 03:24
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Besides the Mars trilogy, what are Kim Stanley Robinson's must-reads? I've already read The Years of Rice and Salt.
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Dec 7, 2022 03:28
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Aurora's great - in fact, it's the book that got me into KSR after bouncing off a couple of his others.
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Dec 7, 2022 03:29
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pradmer posted:The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie - $2.99 a new imperial radch book is coming out in 2023
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Dec 7, 2022 04:19
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pradmer posted:The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie - $2.99 Ok, got the correct one this time, thanks! Lol the dumbest thing is that I've read and enjoyed the Ancillary Justice series, so I should have recognized the author the first time round. Doktor Avalanche posted:a new imperial radch book is coming out in 2023 Hyped
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Dec 7, 2022 05:55
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I think the only scifi type books I had in school were the giver and slaughterhouse 5. Those are the only books I actually remember reading for a positive reason at least. I remember Ethan Frome because gently caress Ethan Frome.
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Dec 7, 2022 06:25
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We were assigned Tunnel in the Sky, Brave New World and Slaughterhouse 5, and I ended up reading 1984 on my own. I can't remember if that was my own idea with teacher approval or if I picked it from a list. I guess A Prayer for Owen Meany was also technically fantasy. e: huh, Oryx and Crake and Never Let Me Go are on the AP Lit reading list now pseudorandom name fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Dec 7, 2022 |
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Dec 7, 2022 08:07
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You guys remember what you read in school???
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Dec 7, 2022 08:52
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tiniestacorn posted:You guys remember what you read in school??? It's amazing, I don't remember a single book we were required to read in school. No, actually I distinctly remember the very first book we read in elementary since it was such a special and warm memory for me, but that's it. Our education system in Turkey distinctly fails to instill a love of reading, vaguely remember being required to read literature that was grim (Ömer Seyfettin and his "Falaka") and maybe not really apricated by teenage minds. I became a voracious reader after discovering horror and sci/fi based on their cool covers. Just introduce the crazy page turning mojo of some not so classic books, maybe YA fiction instead of pumping a hate for reading by forcing people to read classics that were written for literal adults of centuries past, how hard is that? I envy you guys that got to read sci-fi during your education before college!
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Dec 7, 2022 09:36
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Lol I read Candide in high school, but on my own time. It was in the bookcase at home and I recognized Voltaire from history class (and amateur electronics). I did not have remotely enough background to actually catch the very many things it was parodying, and Wikipedia didn't exist, so most of it went way over my head, lol. We did not do any sci fi or fantasy as set works, but I read a shitload in my free time, although a lot more in grade school.
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Dec 7, 2022 09:37
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I think I read and learned more (in both SFF and general literature) from the school library than I did from whatever was assigned in English classes. I genuinely believe going to a public school that probably didn't have too much money floating around was a benefit for that library, because it meant the shelves were stuffed full of 1960s-1990s books that had probably been sitting there for decades and which I never would've found in a bookstore, but which I quite happily read because it was what was available to me, and if it's a story about aliens and spaceships or whatever then you aren't going to notice it being "dated." Ditto the local public community library. Kazzah posted:Aurora's great - in fact, it's the book that got me into KSR after bouncing off a couple of his others. Aurora is a great book precisely because it challenges the sacred cows of science fiction which KSR himself had a big part in promulgating. And not even in some big road to Damascus moment where he renounces them - I'm sure he's still pro-space colonisation - but more like a "hmmm, actually, should this really be the priority of imaginative science fiction in the 21st century?" (It's therefore a shame that New York 2140 and Ministry of the Future were kind of ehhh, but I'm confident he'll eventually write a sci-fi book about the stewardship of Earth that's on par with the Mars trilogy and Aurora)
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Dec 7, 2022 11:09
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Haystack posted:Let us not forget the OG fantasy school novel, The Phantom Tollbooth. God that book owns
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Dec 7, 2022 11:12
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tiniestacorn posted:You guys remember what you read in school??? I read a sci-fi book from the school library and I can't remember what it was called. It was a story about a teenager that lives in some kind of post apocalyptic dome society. Everyone in this dome is a cyborg, except for the servant class who does all the work. In theory everyone is supposed to be allowed to become a cyborg, but some people "can't take to the surgery" so they have to become working class. The big twist is of course that everyone can be a cyborg and they are just letting people fail so they can have servants. The book mostly follows a teenager who escapes/gets kicked out or something? He goes and lives outside where his cyborg implants don't work and he meets a tribe of normal people who teach him that the cyborg city is hosed up
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Dec 7, 2022 11:41
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Thinking back, this is the stuff I can clearly remember reading in school as assigned reading in various high school English classes, in a public school in Texas. Bless Me, Ultima Romeo and Juliet The Odyssey My Antonia Frankenstein Of Mice and Men The Old Man and the Sea Khizan fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Dec 7, 2022 |
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Dec 7, 2022 12:02
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Khizan posted:Of Mice and Men I had this one too, and I think it's on par with The Great Gatsby for getting assigned because it's short and has relatively easy themes and symbols, while completely missing the fact that teenagers are unable to parse its meaning. Of Mice and Men is about your dreams of escaping an unhappy life being futile, and The Great Gatsby is about regret and missed opportunities. The vast majority of teenagers have not properly experienced either of those things yet. But because they're less than 150 pages long, have a small cast of characters, and symbolism that's easy to break down and analyse, they're catnip to curriculum designers who think that high school kids need to be eased into an extremely limited scope of ~Proper Literature~. I learned more about both life and literature from children's books and YA books than I did from the literature I was assigned in high school classes, not because they were superior to classic adult literature, but because they were engaging with me at my level.
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Dec 7, 2022 12:21
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The Great Gatsby taught me that rich people are dangerous, self-absorbed dipshits, so I feel like it was a net positive. As far my schooling went, I can only remember Slaughterhouse Five, Brave New World, and The Giver as the only scifi among my assigned texts.
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Dec 7, 2022 12:52
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I mostly remember the books I hated -- Ethan Frome, The Return of the Native, A Separate Peace. There was also a fair amount of Shakespeare and Dickens, including Hard Times and Great Expectations, plus The Scarlet Letter,, The Light in the Forest, and, inevitably, The Great Gatsby.
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Dec 7, 2022 13:26
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Doktor Avalanche posted:a new imperial radch book is coming out in 2023 hoipe
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Dec 7, 2022 13:38
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My fourth grade teacher grabbed four of us who liked to read and gave us Wrinkle in Time. I don't remember much else.
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Dec 7, 2022 13:45
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I remember reading The Chrysalids in school at some point, and The Hatchet, but everything else has evaporated from memory at this point in my advanced age (mid 30s). Origin Complex had some incredible world-building and xenoarcheology, and I liked that the main character was more of a high-level consultant than a hard-boiled, special forces archetype, but I was hoping for a bit more closure (it ends maybe a few days after the timeline in Steel Frame, and despite the main character gaining some very anime powers, we don’t get to see the full force of them unleashed. And she doesn’t get to make out with her hard-boiled, special forces girlfriend while poo poo explodes behind them). Regardless, it’s still a must-read if you liked Steel Frame at all, and I’ll definitely check out whatever Skinner publishes next.
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Dec 7, 2022 14:12
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Another Dirty Dish posted:I remember reading The Chrysalids in school at some point,
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Dec 7, 2022 14:24
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