Would you look over my literature selections for next year?

[Meriwether]

High school is new to me. Dd is going to have two literature credits next year. One of them is through TOG and the other through a Lord of the Rings study. TOG runs from Augustine to Austen. The top section are books that are specifically used in one or the other, except The Prince, Canterbury Tales, and Le Morte D'Arthur. The bottom section is a list of books she hasn't read yet that I want her to read next year. I won't require any output for the bottom section. Considering that this is for two credits, does this seem like too much? Not enough? Am I missing something essential? Is there something in particular you would cut?

 

Augustine - Confessions

Song of Roland

Beowulf

Mabinogion

Dante - The Divine Comedy

Sir Gawain & The Green Knight

Chaucer - Canterbury Tales, selections 

Malory - Le Morte D'Arthur

Machiavelli - The Prince

Spenser - Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves

Shakespeare - various

Milton - Paradise Lost

Moliere - Tartuffe

Swift - Gulliver's Travels

Racine - Phaedra

Austen - Sense & Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy + The Hobbit & Silmarillion

Prose and Poetic Eddas

Nubelingenlied

Saga of the Volsungs

The Wanderer

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
 

Lorna Doone

The Three Musketeers

Ivanhoe

Scarlet Pimpernel

Count of Monte Cristo

A Tale of Two Citites

[Lori D.]

Basing my comments on my experience with average / slightly above average DSs, and from my experience with doing Lit. for several years now with my homeschool co-op. If you have an accelerated student who has already ripped through a lot of the traditional classics, and reads/absorbs/analyzes quickly and needs the volume of material in your original list, then disregard my comments, go for it, and enjoy!  :)

 

 

JMO: If you are doing full translations, not abridged or excerpts, this is enough literature for 3 credits (years). It is both a LOT of pages of reading, and a fair amount of heavy/complexity that will require slower reading for thinking/analyzing. More complex/difficult works and works written in a poetic form, or works read in Middle English, will be read at a slower rate, which means you may not be able to get through as many works as quickly as when reading something like, say, historical fiction.

 

Bear in mind, if you are doing 2 Lit. credits (and I assume by that, you mean English credits, which are typically 1/2 Lit. and 1/2 Writing), you need to plan for approx. 1 hour per day per credit. That's a total of 10 hours a week to complete these two credits. (It is unfair to your student to repeatedly go over this 10 hours/week amount, as it means you are spending more than the maximum amount of credit hours of 180 hours = 1 credit.) That 10 hours a week for 2 credits might break down to something like approx. 3-3.5 hours/week of Writing, and 6.5-7 hours/week of reading/discussing/analyzing Lit.

 

If it were me, I'd mark a number of the works in some way and have in mind that those are the works that can be dropped/bumped as needed if you find you are not able to accomplish as much work in your 10 hour/week window for 2 credits as you initially thought. Remember, the Great Books is about *quality*, not *quantity*. ;)

 

Below is just one idea of how this might look. I'm running a 32-week Lit. & Comp. class this year for high school that is a focus on the Lord of the Rings trilogy (we're digging really deep with analysis on this one) for 24 weeks, and then the other 8 weeks we'll cover: Beowulf, 4 tales from The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Macbeth, and the Tolkien short story "Smith of Wootton Major". If we had a full 36 weeks, I would have MUCH preferred to give some of the additional works a bit more time for reading and discussing/analyzing/writing about the works; I probably would have added in a bit of poetry and a few more short stories to help flesh out our Lit. coverage. Students have a 90-min. class with me once/week and then spend 3.5-4.5 hours/week at home on: reading the chapters, doing the guided analysis questions for those chapters (as prep for class discussion), and on writing assignments. I don't think the students could have handled very much more Lit. than this in one year. Several of them are doing TOG at home, so this class is a second Lit. course for them.

 

TOG 1.0 credit:

- Augustine - Confessions

- Song of Roland

- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

- The Once and Future King (White), OR, Pyle's King Arthur -- JMO: suggested substitute for Mort d'Arthur**

- Divine Comedy** -- JMO: excerpts, rather than the entirety

- Canterbury Tales -- selections*** 

- Shakespeare -- just guessing: 1 play and some sonnets??

- The Prince*

- Gulliver's Travels* -- JMO: excerpts, rather than the entirety

 

LotR 1.0 credit:

- The Hobbit

- Lord of the Rings trilogy

- The Silmarillion

- Beowulf

- Prose and Poetic Eddas -- JMO: excerpts, rather than the entirety

- Nubelingenlied -- JMO: I suggest an abridged version

- Saga of the Volsungs* -- JMO: excerpts, rather than the entirety

 

* = drop or bump to a future year if running short on time

** = college work--save the full work till college, unless it is of high interest to your student, OR, unless it is very important to you to cover this -- in which case, drop other works, give yourself lots of time and go slow so this is meaningful and not rushed

*** = are you doing this 1.) in the original poetic Middle English, 2.) or as a modern poetic translation, 3.) or a prose translation? 1.) will require more time and patience in the reading of the tales just to figure what's going on; 3.) maximizes your time for analyzing/discussing

 

 

DROP -- "B" List items to add back in if you have time, or swap with above items if your student really wants some of these

- Mabinogion

- The Prince

- Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves

- Tartuffe

- Phaedra

- The Wanderer

 

BUMP LIST -- save for a future year:

- Sense and Sensibility --OR-- Pride and Prejudice

- A Tale of Two Cities

 

ENJOY AS MOVIES/PERFORMED PLAYS -- rather than read:

- possibly a Shakespeare play (they are meant to be watched in performance! :) )

- The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

- Ivanhoe

- Lorna Doone

- The Three Musketeers -- OR: Cyrano de Bergerac

- The Count of Monte Cristo

- Scarlet Pimpernel

Edited March 22, 2016 by Lori D.

[AppleGreen]

Just want to echo what Lori said, although not as eloquently. I had a long list of lit to read with my current 9th grader at this time last year, and then reality hit. We are dealing with some minor LDs, working memory and processing speed issues, so that certainly changes the landscape, but that is a lot of books of to synthesize and require output for, especially when you factor in requirements for other high school classes. As Lori said, you may have a child totally ready for that. If so, happy reading and discussing. If not, I think Lori gave you a great plan for breaking your list into manageable chunks and know that she will still be getting a really solid foundation.

[Garga]

That's 33 books/plays, if you do only one Shakespeare play and you wrote "various" for that, so if you do more than one play it's 34-35 books/plays

 

That's a LOT.

 

If you school for 10 months a year, that's 3.4 books a month. That's almost a book a week.

 

I realize it's for 2 credits, but how would you really do this? I'm a lightning fast reader and always have been, but I think it would be really tricky to read a book a week AND analyze it AND write a paper on it. These aren't easy books to fly through. These are books that take longer to read than a Grisham novel, for example. How many hours per week do you see this taking?

 

I am not here to rain on your parade. I'm just wondering what the plan is and how much work, exactly, is required for each book. A one-page paper per book? A 3-page paper per book? etc.

 

Also, general question for anyone...does reading time count toward the classroom time? Or do you send the student off to read on her own time, and only count the hours of discussion or paper writing as credit hours? (Maybe I should start a new thread to ask that...)

Edited March 22, 2016 by Garga

[Meriwether]

Thank you all. This was the kind of feedback I was looking for. She is a great reader. She reads about 300 books/year - not at the level of Dante, but not just fluff either. The reading will be a stretch in that regard, but she does read well and quickly. She reads more than 10 hours per week for school now and is disgruntled that she doesn't have enough assigned reading. In fact, she wanted to do the LoTR study for fun. I wasn't originally going to award credit for it. I'm more worried about output. She doesn't like writing. She doesn't particularly care for discussions. I want to go through the Lively Art of Writing with her with the Lord of the Rings study, so she should get some practice writing essays. I'll do the TOG writing assignments with the TOG books.

 

I'm certainly willing to read excerpts of some of the works and cut what really doesn't work. I'm also thinking about reading some of the harder works aloud. I just don't have a good idea of how much time the high school level work will take. I have started reading through the books myself, so I'll have a better idea how long they will take for a first read through. I can't really say how long everything else will take.

[yvonne]

Does she need two credits of lit next year?  If not, you could aim for one English credit with the work that is typically expected in a high school English course--discussion, analysis, essay/longer paper. Pick the books you really want to get into and use those for the credit. Let her enjoy simply reading the others.

 

You can add the books she reads for fun to a reading list with her transcript. It might actually be more impressive to see a solid Eng credit _and_ an impressive personal reading list than two credits of "assigned reading." 

[Lori D.]

... I just don't have a good idea of how much time the high school level work will take. I have started reading through the books myself, so I'll have a better idea how long they will take for a first read through. I can't really say how long everything else will take.

 

Then, of your list, I'd make sure to slow down and take your time to research author/times, annotate while reading, discuss/analyze, and write about the following, to "count for credit". All of these are quite "stout" due to being written in a poetic form (Song of Roland, Beowulf, Divine Comedy, Sir Gawain, Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost), or containing heavy theology/philosophy ideas (Augustine, Machiavelli), or very meaty for literary discussion (Shakespeare, Tale of Two Cities -- all of these below, really). You really do not want to "short" any of these by "just reading" as you would a YA novel or historical fiction. ;) The following would be a meaty amount of works for 1 credit of English:

 

Augustine - Confessions

Song of Roland

Beowulf

Dante - The Divine Comedy

Sir Gawain & The Green Knight

Chaucer - Canterbury Tales, selections 

Machiavelli - The Prince*

Shakespeare - various **

Milton - Paradise Lost

A Tale of Two Citites*

 

* = if approaching 180-hour upper limit on the English credit, bump to a future year for formal Lit. study (or toss into a free read basket)

** = I'd still just go with 1 play and a few sonnets, in order to not go over the 180-hour upper limit on the English credit (watch as many film or live performances as you like if you're having fun with Shakespeare)

 

And since you have a plan for the Lord of the Rings study that includes research, discussion, analysis and writing, have fun doing those works I listed in my post above as a second credit. :)

 

Anything else on your list would be fine to toss into the book basket as optional "free reading" for your voracious reader. ;) Hope that helps. Warmest regards, Lori D.

Edited March 22, 2016 by Lori D.

[Reefgazer]

Holy shmokes!  My DD is a strong reader with excellent comprehension, but this quantity would be a stretch for her to read/discuss/write about.  As just pleasure reading, yes.  More than that, too much for us....

 

High school is new to me. Dd is going to have two literature credits next year. One of them is through TOG and the other through a Lord of the Rings study. TOG runs from Augustine to Austen. The top section are books that are specifically used in one or the other, except The Prince, Canterbury Tales, and Le Morte D'Arthur. The bottom section is a list of books she hasn't read yet that I want her to read next year. I won't require any output for the bottom section. Considering that this is for two credits, does this seem like too much? Not enough? Am I missing something essential? Is there something in particular you would cut?

 

Augustine - Confessions

Song of Roland

Beowulf

Mabinogion

Dante - The Divine Comedy

Sir Gawain & The Green Knight

Chaucer - Canterbury Tales, selections 

Malory - Le Morte D'Arthur

Machiavelli - The Prince

Spenser - Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves

Shakespeare - various

Milton - Paradise Lost

Moliere - Tartuffe

Swift - Gulliver's Travels

Racine - Phaedra

Austen - Sense & Sensibility; Pride and Prejudice

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy + The Hobbit & Silmarillion

Prose and Poetic Eddas

Nubelingenlied

Saga of the Volsungs

The Wanderer

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
 

Lorna Doone

The Three Musketeers

Ivanhoe

Scarlet Pimpernel

Count of Monte Cristo

A Tale of Two Citites

 

 

[LisaKinVA]

I saw this and was reminded of my first foray into high school lit a few years ago...it's just so hard to choose.  There are so many great books!

[elegantlion]

Another option for Arthur is to read excerpts of Malory after reading some of the previous stories or in place of Malory. The Death of King Arthur is a 13th century French version, part of Lancelot-Grail cycle, or Lancelot Vulgate. The Quest for the Holy Grail is another part of the Cycle. Of course, a showing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail would be an added resource for fun. 

[Meriwether]

I saw this and was reminded of my first foray into high school lit a few years ago...it's just so hard to choose.  There are so many great books!

 

So what did you do?  :bigear:

[happypamama]

This is my intended list for my DD for next year. She is not a super fast reader (well, tbh, I don't know; I'm a very fast reader, so slower than me might just mean average), and some of these are hefty. I may need to adjust my expectations.

 

LOTR trilogy -- this will be a family readaloud

Medieval Lyrics, Norton

possibly medieval poetry from Veritas Press

Anglo Saxon Riddles (gotta go find the link someone posted for this before deciding for sure)

Song of Roland

Hamlet or Henry V -- preferably watched and read aloud

Bede, Caedmon's Hymn

Iliad/Odyssey/Aeneid (because LLfLOTR recommends it for one of their unit studies)

Beowulf

Vinland Sagas

Mabinogion (selections)

Arthur (still deciding exactly which version)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Canterbury Tales

Trumpeter of Krakow

something Robin Hood

something Norse myths

(Those last couple may be good family or big kid readalouds, plus some of Tolkien's other works.)

 

And I feel there is one or two other poetry/saga books on my shelves that I need to dig out and peruse for her that I can't remember right now.

 

Plus I threw in some stuff for history, in addition to SWB's HOM/RW, but being as it's been twenty years since I read them, I need to preview them, and I may find that not all are suitable for early high school. Possibilities: Asser's Life of King Alfred, Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, The Conquest of 1066, Eileen Power's Medieval People, The Medieval Machine, Life in a Medieval Castle/City, Women in the Middle Ages, and something by Barbara Hanawalt. Plus some speeches from World's Greatest Speeches. I'm SURE we will not get through all of that, but I think she will really enjoy some of them.

 

ETA: As always, LoriD, thank you for your excellent thoughts!

Edited March 22, 2016 by happypamama

[LisaKinVA]

So what did you do?  :bigear:

 

Exactly what you did..posted my list here and asked for input ;)

 

We were doing Modern World Lit (I still had to pare down a bit more during the year, we just didn't have the time with all of the moving.)

 

This year, I made a master list, then I chose four *musts* and ds chose four, and then I added in about 4 plays to watch, and some poetry.

 

Next year, I'm going with a Textword Anthology for DD in 9th, and doing a 3+3.  If DS does AP Comp at home, we'll do a Textword Anthology and a 3+3.  These last two years we had moved away from this approach.  However we've learned this approach really does work best for us.  

 

ETA:  Pony Girl and LEGOManiac are much happier with math/science/technology courses...so I have to compromise somewhere so they have some freedom to bloom and grow in other areas of higher interest.

 

My middle schooler will do Mosdos and 3+3, my 4th grader will also do a Mosdos text, but most likely have more books.  None of this includes audio books (which everyone also has... those alternate one of my choices with one of theirs (for the most part...when my 1st grader wanted to do the whole Little House series, I happily obliged)

Edited March 22, 2016 by LisaK in VA is in IT

[Lori D.]

 

I saw this and was reminded of my first foray into high school lit a few years ago...it's just so hard to choose.  There are so many great books!

 

So what did you do?  :bigear:

 

Not LisaK, but each year of high school I started off with a list of over 100 "must read" works/authors for that year, and over the course of a few weeks managed to "whittle down" to about 35, and then just really moaned and groaned and wrung my hands and wailed for awhile ("but we HAVE to do ALL of these!")  :tongue_smilie: before getting brutal and marking about 8-12 or so as the most important works/authors to cover with a bit of depth, and anything else can go onto a free-read list. And mentally "let it go" (belted out ala Frozen fashion -- lol!), realizing that the student has all of adulthood to read all the rest of these fabulous works. Besides, I need to save *something* for my student to discover on their own in college, or as an older adult. ;)

 

Really, I think it boils down to goals. What are your goals with Literature?

 

For me, I had several goals.

 

I had the goal of familiarity (not necessarily deep digging) with the most well-known and most referenced works and authors, so that we would have "cultural literacy" -- understand the allusions made all the time in modern culture -- books, movies, TV shows, advertising, speeches, etc. -- and how the modern reference was being used (echoing the theme/idea of the original? parodying it? ironic? complete opposite or twist?).

 

I also wanted us to have a small handful of works (8-12 a year), that we were digging deeper into for several reasons. I wanted us to learn how to discuss/analyze and write about. I wanted us to read enough works to be able to compare works written by the same author, or compare works by different authors in the same time period or genre, or see similarities between authors in very different time periods/genres. I wanted us to take time for some works to research the author and the author's times to see what kinds of ideas or philosophies were important to the author, and how do those come out in the writing, or how did the times/culture influence the author. You cannot (and should not try) do this with every book of Literature.

 

I also had the goal of using that small handful of works for deep digging to help us learn about topics in Literature -- about the different forms of Literature (novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, plays, essays), and different genres of Literature (realistic, tragedy, comedy, epic/adventure, myth, fable, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, suspense/thriller etc.), and different literary movements (Gothic, Romanticism, Naturalism, Stream of Consciousness, Lost Generation, Magical Realism, etc). About literary devices and how the author uses them to create a complex work. About big ideas or themes such as bildungs roman (coming of age). About the power of metaphor and image to express abstract ideas. And about how by entering deeply into Literature and conversing / wrestling with the work, we can learn, grow, be changed.

 

In order to achieve some of those goals, we really had to pare down the list so we could spend that focused time. 

 

All that said, you can cover a few more authors in a year if you do short stories or novellas. For example, the year we did American Lit. we increased the number of short stories, and decreased the number of longer works, which allowed us to cover more authors and genres, and also gave us the opportunity to do a special focus on elements of the short story and how it works (in contrast to how the longer novel works). BUT, I still had a specific goal of going deeper about the short story and comparing the various American authors. I didn't just deluge us with reading. ;)

 

Ideas for How to Choose:

- consider limiting your in-depth works to 8-12 per year; a few other works can be read as supplement/go-along; put the rest in the free-read pile

- determine what your goals are for Literature, and how many works/authors will allow you to accomplish this goal

- use your goals to help determine which works to cover in depth

- use "college bound reading lists" to help you decide which works to cover in depth

- is a traditional school, or specific online classes, a possibility? what do they cover or what would be good prep for your student if heading in this direction?

- talk to your DD -- what does SHE want to go in depth on? is there an author/genre/time period she is really interested in exploring? pick works to go in depth on that build a great unit around her interests

 

Ideas for Helping Discussion (or ease the dislike of discussion):

- watch a good film version and read the book -- that tends to naturally open up discussion with comparison

- together read aloud, alternating pages, or listen together to the audiobook (allows for shared experience and discussion in the moment)

- if possible, discuss as a group -- is another sibling ready for some of these books and for discussing? can an occasional book be done as part of a book club with peers? is there a homeschooling friend reading a few of the same books in the same year for getting together with?

- annotation (DSs really hated this, and we didn't do a lot of it, BUT, they have both later on said it was very helpful for slowing down and seeing what was going on in the work and for triggering discussion) -- see this past thread for getting over the hump of annotating/discussing "Why does my DD have lots to say" -- see esp. posts #1,3,5,7 and 18.

- use some of the ideas in post #5 of that above thread for "pre-reading" -- prime the pump for discussion with "Here's a list of some of the things that are like "buried treasure" in this book we're about to start reading, so we have an idea of some things to be keeping one eye open for as we also read for enjoyment and for plot and character. :) "

- start off a time of discussion by handing DD the study guide and have her ask YOU some questions (it's hard for DC to be a class of 1 for the teacher to call on for all the answers to all the discussion questions!!)

- start off with just casual discussion over tea and cookies with both of you sharing things like -- what were your initial impressions? what did you like/not like and why? what jumped out at you, or seemed important or was interesting? what do you think will happen from here? what would you do if you were the character? does this remind you of anything else -- book, movie, TV show, historical person/event, etc., and how?

 

 

BEST of luck in your family's own unique Literature journey in high school! It will be great. :) Warmest regards, Lori D.

 

Edited March 22, 2016 by Lori D.

[RootAnn]

i have a kid who loves to read & is pretty darn good (fast/good comprehension) at it. She leans heavily toward fluff for her free reading, but does fairly well with the meatier stuff I assign (and occasionally the stuff she picks on her own).

 

She ALSO hates to write and doesn't care much for discussions with me that she doesn't bring up herself. So, I have a list of lit requirements that she must read & discuss & write about. The rest is available for free read time or inclination. The goal was to spend a lot of our Freshman year on writing with the literature being the fluffier part of the course. (It hasn't worked out exactly that way, but that's a whole 'nother story.)

 

Personally, I'd probably let the LOTR stuff be less output-heavy and more free-read-y. Let it truly be more 'for fun.' She can do one 'output' a semester from the LOTR thing -- a Powerpoint comparing something, a video discussing something, a blog post debating some question she thought up, etc.

 

If you feel she needs to work on her writing, I'd make sure your course is focused in that direction. In our house, if I don't have it laid out that way (time/material-wise), it won't happen that way.