Library
This is a list of just a few of the books in my classroom library. If you want to read one for pleasure or for extra credit (which requires writing a thoughtful response to the text!), just let me know. I encourage students to check out books from me in class, any day of the week.
Want to suggest a book I should add to my library? Please just leave a comment, below.
Happy browsing!
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson – a difficult, moving YA novel about a girl’s experience as a high school outcast.
Feed by M.T. Anderson – an incredible futuristic YA satire about life when everyone has a “feed” implanted in their brain and life is one continuous TV commercial
Kindred by Octavia Butler – a sci-fi/time-travel novel by a queer black writer, about a black woman who is thrown back in time to the antebellum American South. An incredible and disturbing story.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald – yes, this is on our required reading list, but it’s just such a great book. I highly recommend you read it purely for the pleasure of reading beautifully crafted sentences, and for the strangeness of being dropped into the midst of the “roaring twenties.”
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton – the original, the best, the grandmother of all YAs about disaffected youth. A classic.
Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein – an absolutely riveting biography of one of the founders of American folk music. Woody Guthrie wrote that song you sang in elementary school music class — “This land is your land, this land is my land…” Betcha didn’t know that was a political song — a revolutionary song — a song of passionate anger! “But it sounds so sweet and inclusive,” you protest! You’re right, it does. And yet, that song was Woody Guthrie’s answer to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” a song Guthrie considered to be complacent and unrealistic. Woody Guthrie: A Life is a must-read if you’re studying the Great Depression.
1984 by George Orwell – a classic. Like Feed and Uglies, this novel deals with the implications of the destruction of individuality and freedom.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck – this is another book that is on our required reading list, but like The Great Gatsby, it’s really worth a closer read than just completing a homework assignment. This book was published seventy years ago, but it is just as politically relevant today as it was back then. It’s all about the politics of the disenfranchised — people denied voting rights, though they live and work in a society and are subject to its laws. To me, this is all about “the Other” — that human tendency to marginalize people we don’t understand.
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld – another great futuristic YA. This one deals with issues of beauty and conformity, and living under the watchful eye of Big Brother.
