It’s amazing what kids can do when you raise your expectations of them.

I have been teaching literature to high schoolers for 24 years. The first ten were in a public school, where I covered the standard textbook stuff — poetry, short stories, and excerpts from longer works. In a good year, we might also get through two  short novels like A Separate Peace or The Pearl. Never more than that. And often, we had to read the novels aloud in class over several weeks because so few would be willing to complete the reading on their own.

That’s not a blanket criticism of public schools or school kids, by the way. I taught in a low-income school with a history of low performance, and I was usually given low-level courses (because I was good with those kids). It was hard, and there are no easy answers to the myriad challenges such schools face.

When given the opportunity to teach literature in a once-per-week enrichment program for homeschoolers in 1999, I jumped at the chance. I loved the idea of creating my own curriculum from scratch. I had always thought students could handle more than what we typically asked of them.

Roughly following the classical/Great Books model advocated by Susan Wise Bauers and others, and tweaking the syllabus over the years, I eventually landed on the 5-year plan below. I’ve taught this curriculum for about ten years now, and well over a hundred kids have completed at least the first four courses (the Advanced Lit class is reserved for those who finish the first four early or seniors willing to take two lit classes).

It’s an impressive book list. I am always amazed at how well teenagers do. They not only complete each week’s reading assignment and pass their weekly comprehension quizzes, but — and this is the so important — they usually like the books. Not all of them, of course, and everyone prefers some to others, but the great majority of students tell me year after year how much they enjoyed what they read.

I take a particular approach to these works — one that I explain at the start of each year. Our goal is to simply scratch the surface of each book. I subscribe to C.S. Lewis’s definition of great books: They are books that invite and reward additional readings. What I hope to accomplish in my lit classes is to introduce students to the best books I know by the most influential writers of the western tradition. These books are rich and deep. We don’t even pretend to plumb their depths. We talk about their place in literary history and the general reasons they are recognized. We spend some brief time talking about the author and the historical period, but the emphasis is on the content of the books themselves — the story, characters, and style.

We talk a lot about what we like and don’t like. When we discuss books we don’t like, we talk about why others might like it so much. We make fun of the dumb parts (and trust me, even the greatest of great books have some dumb parts). We laugh a lot and remind ourselves that these books were not written to be analyzed and dissected by teenagers, but to delight and enthrall ordinary readers.

I could write more about my approach to teaching literature in a future post, but let’s get to the point of this one: to show off the books my students read. Unless noted, we read the works unabridged in their entirety. Let me know if you have any questions.

Lit 1

• Mythology (Edith Hamilton)
• The Iliad (Homer)
• The Odyssey (Homer)
• Agamemnon (Aeschylus)
• Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)
• Medea (Eurpides)
• The Frogs (Aristophanes)
• Various Fables (Aesop)
• Till We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis)
• Various Dialogues (Plato)
• Selections from The Republic (Plato)
• Poetics (Aristotle)
• The Aeneid (Virgil)
• The Lives of Lycurgus & Caesar (Plutarch)
• Julius Caesar (Shakespeare)

Lit 2

• Confessions (Augustine — an abridged translation)
• Beowulf (Anonymous — the Seamus Heaney trans.)
• The Inferno (Dante)
• Various Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)
• “Prologue”
• “The Knight’s Tale”
• “The Pardoner’s Tale”
• “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”
• “Gawain and the Green Knight” (Tolkien’s translation)
• The Once and Future King (T.H. White)
• Excerpts from Le Morte D’Arthur (Malory)
• Utopia (More)
• Book 1 of The Faerie Queen (Spenser)
• Doctor Faustus (Marlowe)
• Hamlet (Shakespeare)
• Macbeth (Shakespeare)
• Henry IV, Part 1 (Shakespeare)
• Henry IV, Part 2 (Shakespeare)
• Henry V (We watch the film version by Kenneth Branaugh as a class)
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)
• Various Sonnets (Shakespeare)
• Selections from John Donne (“Valediction, Forbidding Mourning,” “The Flea,” etc.)
• Various metaphysical poems (“To His Coy Mistress,” “To the Virgins,” etc.

Lit 3

• Don Quixote (Cervantes, abridged trans. by Starkie)
• Paradise Lost (Milton)
• Christianity for Modern Pagans (Kreeft’s abridged, annotated verson of Pascal’s Pensees)
• Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan)
• Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) or Robinson Crusoe (Defoe)
• Various poems by the Minor Romantics (Burns, Gray, Bryant, Blake, etc.)
• Various poems by the Major Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron)
• Pride and Prejudice (Austen) or Jane Eyre (Bronte)
• Frankenstein (Shelley)
• Various poems by Tennyson (“Charge of the Light Brigade,” Crossing the Bar,” etc.)
• Various works by Poe (“The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Cask of Amontillado,” etc.)
• “Self-Reliance” (Emerson)
• “Civil Disobedience” (Thoreau)
• Excerpts from Walden  (Thoreau)
• “Rappuccini’s Daughter” and “The Minister’s Black Veil” (Hawthorne)
• Moby Dick (Melville)

Lit 4

• David Copperfield (Dickens)
• Various poems by Dickinson
• Various poems by Whitman
• Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
• The Return of the Native (Hardy)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
• The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot)
• Various poems by the Modernists (Pound, Williams, Hughes, Cummings Frost)
• “The Metamorphosis” (Kafka)
• “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (O’Connor)
• “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (Hemingway)
• Our Town (Wilder)
• Go Down, Moses (Faulker)
• Animal Farm (Orwell)
• The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
• The Crucible (Miller)
• Lord of the Flies (Golding)
• The Great Divorce (Lewis)
• Peace Like a River (Enger)

Advanced Lit

• The Universe Next Door (Sire)
• An Experiment in Criticism (Lewis)
• How to Read Literature Like a Professor (Foster)
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson)
• The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne)
• Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Dillard)
• The Call of the Wild (London)
• Waiting for Godot (Beckett)
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard)
• The Plague (Camus)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig)
• Life of Pi (Martel)
• Things Fall Apart (Achebe)
• To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
• Lost in the Cosmos (Percy)