Supplemental Essay #6 Book List

JHS
Mon, 03 Aug 2015 23:26:36 +0000

Wait a second, gibby. Are you really telling me that at Stuyvesant your children had both Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov as assigned reading? Along with Moby Dick and War and Peace? That’s . . . a little hard to believe. Especially since there are some other pretty massive 19th Century novels that I thought it was difficult to get out of high school (as an ambitious student) without reading.

My daughter read The Brothers Karamazov for a high school course, but it was part of an elective minicourse that ran for a whole trimester and read two books (the other one being Anna Karenina), and maybe six kids signed up for the course. It was a great course, but the reading load was more than twice what the school’s English department had as its standard. And this was a school with a platinum-level academic reputation.

My mother taught a really rigorous high school American Lit course for 20 years, and she never assigned Moby Dick. It would have taken too much space in her curriculum.

What I liked about the OP’s list was that I thought it showed that the OP followed up on books he or she liked by reading more of the same author. What I didn’t like was that they were all pretty standard, and that you couldn’t tell anything about what the OP got out of the books just by looking at the list, other than that the OP likes reading books that lots and lots of other people love reading, too.