Over
the years I’ve come up with a lot of global lit lists. But when I came up with
an idealized high school curriculum a few months ago it opened up the potential
for distilling such a goal into a manageable set of things to read.
My ideal curriculum held that Freshman year should cover World Lit from the Middle Ages
to the 20th Century, Sophomore year focusing on world lit just from the 20th
century, Junior year American lit, and Senior year a choice of electives.
So
for Freshman year, let’s try:
August:
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
September:
The Inferno by Dante
October:
Poetry of Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei and Tao Chien
November:
Journey to the West (abridged) by Wu Cheng’en
December: Haiku of Matsuo Basho, Japanese No
Dramas
January:
The Recognition of Shakuntala by Kalidasa, Poetry of Rumi and Saadi
February:
Sundiata, African Folklore
March:
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
April:
A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, Candide by Voltaire
May:
Poetry of Donne, Pope, Marvell, Wordsworth, Shelly, Baudelaire, Valery, and
Rimbaud
June:
Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
And
for Sophomore year, how about:
August:
Sister My Life by Boris Pasternak
September:
Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz
October:
In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka, Funes the Memorious and the Library of
Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, Diary of a Madman by Lu Xun
November:
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, Eagle or Sun? by Octavio Paz
December:
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
January:
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, Death and the King’s Horseman
by Wole Soyinka
February:
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Rashomon by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
March:
Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather by Gao Xingjian
April:
The China Tree by Issam Mahfouz, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
May: The
Plague by Albert Camus
June:
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Also,
for kicks, here’s Junior year’s suggested American Lit:
August:
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
September:
Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, Leaves of Grass selections by Walt Whitman,
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, and Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
October:
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
November/December:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
January:
American Indian Stories, by Zitkala-Sa, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott
Fitzgerald
February:
Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin, A Good Man is Hard to Find by
Flannery O’Connor
March:
Howl: Part One by Allen Ginsburg and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
April:
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
May/ June:
Slouching Towards Bethlehem selections by Joan Didion, The Things They Carried
by Tim O’Brien
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