A 10TH GRADE READING LIST FOR TIMES LIKE THESE
| Beloved |
do you have memories like mine, of stickered paperbacks and pencil-smudged desks—
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| The Lord of |
the flies’ lazy laps overhead, the dry erase fumes and overcooked body spray? Outside, the
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| The House on Mango |
street noise, like mortgages or old age, is far away from essays and lunch trays and football
|
| The Hunger |
games and dress codes. Now listen up: Allegory. Foreshadowing. Irony. Theme. In a quality
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| The Handmaid’s |
tale, everything has a symbol. (Are you taking notes?) A fireman, a cake, a pilgrim, a paperweight,
|
| To Kill |
a mockingbird, any bird. Glasses, skulls, heads on sticks, #42. Today nothing adds up. What would
|
| The Hate |
u give for the answer—easy to spot, like red hunting hats or scarlet letters or blue eyes? Vocab quiz:
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| Slaughterhouse- |
five ways to describe a dock light: emerald, jade, viridian, lime, chartreuse. Why would you need these
|
| Into the | wild stories? Pages dripped with blood, trauma, conspiracy, breakdowns, talking animals. But |
| The Things |
they carried truths, along with imperfections, histories, warnings. So when you’re getting torn
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| Things Fall |
apart (hang the witch/burn the pages/send them back/lock them up/distrust the
|
| Love |
medicine/white noise & white houses/red hats & red plagues), remember the night still |
| I Know Why the Caged Bird |
sings with voices. Changing the ending. Do you have memories like mine, of an eager, limitless
|
| Brave New |
world, of it stretching before you? I’m taking a breath. I’m ready to
|
| Speak | |
—from Poets Respond
October 13, 2020
__________
Laura Murray: “I had fun writing this poem. Increasingly it has felt to me like we’re living in some sort of fictionalized reality, aligning with material you might read in high school English. Although I wrote this after the vice presidential debate (and Kamala Harris’s meme-able ‘I’m speaking’ moment), the final title was an unintentional but happy tie-in. I also thought it was fitting that most if not all of these titles are banned or challenged books.” (web)
