What books should I teach in 9th grade honors English?

December 1, 2023 7:26 AM

High school English teacher here. I work at an independent school and have a good amount of leeway in terms of what texts I assign. I am looking for a few great books to add to the curriculum in my 9th grade honors English class.

The theme of the course is "coming of age," and probably has to stay that way, so books that loosely adhere to that theme are helpful.

What's staying: Romeo and Juliet, probably The Catcher in the Rye (at least for now), and some poems and short stories. What's going: some random YA that I inherited from my predecessor.

I would like to assign books that are classic, or well-regarded enough that students will feel like they're participating in a conversation by reading them.

I'm interested in novels, but potentially also a nonfiction book (Into the Wild? Educated? Silent Spring? The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks?)

Novel-wise, I'm weighing things like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Metamorphosis . . . what am I not thinking of?

I also want to assign a how-to-write book as summer reading. I would likely default to Strunk & White (not perfect, but it's short and is kind of the ur-manual of its type), but open to suggestions there as well.

Ditto with poems and short stories. Suggest me some!

TLDR: what have you taught to 9th graders that is challenging and of literary merit but has also gotten them engaged???

posted by toomuchkatherine to Education (45 answers total)

Maybe The Stars and The Blackness Between Them?
posted by shadygrove at 7:54 AM on December 1, 2023

The Things They Carried
posted by extramundane at 8:01 AM on December 1, 2023

Housekeeping
posted by cda at 8:04 AM on December 1, 2023

I am not a teacher but I was honors English in high school and college in the 60s/70s.

For poetry and coming of age I would suggest Equipment by Edgar A. Guest.

I would also suggest the relatively short Allegory of the Cave by Plato.

And for a motivational and inspirational book, The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.

And perhaps consider something on topic but created by an indigenous author.
posted by forthright at 8:07 AM on December 1, 2023

Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Maya Angelou, The Color Purple

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

Too many excellent choices to count (and I've read Not Enough of them, sadly) on ALA's Stonewall awards list.

If you think I am making a point about your existing list... well spotted, and I encourage you to go back to those "random" YA novels in case they maybe weren't so randomly-chosen after all.
posted by humbug at 8:08 AM on December 1, 2023

A Boy and his Dog.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 8:09 AM on December 1, 2023

Instead of Catcher in the Rye (or maybe in addition to it?), consider David Mitchell's absolutely lovely and poignant Black Swan Green. I guess this doesn't quite fit your "classic" criterion, but... I dunno, it's a much better book with a main character who isn't a misogynistic jerk. When I read Catcher in the Rye in ninth grade, I just couldn't relate; it felt pretty outdated.

For a how-to-write book, I much prefer Joseph Williams' Style: Toward Clarity and Grace to Strunk and White. Where Strunk and White give pithy rules like "Be clear", Williams actually shows you how to do that by giving vocabulary for what what makes prose readable or not. It has tons of helpful examples, and I think there's also an edition with exercises you can do too.
posted by number9dream at 8:09 AM on December 1, 2023

A vote for what not to teach: A Separate Peace. 33 years on and I still HATE THAT BOOK that I had to read in 9th grade English.

One book we did read that year that I loved was Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
posted by tafetta, darling! at 8:23 AM on December 1, 2023

I would like to assign books that are classic, or well-regarded enough that students will feel like they're participating in a conversation by reading them.

The books that are considered "classics" (including the books you're listing as keeping and as considering) are often neither diverse nor inclusive. I'm not really sure how to say this politely but if my kids came home from school with a reading list like that in today in 2023, I would genuinely be shocked. Additionally these books are just really really old and ignore the entire body of coming of age literature written after, what, 1970?

As an educator what is your own reading like? Are you reading award-winning ya fiction from a cross-section of genres? The Hate U Give, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and the amazing Light from Uncommon Stars are all outstanding and highly regarded books written in this century that should really resonate with your readers.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:29 AM on December 1, 2023

Some parts of The Things They Carried are a bit much for a school setting, but I had to read excerpts from it at that age and it was important to me. It was paired with discussion of the Vietnam War and some local involvement with prominent events.
posted by tofu_crouton at 8:37 AM on December 1, 2023

If there's a chance they won't be taught it in later years - Animal Farm.
posted by kitcat at 8:38 AM on December 1, 2023

If you want to absolutely outrage your students about an almost forgotten series of horrific crimes committed against Americans their age and older well within living memory, and for which there was never even a hint of justice in any case as far as I know, consider My Lobotomy: A Memoir.
posted by jamjam at 8:39 AM on December 1, 2023

Apologies if some of these are hopelessly outdated, but here's a few that have stayed with me through the years:

John Knowles, A Separate Peace
Herman Hesse, Damien
Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

For a short story, I find Joseph Conrad's Youth to be just a hilarious exposition on, well, youth, and coming of age as a young sailor on an epically disastrous voyage.

A vote for what not to teach: A Separate Peace. 33 years on and I still HATE THAT BOOK that I had to read in 9th grade English.

haha!...I feel exactly the same way about Catcher in the Rye!
posted by Bron at 8:46 AM on December 1, 2023

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a lovely novel but I think overlong for your purposes and you already other books that are old and white?

Are you allowed to teach The Hate U Give? There's a lot there to grip the reader emotionally and it ties in with a lot of current discussion about police violence.

Or The Bluest Eye or Sula? Morrison is a literary giant (and I think really meets your "classics" requirement) and also she wrote these books because she said she wanted to write the kind of books she wanted to read as a young person and didn't yet exist. This can help them think about what they want to say in the world that hasn't yet been said.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club? This is a queer coming of age story set in SF Chinatown in the 50s. It also gestures at trans identity. I like that it talks a lot about multi-layered identity, the complications of history, and I think the parents are painted in an extremely nuanced light.

Never Let Me Go? I think this one is really layered. You can talk about technology, you can talk about morality, you can talk about "genre fiction."

The Outsiders? One thing about this book is that it was written by an actual young person.

For memoir, maybe Solito?

If you can find one that takes place in or near where the kids live, that can be really engaging, I think.
posted by vunder at 8:53 AM on December 1, 2023

I read "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" on a tip from a peer in 10th grade, although I would have been ready for it in 9th. It certainly wouldn't have been assigned reading in my very white high school 40 years ago.

It changed my life for the better in a way that wouldn't truly reveal itself until four decades later. I can't recommend it highly enough.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 8:56 AM on December 1, 2023

Not a suggestion, but a question -- who do you want to put your students in conversation with? Classics put students in conversation with a specific slice of the past -- and that has value, I'm not knocking it, but creating a dialogue with more people, living and dead, has value too.
posted by eirias at 9:05 AM on December 1, 2023

Elizabeth Acevedo is great. She's written poetry and YA novels and was a high school teacher, so very familiar with that audience.
posted by wicked_sassy at 9:15 AM on December 1, 2023

Some ideas:

So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ - it's not 100% coming of age, but there is a bit of that - it's one long letter written from one woman to another, reflecting on their lives (including their youth) as well as on their daughters coming of age, and how this compares to their own generation. Also covers the transition of Senegal from the colonial to postcolonial period. I've taught this to college students, but it's doable for high school students - and it's short (under 100 pages).

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke - fitting with the theme of people writing letters reflecting on their younger self. And fits your desire for a classic.

The Leavers by Lisa Ko - not a classic, but it was a National Book Award Finalist. Very much a coming of age story, in this case of an adopted Chinese–American boy, into early adulthood.
posted by coffeecat at 9:19 AM on December 1, 2023

The Round House by Louise Erdrich
The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez
+1 to The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple
posted by lizard music at 9:26 AM on December 1, 2023

lovestar by andri snær magnússon is an icelandic classic taught to this age group in iceland and the english translation is beautiful, fits w your themes
posted by wowenthusiast at 9:26 AM on December 1, 2023

"slaughterhouse five."
posted by kensington314 at 9:31 AM on December 1, 2023

The book that meant the most to me in my ninth-grade honors English curriculum was the The House on Mango Street.

Everyday by David Levithan probably isn't deathless literature, but it's really powerful and could spark excellent conversations about identity and perspective.

Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being is a heavy read but has a lot to offer a young reader as well as interesting aesthetic choices to discuss.

I read Man's Search for Meaning in high school and got a lot of mileage out of it. If your students have read a Holocaust memoir in their other classes, you could pair it with another book about genocide (here are some ideas).
posted by toastedcheese at 9:44 AM on December 1, 2023

First, a plug for short stories (which could actually be read in class) and require way less investment on the part of your students.

Second- if you’re teaching the kids to write, I love NYT’s Frank Bruni’s recurring bit ‘for the love of sentences’, which highlights terrific lines from current journalism. Would be great for getting class started or wrapping things up.

Finally- I’m sure you’ll emphasize a number of newer works from indigenous, non-white, non-cis and etc. authors- that’s important, and what kids will want to read. But I suggest pulling in a few short stories from, say, Kipling or Maugham or Lawrence so that your students will know WHY it’s so important. The racism, sexism and classism is APPALLING yet couched in such well crafted language…
posted by carterk at 9:48 AM on December 1, 2023

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, maybe, funniest book I've ever read. PG Wodehouse's Code of the Wosoters, too. They're young to appreciate these, but British humor is so good. The Color Purple and other work by non-white authors. I'd also do a list involving British books, including Pat Barker, esp. the WWI trilogy, and some Indian writers. Americans tend to not get world news and culture; I'm grateful to excellent college literature professors who introduced me to a a wider pool of English-language literature. War novels, like Johnny Got His Gun, Catch-22, etc., are a form of coming of age novel.
posted by theora55 at 10:47 AM on December 1, 2023

we were assigned Watership Down in 10th grade and I loved it. Seems like it would be perfect in a skilled teacher's hands because while it literally is about rabbits growing up in the world there are so many allegories to discuss.
posted by mmascolino at 11:45 AM on December 1, 2023

I advise extreme caution with deliberately selecting *-ist books. Students in the targeted demographic(s) do not want to be forced to read that shit, quite understandably. (We had to stop hiring an adjunct who had been moonlighting with us for a long time because of exactly this, plus ill-advisedly doubling down on it with students and with us.) Some privileged students are liable to miss the point and use what they read in the book to abuse less-privileged students.

It's just... not a good idea, pedagogically. Stick with the more inclusive stuff.
posted by humbug at 12:47 PM on December 1, 2023

With a focus on your "coming of age" theme, here's stuff my sons (now HS seniors) had in recent years:
- "The Hate You Give" and "Into The Wild," in sophomore and junior year, respectively, iirc. They were among their favorite reads.
- They also read Isabel Allende's "City of the Beasts." Weird but memorable, they said. Bonus of having both a boy and girl as protagonists and a sort of fantastical setting.
- "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" is non-fiction but a terrific story, features a teenage boy, and is set in Africa. My guys loved it.
- Mixed reviews on "The Lord of the Flies" but that's a pretty standard freshman English book and it's definitely kids coming of age, so...
- They both read "Hatchet" in middle school, and loved it, enough to have re-read a couple times since. It may be a bit young for ninth grade, but maybe not?
posted by martin q blank at 1:10 PM on December 1, 2023

High school English staffer here to recommend All American Boys, Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, House on Mango Street, and Speak as books that connect well with Hon 9 students currently…Like literally today.
posted by rabidsegue at 1:31 PM on December 1, 2023

Also for poetry: Poet X (novel in verse).
posted by rabidsegue at 1:33 PM on December 1, 2023

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark?
posted by rd45 at 1:44 PM on December 1, 2023

Perhaps consider how online-accessible the books you choose are for this cohort of students, not just in terms of plot summaries or information about the book but in terms of a wider digital universe of content created both by the author and by readers.

I say this because if your school’s honors-class system can overburden even the most proficient 9th-grade readers with too much homework and projects of excessive complexity which must also be balanced with athletics and activities, it may very well be worth looking for titles with not just library-accessible audiobooks and robust but readable Wikipedia entries, but also other forms of adjacent media, like YouTube interviews with the author, memes and fan fiction to build interest and generate that conversation you seek.

Of course, I am sure they would do their best to read whatever you assigned them, but I also know that a few decades ago, I was utterly swamped by schoolwork in my ninth-grade honors classes as I adjusted to the faster pace and deeper complexity of high school, and as a result spent many nights barely skimming my assigned reading for honors English because it seemed so low stakes when I could check the Cliffs Notes ten minutes before class and do fine enough to get As and Bs.

Honors students will seek whatever help they can get in “getting through the material” in your class just as they do for all their classes. Knowing there’s a lot of supporting book-related media out there and that their reading brings them into a wider universe of shared knowledge of the book might motivate them to take the time to actually do the reading each night a bit more than if the book feels less like a cultural phenomenon and more like a gruelling rite of passage. Overall, you want to avoid what happened to me with Great Expectations, which I was made to read over Christmas break in ninth grade in a mostly pre-internet era: having to read a chapter and then cross-reference with the Cliffs Notes because I was unable to deal with the complexity of the language and the impossibility of remembering all the details, I swore off reading fiction for leisure for years afterwards.

Good luck!
posted by mdonley at 2:31 PM on December 1, 2023

Would definitely not recommend Elements of Style :) Picturing myself as a high school student I would find it deadly boring. I would go with On Writing Well, by William Zinsser which has excellent examples, and is smoothly and wittily written.

For poems - Billy Collins! Or get the poetry anthology he edited called Poetry 180 which is a mostly modern selection of accessible but substantial poems.

For short stories - sample some from the Art of the Tale, a massive collection of stories that are all discussion-worthy and beautifully written.
posted by storybored at 2:37 PM on December 1, 2023

Instead of Strunk & White, you might consider Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.
posted by MyTwoCentsToo at 4:32 PM on December 1, 2023

seconding William Zinsser on the writing guides. On Writing Well is terrific, and Writing to Learn is sort of a companion book to it.
also, the kids inform me that City of the Beasts and Lord of the Flies were middle school for them. But they'd work for ninth grade, I think.
posted by martin q blank at 5:54 PM on December 1, 2023

For poems, around that age I really connected with a book called Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle. I especially liked Fifteen by William Stafford and Overheard in a Saltmarsh by Harold Munro, but the whole book has a great variety.
posted by Night_owl at 6:26 PM on December 1, 2023

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou is excellent for 9th grade.

Also, Stamped, the YA version of Stamped from the Beginning. (nonfiction)
posted by RedEmma at 7:04 PM on December 1, 2023

The rule of the bone x Russell Banks. Future classic.
posted by pmaxwell at 12:55 AM on December 2, 2023

For the sake of the students, give them a break from the classics!

Hated "A Separate Peace," "Catcher and the Rye," "Animal Farm," etc. in high school. It's honors English - these kids get bored really easily and have to sit through so much pedantic drivel in high school anyway. Go for books whose subject matter is intrinsically interesting, or that they can identify with (present day at least), in addition to the literary merit. Those older books just felt like eating a mouthful of dust and made me never want to read again.

Lord of the Flies was good, mostly due to how shocking it was.

My Lord of the Flies instructor (the cool one!) had us analyze a lot of song lyrics. That was fun and different. We did Scarbourough Fair but I'm sure there are a lot of current lyrics you could do instead of some dusty old poetry.

Are you allowed to teach movies? I seem to recall analyzing a bunch of really boring movies in HS, in black and white with characters I couldn't relate to. But there are lots of better movies now.
posted by bluesky78987 at 6:58 AM on December 2, 2023

Kiese Laymon's How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America was the kind of thing I really wanted to read in high school--a school that taught almost exactly what you're reviewing...Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, Romeo and Juliet, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, etc. Oh my gosh, just stop. Even then (40 years ago!), these stories felt bizarrely, creepily, nostalgic for a world I did not recognize. They only taught me that literature, history, and culture were things that I had no part in experiencing, forming, or influencing. (And I say that from the point of view of a middle class white teen in northeast U.S. That message is much more insidious to anyone not sharing those identities.) Please, please, do not fetishize the past. Give your students stories that prove they exist in this world, they have agency, they are the world.

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought." - Basho
posted by cocoagirl at 8:49 AM on December 2, 2023

My teen had The Things They Carried as a senior year read (early) for expository writing- preparing for college admissions essays. Great book, just check in on future canon.

Speak by Laura Halse Anderson is well timed as a high school freshman read.

With war leading the media, Slaughterhouse Five by Vonnegut is a decent approach to the realities and PTSD (being unstuck in time)
posted by childofTethys at 9:04 AM on December 2, 2023

Sherman Alexie is very engaging, especially the book mentioned above.

Speak or Caged Bird, but not both, and Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights and others are TERRIBLE for adolescents figuring out healthy relationships and consent in addition to Honors Freshman English. Yes, characters need conflict but it’s great to have a teacher that speaks to these dynamics if a book must be taught.

Metamorphosis and Bluest Eye are short classics that may Actually Get Read.

Pair The Hate U Give with MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail

If you have a lot of students interested in science and making a difference (including via writing), Henrietta Lacks is interesting in two ways - there is the literal story of Henrietta Lacks and her family, especially her daughter, who reckons with her mother’s life, as well as the journey of Rebecca Skloot who is researching and writing the gift of the book-it’s more of a coming-of-awareness tale, a solid one. Our campus had it as a college new student read about 10 years ago.

Memoirs:
Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle instead of Educated
Night by Elie Wiesel
D. Watkins, Black Boy Smile
baynard woods, Inheritance-An Autobiography of Whiteness (or the earlier)
Debby Irving: Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race (Tim Wise’s White Like Me is too Bro, and with J.D. Vance students would watch the movie.
posted by childofTethys at 11:02 AM on December 2, 2023

No specific titles, but can you make a point about how Romeo and Juliet are basically the same age as your students? When I realized that, in high school English, it totally changed the valence of the whole thing for me: the play became of a piece with the overheated relationship/clique drama that constantly sloshed around the school.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:10 PM on December 2, 2023

And no got-damned Catcher in the Rye.

John Greene has shown that you can write about kids in their language; CitR is so old now that it feels like historical fiction.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:12 PM on December 2, 2023

Willam Durbin's books about a boy becoming a voyageur and having to grow up are good.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:14 PM on December 2, 2023

I think All-American Boys is a better read and more discussable than The Hate U Give. I think Jason Mott's Hell of a Book is far better than either, but too much sexual content to fly in 9th grade.
posted by jocelmeow at 12:20 PM on December 2, 2023