School started this week.  And I’ve got a whale of a course load–five separate courses with five separate reading lists.  But the nice part about it, I got to choose the books.  So here is what we’re reading:

AP Literature and Composition

Brave New World. Aldous Huxley
The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood
Crime and Punishment. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Stranger Albert Camus
Oedipus Rex Sophocles
Antigone Sophocles
A Doll’s House Henrik Ibsen
Hedda Gabler Henrik Ibsen
Hamlet William Shakespeare
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead Tom Stoppard
Slaughterhouse-5 Kurt Vonnegut
Catch-22 Joseph Heller
Invisible Man Ralph Ellison
The Piano Lesson August Wilson
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf Edward Albee

Literature and Film

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Joseph Heller
Winter’s Bone Daniel Woodrell
Revolutionary Road Richard Yates
The Commitments  Roddy Doyle
The Human Stain  Phillip Roth

The Contemporary Short Story

Best American Short Stories of 2011 Geraldine Books (editor)
The New Yorker magazine

Creative Writing

The 3AM Epiphany Brian Kiteley
The Practice of Creative Writing Heather Sellers
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Annie Lamott

Modern Irish Literature

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  James Joyce
Dubliners James Joyce
Butcher Boy Patrick McCabe
Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett
The Complete Plays of John Millington Synge
The Lonesome West Martin MacDonagh

Now, I have to admit this is a pretty hefty reading list.  Many of the titles I have read multiple times, and some as recently as last year and each of the three years before that.  But as for others, it has been a good while and I’m going to have dig in and get them read.

And of course this is all supplemented with various handouts of Yeats and Heaney and MacNiece, of Hemingway and O’Connor (Flannery and Frank), of modern poets and ancient classical texts.

My boys are getting quite a load.  Some appreciate it. Many don’t.

But that’s okay.  At least they’ve been exposed to the things I love–and sometimes I think that could be contagious.