I'd use the books that blew my mind:

On The Road
Catcher In The Rye
The Complete ouevre of Richard Price
An Underacheiver's Diary
Barney's Version

and Abbie Hoffman's Revolution For The Hell Of It

Some of mine.

My drama teacher gave me The Golden Bough and Camus and e.e. cummings.

All of Ferlinghetti came at me through my friend, Josh.

Abbie Hoffman's Steal this Book (and, since it was the 80s, Steal This Urine Test) were delightfully countercultural. I sought out a lot of other hippie/yippie/rebel/revolutionary stuff around this time, but don't remember many other titles.

Dharma Bums and Lolita have to be on any such list, of course.

All of Hunter S. Thompson. I actually learned so much about 60s/70s politics inadvertently through his books. The Great Shark Hunt was my favorite (I always dug shorter journalistic/essay pieces). Tom Wolfe's reportage-y stuff, as well.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and also a book of Kesey's essays, Demon Box.

Carlos Castaneda, William Burroughs, Pynchon, The Joy of Sex. All kinds of stuff.

I was also into the, ahem, 'classics', still am, and I loved short stories at the time (McCullers, Cheever, Raymond Carver), but today I'm trying to think of books that I could feel burning in my backback, that were badges, that made me feel I was getting away with something.

What were yours?

oooh, forgot Cuckoo's Nest.

Oh my God, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder. I forgot about them. Got to take a workshop with Gary Snyder my senior year and was beside myself; it's a blur.

Peace by Gene Wolfe
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin
On The Beach by Nevil Shute [although kids would hate that one]
The Adventures of Telemachus by Louis Aragon

In HS I read schlock fantasy novels. I never broadened my horizons into dark curriculum until one summer in college when I caught up on all that stuff. Sometimes I feel that my life is one of studied retardation.

I have not read a single book mentioned here so far. Except for Catcher in the Rye (hate) and one of the Richard Price books.

*shuffles away, feeling inadequate*

I always felt like Crime and Punishment was something I should've read in high school. I would've HATED it and bitched about it to anyone who'd listen, but I think it's the most readable character profile type novel I've ever read.

And lots and lots of Vonnegut.

Only one of my lit teachers ever gave me (and the rest of my class, for that matter) any "extra" books to read -- of the dozen or so books listed, I hadn't read two or three. One was by an author I couldn't stand, and one was Paulo Coelho.

Anyway, here's what I'd recommend:
- In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
- Karel Capek's RUR
- Moscow-Petushki by Venedikt Erofeev
- Daniil Kharms' short stories

dno: I had to read Crime and Punishment in high school. My classmates (at least the ones I talked to) hated it and bitched about it, but I loved it.

Yeah, I'm a nutter.

I also think kids should read Finnegans Wake in high school. Otherwise, they'll grow up thinking that it's too difficult to understand for someone without a PhD in English.

All these "illicit" books were on the encouraged reading list all through school. I rebelled by reading The Count of Monte Cristo, Look Homeward, Angel, and Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.

I really fucked off my eleventh-grade English teacher when I read Finnegan's Wake for an open segment and wrote a detailed essay on it, forcing her to read the book herself. She didn't, and gave me an "A," even though large sections of my essay were either barely related to the material or utterly false. After years of being caught in traps laid by mediocre teachers, it was a true joy to catch one in a snare of my own.

My mother was a librarian, and I've always been a self-motivated reader, and whenever a teacher would crow about what a good reader I was, I'd tell 'em it had little or nothing to do with their efforts. They'd get mad, send me to the office, call my mom in, and offend my mom by taking credit for my reading; she'd put up with the teacher's slander, and then we'd leave together, she'd fume in the car, tell me she was proud of my reading but could I just learn not to piss my teachers off so much (as if the ability to piss them off wasn't something I'd spent years cultivating), and then we'd go get ice cream or go to the library to pick out books.

Shit, Brautigan rules. How could I have left out that story. The Hawkline Monster is sweet too.

Hugh Janus: Nerd Rebel

You would have fit right in with my buddies and me. We'd wear togas to school simply because we could get away with it.

Tom Robbins.
Hunter S. Thompson.

I came too late to much of the 60s/70s countercultural/Beat writing (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Pirsig, etc.) to appreciate it--I think it helps to get one's first exposure to it in high school. (Not that that's a bad thing.) But as an adult the only writers I really enjoyed out of that loosely-defined group were Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.

I read tons and tons of SF in high school ('30s-'60s). Asimov, Heinlein, and Herbert, especially. Herbert got me thinking about politics, religion and the environment in a way that assigned reading didn't.

I read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man two or three times during my senior year, and I wrote my AP English exam essay on it. When I told my teacher that I sympathized with the protagonist and thought that turning his back on society and going into seclusion to steal electricity from the Man was really his best option, she started crying right in front of the class. "I hope you don't really feel that way," she sniffled. "Oh, I do hope you don't feel that way." Poor Miss Blanco.

I got turned on to Pynchon when I found a hardcover edition of Gravity's Rainbow sitting in the bargain bin at a Waldenbooks in a mall, the summer between my junior and senior year. I'd never heard of the guy--I was just looking for something cheap to entertain me for a while, and the book was five dollars. I nearly put the thing back after looking at it (there's not much on the cover to advertise its content except the first few words of the novel), but a total stranger approached me as I was putting the book back and said, "I don't know why this book is here, but you should buy it." That guy changed my life.

Prospero, my college roommate had the opposite experience. She was trying to buy Gravity's Rainbow from a used bookstroe for a course she was taking, and the owner all but refused to sell it to her.

As for subversive reading... I didn't do much of it. The closest, I think, was Updike's Witches of Eastwick, which I was actually reading one day during English class while the rest of the class was finishing a quiz, and my teacher looked at me and said, "Does your mother know you're reading that book? It has a lot of sex!"

Since my mother did in fact know I was reading the book, I just shrugged it off. But that was the first time anyone really acted like there were non-romance-novel books that should be off-limits to kids; my parents always let me read whatever I wanted.

And Witches of Eastwick did, in fact, shape much of my worldview, and I used to hold it up as the one example in which Updike was not hideously anti-woman. Then I reread it recently, and saw that it was actually hideously anti-woman. Shattered the illusions of youth right there, it did.

My best reading year was 7th grade. I was out sick a lot and luckily had an English teacher who basically let me work outside the box and write about whatever I chose to read. That year I read In Cold Blood, Helter Skelter, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Martian Chronicles, Brave New World, The Electric Acid Kool Aid Test and pretty much every book Stephen King had written up to that point. I would go on to re-read a lot of these books.

Basically what Miko (My father gave me Great Shark Hunt when I was 12) and Jonmc said plus tons and tons of the pulps, like Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, Charles Williford and so on. Vonnegut, the outlaw sci-fi cannon, PKD, Alfred Bester, the Cyberpunks (I read the sci-fi cannon from 10 to 14 say, Heinlen and all that business). Orwell (Down and out, Homage to Catalonia). I think the vast majority of what I read was noir though, hundreds and hundreds of books. I love books.

Alfred Bester, huh? I've been sitting on a ton of PyrE for years, trying not to think about explo--
(oops)
*KLABAAAM!*

I read a lot of Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert also. And Robert Silverberg, Michael Moorcock, and William Gibson. I had read some Asimov in junior high to be fair, though. I found some Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories and I thought they were really good, just as important as The Scarlet Letter. I read Lolita and Pnin.

I didn't read Alan Watts, but I purchased a translation of the Tao Te Ching in senior year. However my family is Chinese and big nerds of Chinese literature so I've noticed I see it differently from most other people I meet.

No Anarchist's Cookbook, anyone? Oh well, me neither. :)

Boy, these threads are up my alley (rubs hands together gleefully). A few of my favorites:

Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries
Lynda Barry's Cruddy
Laura Kasischke's Suspicious River
John Barth's The End of the Road
Breece D'J Pancake's Trilobites
Sartre's No Exit
Charles Bukowski's Factotum
William Burroughs' Junky
Junot Diaz's Drown
Edward Albee's Zoo Story
Art Spiegelman's Maus (Parts I and II)
Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
Robert Olen Butler's Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina
Michael Cunningham's The Hours
Kate Chopin's The Awakening
Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit
Poetry by Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Charles Bukowski, Kate Rushin, Charles Simic, to name a few...

There is no such thing as an "off-limits" book, in my view. I teach quite a few of the books on the above list, or have encouraged them as Independent Reading, along with some of the titles already mentioned, like Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest (a class favorite) and Ellison's Invisible Man and Catcher. I have paused "read alouds," however, in the middle of a particularly "raw" section, when my principal has walked in (he just doesn't always share my weltanschaaung, alas). My students are quite fond of Zane (Addicted, The Sex Chronicles, etc.). Again, no off-limits books in my classroom (except, of course, actual "pornography," like Hustler or something... I don't wanna lose my job afterall). My first year of teaching, I got in a terrible fight with my co-teacher over Junot Diaz's Drown; he refused to let me teach it. We weren't co-teachers for very long (I got my own classroom the very next marking period). Funny thing is, one of our assistant principals is good friends with Diaz. (Ironically, that same teacher was okay with excerpts from The Basketball Diaries, until he read them...)

I just read Drown, I found a copy on my street, it was good.

I have also brought in so-called underground comics, like Milk & Cheese, Hate, Optic Nerve, Duplex Planet, for my "reluctant" readers, which they love; surprisingly, for tough Bronx students, they also like the Archies. (I do leave the Cherry Poptart at home... though I once did a graduate seminar paper on Angela Carter that included Cherry Poptart.)

(cool, DW; I'm waitin' on his next one... have you read the Pancake stories? some of my absolute favorites...)

I useta swipe my dad's Cherry Poptart comix allatime... I'd skim Tales from the Leather Nun and all the fem dom shit my folks were into... they had enough condoms for themselves as well as me and my nympho girlfriend (birds of a feather), though I had to reach into a box containing handcuffs, a cat'o'nine tails, a couple vibrators, a giant black dildo, ball gags, and plenty of alligator clips if I wanted to get some.

The first time it's a bit shocking, but one gets used to running that sort of gauntlet after a bit.

But yeah, Cherry Poptart, hot stuff! I'm sure your students would love it, Pips.

yay! I was hoping you'd show up in this thread, Pips!

What you say about your teaching choices is right on. A lot of teachers of our generation do actually teach some of these titles. But when I was in public school in the mid-80s, most of these definitely were pretty far from the canon.

Langston Hughes! I still love him. In my high school's favor, I can say that the teachers did a good job across the board including literature by black and non-male and non-Anglo-Saxon writers, probably due to the fact that the student population was so culturally diverse. So I didn't have to find Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Brooks, or Wright on my own. But if you didn't find them in school it would be really important to find them somehow.

surprisingly, for tough Bronx students, they also like the Archies.

It seems that almost nobody doesn't like Archie comics. They have a weird, mesmerizing power.

Thanks, Miko. : )

I know whatcha mean... I didn't read most of the "good stuff" until after high school (I graduated in '84), though I liked the Shakespeare and Frost and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight we did read, too.

(Hugh, every young man should have a "nympho girlfriend" of their very own... I do hope your folks washed that stuff thoroughly : 0

In High School I really loved Kathy Acker and Bukowski! After reading many assigned books it was refreshing to see very experimental and sometimes loose forms of writing.

Also : Rumi!

Also : comics...so many comics....

i also had to read crime and punishment and loved it. I was then ridiculed for reading the idiot "for fun".

i was always getting into trouble for extracurricular reading in high school. perhaps foreshadowing my career as a librarian.

i was also pretty into bukowski in high school. perhaps foreshadowing my career as a dirty ass drunk.

A Clockwork Orange--to the point where I dressed up as Alex senior year Halloween( My reply to the guy who told me I couldn't be him because I was a girl was "So what?"), Betty Smith, Erica Jong, John Irving....

I remember finding and liking the snarky young Brits when I was in high school: Martin Amis’s “London Fields” and Julian Barnes’s “History of the World in Ten and One Half Chapters.” I thought they were very clever. I thought I was awfully clever too. I read Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” loved it, and loved feeling like I was the brightest teenager in my particular zip-code.

What would I have liked in high school, but didn’t find until later? I’d probably have gone nuts over Murakami, either “Hard Boiled Wonderland” or “Norwegian Wood” – for very different reasons, of course. I’d have been daunted by “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” but I’d carry it around, and make it look like I’d read it.

I probably could have benefited from some less-clever, more humane books back then. Ray Carver’s “Cathedral” would probably have done young me some good. Joseph Mitchell too.