Top Ten Tuesday: Required Reading

YO PEOPLE. Today's Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by the fab The Broke and the Bookish was hard! We apparently are not budding lit professors. Nevertheless, here is what makes our list as teachable books. Cheers to all those TTT participants out there! share your ideas!

 
• The Book Thief- definitely appropriate for an American Studies class and a good comparison to Anne Frank's Diary of a young girl as it tells the story of a different but in many ways same young girl in WWII.
• And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini. Not because everyone is all "we love the Kite Runner" but because of the interesting way the book floats around the narrators, it almost has a feeling of stream of consciousness.  I think someone smarter then me in this subject would have more to say.  (you could say Shatter Me was going for the stream of conscious thing, but not as well done, though I still enjoyed it. Can't say that book is worthy of school reading)
• David Leviathan's The Lovers Dictionary (which CC LOVED) for a creative writing class.  Many YA authors (forever side eye for the Fallen series...where I will now lump the Selection series as well)  out there could probably benefit from learning to show a character rather then tell a story.  This book almost broke my heart, in so few words, almost no context, ZERO world building, and just generally well chosen sentences.
• Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog- its such a smart book, I most likely missed half the literary puns/ historical references. Help would be great.
• Neil Gaiman Ananzi Boys, I like how he turns history/folk culture/myth on its head. You could read this in a modern lit class.