Here's what your 10th-graders will be tested on under Common Core: Ovid

[pnwmom]

92. How about Shakespeare? (But not The Taming of the Shrew)

Or Chaucer?
Or any number of other texts from the western canon.

Or they could live really dangerously and include texts from other parts of the world.

Or they could even read modern novels, like The Hunger Games.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Green-t.html?pagewanted=all

Suzanne Collins’s brilliantly plotted and perfectly paced new novel, “The Hunger Games,” is set much farther in the future but grapples with many of the same questions. Collins, the author of “The Underland Chronicles,” a well-regarded fantasy series, has now written a futuristic novel every bit as good and as allegorically rich as Scott Westerfeld’s “Uglies” books.

“The Hunger Games” begins long after the human population has been decimated by climate change and the wars that followed. Now North America is the nation of Panem, a country with 12 fenced-in districts that all work to feed the enormously wealthy and technologically advanced capital. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen lives in District 12, the poorest of them all. Her father died mining in the Seam years ago, and now her family survives thanks to her mother’s knowledge of herbal medicine and Katniss’s own illegal hunting and gathering outside the district’s fence.

SNIP

But the considerable strength of the novel comes in Collins’s convincingly detailed world-building and her memorably complex and fascinating heroine. In fact, by not calling attention to itself, the text disappears in the way a good font does: nothing stands between Katniss and the reader, between Panem and America.

This makes for an exhilarating narrative and a future we can fear and believe in, but it also allows us to see the similarities between Katniss’s world and ours. American luxury, after all, depends on someone else’s poverty. Most people in Panem live at subsistence levels, working to feed the cavernous hungers of the Capital’s citizens. Collins sometimes fails to exploit the rich allegorical potential here in favor of crisp plotting, but it’s hard to fault a novel for being too engrossing.

Both Collins and Pfeffer plan sequels to their books — here’s hoping civilization can hang around long enough to publish them.