Re:Too Much $Fav_Author (Score 1)

I agree with what you are saying. In my opinion, high school lit curricula of all flavors overemphasizes novels and underempahsizes other forms of prose, like short stories and poems. Look, you have to be able to relate the material to kids who don't, for the most part, care about it and don't, for the most part, have the attention span or the built-up knowledge about the world required to read even a modestly paced work of genre fiction and tie together the threads to extract the underlying ideas.

Additionally, most of these kids do not have the intellectual stamina to read through what we might think is "influential" literature and distill the meaning from it, because a lot of these books can be fantastically misinterpreted. You even run the risk of the kids not understanding what they are reading and why its important.

Some material is influential to us only because we either A) read it growing up, B) were introduced to it in college, or C) read it a few times and think its "important" but didn't really enjoy it. Avoid these types of traps. I know I read both "1984" and "Brave New World" and while I enjoyed them, I think they were chosen because they were "influential" rather than enjoyable. A good introduction to what genre fiction is supposed to be about will avoid the obvious ones that kids already have preconceptions about.

Short stories that you can put into a modern, current events type context in concert with a few book reports where the kids do a write-up of books that are chosen from a book list, with very narrow discussion points is I think the best choice. Also choose 1 or 2 books that everyone will discuss in groups throughout the semester. Personally I would recommend "Childhood's End" by Arthur C. Clarke as the first novel. Its a quick read and very enjoyable.

Additonally, Philip K. Dick has not been mentioned nearly enough here. I'd say Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? would be great, because comparing it to Blade Runner (perhaps watching the movie first) is pretty valuable. Also, an introduction to cyberpunk might be a good idea considering the world we live in today. Snowcrash might be fun.

Tolkien...yes everyone is now intimately familiar with Tolkien in their minds (IE Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen, and Elijah Wood with a bunch of special effects). Avoid at all costs, lest you want to present what kids might think of as an "adult" Harry Potter. It really takes an entire semester of reading Tolkien and talking about the basis of his work to really get a lot out of it academically speaking. Kids are perfectly capable of reading the books and watching the movies themselves.

Regardless, I agree with a lot of people here who emphasize short stories. I think it should be the basis for ANY high school literature course. For instance:

Philip K. Dick "The Golden Man"
Harlan Ellison "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman", "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" or anything by Ellison really.
Arthur C. Clarke "Encounter in the Dawn"
One or two stories from "The Martian Chronicles", because they really are individual short stories.

It might also be of interest to read movie screenplays or TV scripts. "AI: Artificial Intelligence" and "The City On The Edge of Forever" are fantastic for this purpose.

Anyway, good luck!

-IR