Top Ten Tuesday #9: Top Ten Books on my syllabus if I taught…

/ Abby Z.

toptentuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week, participating bloggers create a list corresponding to a particular theme. I LOVE this week’s topic: we’re listing the “Top Ten Books that would be on your syllabus if you taught X 101” – some examples were YA Fantasy 101, Feminist Literature 101, Classic YA Lit 101, World-Building 101…

So I totally made two syllabi for two courses because I couldn’t decide which I liked better. The cool thing is that both of my lists are based on actual courses I took in law school (the second one less so – you’ll see).

My first list is the books on my syllabus for Law and Literature 101. This is a real class that I took in my last semester and I knew I wouldn’t graduate without taking it. Some of the books here are ones that we actually read, but others I added because I think they fit the theme.

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  1. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  2. The Trial, Franz Kafka
  3. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
  4. The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
  5. Dark Places, Gillian Flynn

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  6. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
  7. Billy Budd, Sailor, Herman Melville
  8. The Firm, John Grisham
  9. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
  10. Anatomy of a Murder, Robert Traver

And now… my fun class! I also made a list of books to be on my syllabus for Witches 101. Although I didn’t take a law school course about witches specifically, when I took History of the Common Law we had pretty much free reign to choose a thesis paper topic and I wrote about legal and social attitudes towards Jews in the Middle Ages and how a lot of times they were accused of practicing witchcraft. Not to brag but I got an A :p Anyway here is my list:

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  1. Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
  2. All Souls trilogy, Deborah Harkness
  3. The Witch’s Daughter, Paula Brackston
  4. Macbeth, William Shakespeare
  5. Uprooted, Naomi Novik

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  6. Stardust, Neil Gaiman
  7. Caster Chronicles series, Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
  8. Housewitch, Katie Schickel
  9. Wicked, Gregory Maguire
  10. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Would you take my classes?? What would you teach? Let me know 🙂

19 thoughts on “Top Ten Tuesday #9: Top Ten Books on my syllabus if I taught…”

    • Thank you!! The ones we actually read were The Trial, In Cold Blood, The Merchant of Venice, Billy Budd, and we watched the movie of Anatomy of a Murder. We also read some other ones. Just an awesome class.

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  4. I love both your lists! I think the witches list really captures the different folklore around the evolution and depiction of witches (what about “The Crucible!”) and would be a very fun class to take. I love your law list because it captures law in literature through a few centuries! Or, I’m just a softy for Shakespeare.

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  8. Ooh the witches class sounds really fun! And even the law class it’s an interesting way of learning it over dry law books right? I did dystopias so I had The Handmaid’s Tale on my list too.

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