# Teaching > Lesson Plans >  Designing an English Curriculum?

## slicedclouds

I'm a student that is self-teaching/homeschooled, I could use some suggestions regarding English.

I'd like some English and American literature, but I don't want them to be my primary focus, I'm open to literature from all countries, but I'm heavily interested in French, German, and Russian literature.

I want to format it so that each of the two years I have one large novel, three to four smaller novels, a play, and enough essays, short stories, and poems for one of each every week.

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## Stendhal

I am not excessively knowledgeable on literature outside Britain and America, but I can make some suggestions based on my own reading.
19th Century British:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Any Jane Austen novel
Hard Times by Charles Dickens - seems like a good intro to him because it is short
20th Century British:
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
17th Century Spanish:
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
20th Century German:
The Reader by Bernard Schlink
19th Century French
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
19th Century Russian:
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky or something else by him
20th Century American:
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger - superior in every way to Catcher
The Magus by John Fowles
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
19th Century American:
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
18th Century British:
Paradise Lost by John Milton

Hope that helps

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## Hyacinthine

Here are some ideas. I don't know much about German literature, so I haven't listed any. Some of these are really difficult, but I've enjoyed them all and found them worth it.

Really Long Novels:
The Red and the Black, Stendhal (French, 1830)
Germinal, Zola (French, 1885)
War and Peace, Tolstoy (Russian, 1869)
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy (Russian, 1873)
Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky (Russian, 1866)
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (American, 1851)

Long but not too long novels:
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombian, 1967)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (Irish, 1914)
Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee (South African, 1999)
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (American, 1998)

Smaller Novels and Novellas:
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton (American, 1911)
Passing, Nella Larsen (American, 1929)
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (American, 1925)
The Stranger, Camus (French, 1942)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy (Russian, 1886)
The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway (American, 1952)
1984, George Orwell (English, 1949)
Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck (American, 1937)

I don't know much about plays, but:
Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare is a must

Short stories:
First off, I'd recommend the "Best American Short Stories" series. There's a new one every year. I'd also recommended reading stuff from The New Yorker (right now they've got a story called "Escape from Spiderhead" that is amazing and that you can read online) and the Paris Review. As for older stuff that's stuck around over time...
Anything from Dubliners by James Joyce
Anything by Hemingway
Anything by Chekhov
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Essays: 
Best American Essays series (including "The Best American Essays of the Century")
A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift

Hope I've been helpful!

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## Hyacinthine

Oh, you also wanted poems. I'm sorry, I'm not a big expert on poetry, but what I'd recommend:

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
I like my body when it is with your by Ezra Pound

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## Waterborne

You do not learn anything by simply practicing doing something without figuring out how to improve on it. A simple reading list does not constitute an English course. It would take forever for me to make up an entire course, and even then it would be a rough draft because it is not tested. Here is a sample week.

Week 1 
Literary Theory journal of application and opinion
- Study the more important ones in depth
Critical thinking and informal logic journal
- Study the more important ones in depth
Theories of deduction journal
- Study the more important ones in depth
Read and react to a behavioral economics book of your choice.
- Make sure to take note of quotes that interest you
Rogerian essay on behavioral economics perspectives
Write a dystopian short story based on behavioral economics

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## flaviabelen

It's good but you must take interest in American literature as well because it includes more enriched literature for writing an article.

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## flaviabelen

It's good but you must take interest in American literature as well because it includes more enriched literature for writing an article.

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## kev67

George Orwell is good for essays, in particular Politics and the English Language.
Long poem: Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

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