The Mensa Reading List for Grades 9-12

graemep · 2025-04-06T13:44:20 1743947060

I hate reading lists like this, it is so prescriptive it will take the pleasure away. Even worse asking for an adult sign off and making it part of an "excellence program".

Read what you like, not what is on a list. There is room to guide and suggest, but fixed lists to tick off are absolutely horrible.

stratocumulus0 · 2025-04-06T13:57:20 1743947840

Reading lists really give people the idea that reading is some mechanical task that has to be done in fixed time and has a potential to be optimized. This is how speed reading classes were invented.

drcwpl · 2025-04-06T13:45:51 1743947151

Exactly the point I made in the essay.

graemep · 2025-04-06T13:54:59 1743947699

You are more positive than me about it.

You do have some different definitions attitudes to mine which may account for part of it. For example:

> It took me a while to realize the point of the whole exercise of the Mensa list. It’s not to become well-read. That’s a side effect. The point is to lose your smugness. To get knocked off balance by something older, stranger, smarter than you. To stop assuming you know it all.

I would say those are not two different things. If you have not been affected by things that are "older, stranger, smarter than you" you are not well read!

glacier5674 · 2025-04-06T13:41:25 1743946885

Night is important, but I really don't recommend it for emotionally volatile teenagers. I was already mildly depressed when I was assigned it, and borderline suicidal after I finished it. Maybe read it in college when you have easier access to alcohol.

drcwpl · 2025-04-06T13:47:38 1743947258

I should add that point as a comment on the essay, thank YOU - I will link to it

treetalker · 2025-04-06T13:33:00 1743946380

Link to the actual reading list: https://www.mensaforkids.org/achieve/excellence-in-reading/e...

garciasn · 2025-04-06T13:45:35 1743947135

I read, on average, 100 books a year. Anna Karenina was on my list for a long time and I read it back in 2023.

With 100 books a year, I’m averaging two books a week. It took me three full months to make it through that slog; hoping to find one fucking redeeming factor for it.

Let me tell you: there is absolutely no reason anyone should read that novel unless the intention is to make one hate reading.

Can we please stop making kids read books that fucking suck while telling them it’s somehow good for them to do so? We wonder why reading is seen as a slog and few do it; instead focusing on their phones or Netflix watchlist.

dogsdorun · 2025-04-06T13:58:47 1743947927

Why do you assume your experience is the same an everyone’s? Is yours the only opinion in the world? I would expect someone who reads a thousand books a decade to have a more nuanced opinion. Instead you spew self righteous arrogance.

wizzwizz4 · 2025-04-06T13:58:10 1743947890

The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article tells you all you need to know about Anna Karenina.

> By the time he was finishing up the last installments, Tolstoy was in an anguished state of mind and, having come to hate [the book], finished it unwillingly.

globnomulous · 2025-04-06T13:44:15 1743947055

I can't imagine caring what Mensa thinks anybody should read, let alone thinking that anybody should care what I think about what Mensa thinks anybody should read. And between the interminable list of several-sentence-long book reports (...why?), the writing is just one bland, melodramatic, Very Emphatic "not X but Y" after another.

2025-04-06T13:40:17 1743946817

[dead]

drcwpl · 2025-04-06T13:46:45 1743947205

Fabulous, I did not know about those resources, thank you. Will review carefully.

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