Top Ten Book Pairings

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OH MY GOD THIS WAS A FORMATTING NIGHTMARE.  I had to redo this like 432029342 times!!!  ..which begs the question why I kept trying.  I kept hitting the wretched command z key to fix things which made the pictures move and aghghhhahsldk;alkd.  I've given up.  Just completely given up.  I am incapable of putting two pictures next to each other.  I am so inept at blogger hahahaha.  At least my posting date is working again (for some reason it was three days off for my last post...so weird...)  So FINALLY...here's my TTT!  

1.  Gone/Lord of the Flies

Both novels feature children with no adult supervision, no social structures, and their fight for survival.

2.  Speak/The Scarlet Letter

Both deal with a woman's silence, perceived virtue, and how it affects her social status.

3.  The Eyre Affair/The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Both use off the wall humour and ridiculous situations.  While I don't expect Hitchhiker's is taught in school, it is a classic sci-fi novel, and it should be!  The Eyre Affair is set in classic literature, so it would also be easy to pair with more standard school novels like Jane Eyre of Great Expectations (although now that I think about it I'm not entirely sure which book Miss Havisham first appears in)

4.  The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox/Wide Sargasso Sea/Jane Eyre

 Wide Sargasso Sea is a sort of prequel/retelling of Jane Eyre with Bertha as the protagonist, so it is easy to link these two novels, although WSS is a classic in its own right.  The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is more directly connected to WSS due to their link in "madness".  It explores what was considered madness in the past, how it was dealt with, the role gender played, and how long this awful system remained in place.  You'll be shocked.

5.  Dracula/Interview With The Vampire/Peeps

 Dracula is considered the father of the modern vampire.  Interview with the Vampire drastically changed our perspective on vampires from creatures of horror to the creatures of romance we find in current literature.  Peeps crosses from paranormal into the sci-fi genre, where vampirism is caused by a parasite.

6.  Just Listen/Tess of the D'Urbevilles

This is similar to The Scarlet Letter/Speak one, but this more closely relates virtue to status, rather than silence to status. 

7. Tiger Lily/Peter Pan

 This connection is a bit more obvious since Tiger Lily is a retelling of sorts.  It is also one the best written stories I've ever read...the writing is beyond beautiful. This definitely deserves a place in school literature!

8.  The Song of the Lioness Quartet/The Once and Future King

 Both are a coming of age story, from preteens to powerful adults who change the face of their nations, and both are fantasy novels (and both are quartets).  However, the Alanna quartet features a female protagonist.  I think more fantasy should be featured in schools - I don't think I had had any required fantasy reading. I also feel there is a severe lack of empowered women in our required school reading, or at least how we would relate to them today.  I'm not saying there aren't any, and I understand a good bit of that is because female independence is a relatively new concept in comparison to the history of literature, but even the relatively groundbreaking characters (like Jane Eyre) are still tightly held by social standards of the time.  Characters like Alanna make their own destiny, and I think it's important to showcase that in our school literature as well.

9.  Abarat/The Wizard of Earthsea

This is similar in concept to #8 in that they are both fantasies, but with reversed gender roles.  But this combo has islands!  And I really wanted Abarat on this list...

10. His Dark Materials/The Bible

I think this would be a fascinating way to study religion!  Studying The Bible is more common than one would think in public schools, so I think its only fair that if you read about The Bible, you read about other religions as well.  Of course, this would never pass The Bible Belt (in fact I'm pretty sure it's banned in a lot of libraries haha)

I found it interesting that I didn't use many of my favourite classics in here (like 1984 which I probably would have matched up with The Giver, but that's already required reading in a lot of schools), but I did use a lot I hadn't read (The Once and Future King, Dracula, I've only read parts of the Bible) and almost all of the classics I HATED (Tess of the D'Urbevilles and The Scarlet Letter.  All I would have had to do was use Heart of Darkness, and that is literally every classic novel I despised).  I think the only classics I listed that I liked AND read for school were Lord of the Flies and Jane Eyre!  And in fact, I don't think I did read Jane Eyre for school (I was a weird kid...I'd read all but a few of the classics required for school before I'd hit high school haha).

In any case, that's it for my TTT!  What's on yours?