THE MOOK LIST – #8

The Outsiders

via IMDB.com

Why it worked: This story is one of the only things that I remember standing out to me in Middle School.  The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton was assigned to my seventh grade English class and I immediately fell in love with it.  I distinctly remember reading past the assigned chapters and reading intensely into the night, enamored by the world of Ponyboy Curtis.  The movie “The Outsiders” was something we watched in a grade-wide assembly, and these characters came alive on screen in a prolific and wonderful way, acting out scenes almost exact from the book.  To this day, I can still recite Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” verbatim.  

Why you might disagree:  To be honest, I don’t know.  I fell in love with The Outsider’s and everything about it, both the book and the movie.  One thing from the movie that was maybe a little hokey was the stereotypical costuming of the Greasers and the Socs.  The Greasers were VERY greasy and Soc’s were super clean-cut.  Otherwise, this film was filled with up-and-coming stars (C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane, etc.) and was an important movie for it’s time.