All Quiet on the Western Front book club

This is one of those books that I read in high school and really hoped to have nothing further to do with it. I was not planning on assigning All Quiet on the Western Front for a book and a movie, but when my kids had their rebellion against reading The Great Gatsby, they all chose different books. Ironically they all chose books I had no intention of ever assigning. Batman chose War Horse, The Artist chose Beowulf (I had nothing against it, unlike Grendel, which I do have something against, I think my senior English teacher had some problems, she liked to assign sexually explicit books), and Superman chose to have an All Quiet on the Western Front book club.

I sighed and got ready to deal with this horridly depressing book again.

Sigh.

Random fun historical side note for All Quiet on the Western Front

If you don’t know, All Quiet on the Western Front came out shortly after World War 1 and was wildly popular in the 1920s. It’s a rather anti-war book and talks all about the futility of war, and how it’s not actually noble.

Why is it no matter how I spell noble it looks wrong?

It is one of the first books adapted into a movie, I read a Bonhoeffer biography that talked about him seeing it in the movie theater when he came over to the United States. It was wildly popular.

It’s also listed as a reason for why Americans took so long to get into World War 1, because it was such a popular anti-war book, and Americans felt like we were just being dragged into another family struggle among the Europeans.

Now, I don’t think there is much truth to the theory, but it does amuse me as an excuse.

But, getting back to the actual All Quiet on the Western Front book club.

All Quiet on the Western Front book club

I did a lot of talking with Superman about the book as he read it, and we talked about his impressions of the book.

He didn’t think it was as horridly depressing as I did, which was rather shocking to me, but go figure.

• All Quiet on the Western Front discussion questions
• All Quiet on the Western Front chapter questions– several questions per chapter, much more focused on recall then higher thinking
• more questions, I rather like these

All Quiet on the Western Front snacks

He gave me the list of snacks he thought of after reading the book, and I went through it to put them all together. It’s always interesting to me what stands out to my kids as something that would make a good snack.

• trenches- it was some sort of chocolate-covered snack rather like muddy buddies, previously I’ve used nutty buddies
• shells- swiss rolls
• shovels- Oreos with pretzel sticks to look like shovels
• rations- I made hamburger hash, which I was mistakenly of the opinion my kids really liked and I was being such a nice Mom to serve a meal I don’t particularly like. No, my kids are only vaguely indifferent, so they weren’t as excited as I thought they would be, but any sort of mass meal is a good idea for this
• blood- lots of injuries, this is mainly to get Batman his favorite soda, Big Red, wow Amazon doesn’t carry it
• alcohol- Canada Dry
• coffee- root beer

Not super a lot of snacks, we could have done some bullets (whoppers) or a few other things like that, but we did not really do that. The snack labels are available on the Subscriber page (join my newsletter).

I think I’m finally done with all of the book and a movie that my kids have forced on me.

Finally.

More learning fun

• Austria Unit
• 1984 book club
• Chemistry curriculum
• Edvard Munch artist study
• Brunei Unit

“World War 1 trenches” by simononly is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.