The Washington Post queried its readers about books it would throw off the "classics" list, generally books required in high school and survey courses. These types of exercises are useful as gauges of what's in style (lots of books by women such as Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, and Betty Smith) and what's passe or irritating (mostly dead white males like Hemingway, Melville, Hawthorne, and Fitzgerald).
So here's your assignment: Your old high school has asked you to assess the value of the books you were assigned to read for your English class (more than 50 years ago for some of us). What would you tell the curriculum committee to keep? What would you recommend it toss? What would you recommend it add? Maybe a short reason for why a book had value (or not) to you now at your advanced age.
Possibly keep in mind as you complete your assignment: Many high schools are moving toward a "books of choice" option given the furor attracted by old favorites like "A Catcher in the Rye" and "Huckleberry Finn." In that plan, kids can read one of three or four books in a given unit. I have also heard that some high schools are going to a strictly "read whatever you want" approach in which the teacher talks about aspects of literature (critical theory, symbolism, point of view, theme, etc.), and the students apply that to whatever books they want. Maybe think about how literature is taught now as you make your picks
I'll put my keep/toss/add later in the comments so as not to foist my opinions about this on everybody else.
You can read the Washington Post story here if you haven't used up your free stories reading about the latest political calamities.
Before I comment on books, I would like to wish Jean and her husband a Happy 40 th anniversary. I do hope that you will celebrate in whatever manner best suits both of you. May God keep you in the palm of his hand.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I have been laid up the last couple of weeks. We are off to take a brief stroll through a nearby antiques place that Raber likes. We bought our hideous mid-century modern starburst clock there for $10 a few years ago. It ran backwards, a feature I wanted to keep, but Raber replaced the innards and we have it in pride of place over the TV. We are saving our nice dinner for some future date when eating seems more pleasurable.
DeleteYes, happy anniversary, Jean and Raber!
DeleteHappy anniversary! 40 years is a long time to be married. We are 36 years this year. It has sort of flown by for us.
DeleteI'll add my congratulations. Coming from a family that is batting nearly zero in that department, I always like to hear of those who persist.
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ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I have forgotten most of my required high school reading list. But the book that hated the most, I do remember - The Lord of the Flies.
ReplyDeleteI am clearly out of it when it comes to recent literature. I have read mostly non- fiction for the last 40 years, and some escape fiction. Not literature. So I will come clean and admit that I haven’t read any of the books on the current “ keep” list. I’ve never even heard of some of them. So I get an F on this assignment.
I never read much poetry either, But I do like Mary Oliver, who is considered a lightweight by serious scholars I believe.
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I like Mary Oliver. People who say she's a lightweight are the type who tend to think there's something wrong with poetry that isn't idiosyncratic and obscure.
DeleteI though my high school had a pretty good curriculum. I liked just about all of it, with two exceptions, which I'll get to later. We read five Shakespeare plays, Oedipus Rex, Animal Farm, Huckleberry Finn, Great Expectations, Moby Dick, Scarlet Letter, Silas Marner, some Faulkner short stories, Willa Cather's My Antonia (no Nebraska kid gets out of school without reading that one!), Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby. A lot of poetry, including Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Frost, Longfellow (Evangeline and Hiawatha), Coleridge (I loved the Ancient Mariner), Milton's Paradise Lost. And a bunch of others that I'm not thinking of just now.
ReplyDeleteThe only two that I disliked were an anthology of short stories by famous authors compiled by Christopher Isherwood. I felt that he chose the worst things those authors ever wrote. The other one I didn't like was The Pearl by John Steinbeck, because it was so sad. My parents suggested some other Steinbeck to me that I liked better.
I don't think I would want the school to throw out many off that list, but they could add some. Such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
I think it is fine for teachers to allow some time and space for "read whatever you want and discuss it", but I don't think they should do away with the required curriculum, because it is a common thing that all the students are doing, that does give them a sort of bond.
One thing about the required authors is that there is some spin off, if you liked the works you read in class, it motivates you to seek out other things that they wrote.
I read the Washington Post article after I commented with my list. There are quite a few on their list that would be worth adding. But I wouldn't get rid of Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter.
DeleteI am very grateful that I never had to read Lord of the Flies. I don't think I would have liked Catcher in the Rye, either.
Forgot to mention the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were in my high school's curriculum. It seemed like most kids liked those, even if they weren't all that interested in literature.
DeleteI didn't have to read (still have not read) the Odyssey. We did have to read the Iliad. It was a slog, but I didn't hate it, and I'm glad I had to do it. We also had a whole unit on Greek tragedy - Aeschylus et al. It's helpful to have that cultural background.
DeleteJim, if you want to see something based on the
DeleteOdyssey, watch the movie "Brother Where Art Thou". It was pretty good.
I also liked most of what I read in high school. Katherine, I didn't care for The Pearl either, and I confess I'd also toss another Steinbeck work: The Grapes of Wrath. I fully expect Sister Ann Patrice to rise from the grave and haunt me for saying this; she once tore me a new orifice in class because I complained about how much I hated the book. Although really, the economic descendants of the Okies are now MAGA America. I dunno if The Grapes of Wrath helps people like me understand how that other half lives, but maybe there is some value in it.
ReplyDeleteWe read Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. The teachers tried to get us to pay attention to Hemingway's great economy of diction. I didn't get much out of the stories.
What interested me then, and still interests me now, is how much certain works affected others around me, even if they didn't make much of an impression on me. I had classmates who absolutely loved Catcher In The Rye; I guess there was something about Holden Caulfield, perhaps his breakdown, which resonated with them. All of my kids read The Outsiders (which I have not read) and apparently it made a deep impression on all of them.
I hated Grapes of Wrath, too. It wasn't assigned in school, I just read it. There were some things that set off my "ick" alarm. Cannery Row and Travels With Charley were better.
DeleteFunny story, my paternal grandma had a copy of The Red Pony, which was a Steinbeck novella, kind of in the "young adult " genre. Usually she encouraged my reading proclivities. I was about eleven when I picked up The Red Pony and started reading it at her house. She said, "oh, I don't know that you need to be reading that." I said, "Oh, why?" She said, "Because it has some rough language. One of the characters takes the Lord's name in vain, pretty carelessly." I must have looked disappointed, because then she said, "But you can read it as long as you don't think it's okay for you to talk like that." No chance of that, several family members would have been on my back immediately! I finished reading it, but I remember it being kind of a "doggie downer" story.
Maybe what's behind the "you can read anything you want" movement a sort of general freak-out/panic that our kids and grandkids don't read, period. If reading The Grapes of Wrath makes them give up on the whole reading project, that would be a shame.
ReplyDeleteAt least three out of my four kids do read, although they probably aren't likely to read the stuff being discussed in this thread. Two of them like manga, which from what I can tell are Japanese young-adult-ish graphic novels.
Nope. Millennial and Gen Z read more than GenXers. The read-what-you-want move is absolutely precipitated by book challenges and freakouts by the rightwing fringe.
DeleteAnd from Rightwing Heaven, aka, Florida: https://lithub.com/floridas-commissioner-of-education-thinks-jane-austen-was-an-american/
Telling someone they are forbidden to read something is guaranteed to make them want to!
DeleteMy senior English teacher slipped me a copy of the unexpurgated Canterbury Tales when In was in detention with attendant warnings. Possibly the only time in my life that smoking cigarettes in the girls bathroom paid off.
DeleteI guess to an English teacher, lit isn't just for building "reading skills" and a nice pastime. Besides offering kids ways to examine the artistry and of writing, literature contributes to our ability to understand and function in our society. So:
ReplyDeleteReplace Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," a badly dated, whitey-saves-the-day novel with the "Autobiography of Frederick Douglass," a clear, no-frills, first-hand look at what slavery was.
Replace Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" about post-war love and trauma with Jacques Tardi's graphic novel, "It Was the War of the Trenches" if you can get it past the school board. Pretty searing look at the effects of modern warfare.
Replace the ham-handed "Brave New World" by Huxley with "Never Let Me Go" or "Klara and the Sun," both by Kazuo Ishiguro. The newer novels deal with the problems of technology, human cloning and AI, respectively, and are more subtly written and multifaceted than Huxley's novel.
Replace "The Great Gatsby" by Fitzgerald with "The Talented Mr Ripley" by Patricia Highsmith. This is a two-fer. Teachers can have fun looking at the way Highsmith's thriller builds tension plus examine some of Gatsby's themes of American class and materialism.
Here's what I would add:
"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith. Francie Nolan is a first generation Irish American growing up in a tenement. She is gritty without being hard, and she has modest dreams she achieves. It's a lovely book about family and the American dream.
"March" by Geraldine Brooks. What was Mr March from "Little Women" doing in the Civil War and how did Mrs March feel about it? This book imagines it. Maybe read both novels together.
"The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time American Indian" by Alexie Sherman. Kid struggles with life and identity on and off the reservation in this epistolary novel.
Oldies but goodies till worth reading:
Chaucer--Make the kiddies struggle with reading Middle English for an hour and segue into a 30-minute "tour of the history of English." Students find it very enjoyable and surprising.
"Macbeth"--The soul-killing effects of ambition and greed are always relevant. Plus language! Plus witches!
"The Trojan Women"--War is hell for women and children on the losing side.
"A Journal of the Plague Year"--I read this during COVID lockdown.
Genesis and Exodus--We read these in 10th grade. You can't understand archetype, symbol, or allusion without knowing these stories.
Anything by Poe--Consistent crowd pleaser for 30 years and the foundation of American horror.
We did read part of Chaucer's Canterbury tales, including the prologue, "Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote.
DeleteThe droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote...' and a couple of the tales in more modern English. I liked the prologue best.
We listened to a recording of an excerpt from Beowulf in the original. It was totally unintelligible; I suppose that was the point, about how language has changed.
You can identify a lot of Old English words if you see it written out. (Here's the story of the serpent tempting Eve: https://www.oldenglishaerobics.net/fall.html )
DeleteSpoken, it sounds like Low German. Cuz it is! One of the people in my Old English group is a delightful Dutch woman, who is in comparative linguistics and points out similarities between Old English and Frisian. She has some fascinating posts on Yiddish loan words that made it into modern Dutch in garbled form.
I have heard that Frisian is the most closely related language to English. Not sure if Frisian is still in use, or if it is considered a German dialect, or a separate language.
DeleteHave also read that lowland Scots dialect is closely related to Old English.
Eddie Izzard buys a cow in the Friesland area of Holland speaking Old English: https://youtu.be/OeC1yAaWG34?si=bkQPN0Yat8Q9WaL4
DeleteLowland Scots English did retain some Old English and Old Norse words and features. Somebody was just posting about "galoot" and "het up" as examples.
IIRC, the Frisians killed St. Boniface. Therefore I consider it my Catholic duty to demand that Beowulf be banned from Catholic schools.
DeleteHa. Get Moms for Liberty on that ASAP. Actually, Bonny-Face was a nickname for Winfrith, an English missionary to the Germans. Off the top of my head, I think there was a story about him chopping down Thor's oak and building a church out of it. Sometimes this worked with pagans who saw it as a two-fer: protection from the old and new God in one handy worship location. But sometimes it just pissed them off, like it did the Frisians.
DeleteWe also read Chaucer and had to memorize the prologue. I remember it to this day. We read some Beowulf too. We read Julius Caesar, and another Shakespeare, but I’m not sure which play. It was probably MacBeth. Double, double, toil and trouble comes to mind, along with Out damn spot. I remember a Dickens. I’m not sure which. It was depressing, that’s all I remember about it. But Dickens was pretty much always depressing I think, A Christmas Carol being the exception. The Scarlet Letter was ok - timely for me since as I was beginning to become aware of all the hypocrisy in religion. Moby Dick - yes. Read that. But it didn’t interest me until 30+ years later, when we went to Nantucket for the first time. I felt sorry for the whale. Jane Austen - I didn’t get it then. But when I started working in my 20s I read several during my lunch breaks and finally appreciated her. She isn’t dark, so much of what was required reading was dark - depressing.
ReplyDeleteJunior year we were once allowed to choose a book from a list to write an extended book report on. I chose The Jungle. The teacher tried very hard to talk me out of it. So, as Katherine observed, I dug my heels in and kept it as my choice. Very depressing, and it was the first insight I had into the horror of the lives of the truly poor (mostly Catholic immigrants) and the horror inflicted in general by the robber barons and the gilded age in general. Pretty sure we read the Iliad. Don’t remember much. . My senior year Latin class read the Aeneid in Latin. I read Little Women on my own. More than once, but the first time I read it I was about 10 or 11. It was never a school assignment. Of course, I never picked up on all the nuances. I just enjoyed reading about the lives of the four sisters. I identified with Jo.
For someone my age, high school is part of the pre-historic period of my life, along with the memories of childhood. According to my fading memory, high school textbooks were provided by the school and were returned at the end of the semester. Who knows what was in them?
ReplyDeleteThat is in great contrast to the historical periods of my life beginning with college. All those books, both required and not required, are in my downstairs library. Those I can examine in great deal to jog my memory.
High School is also a part of the science period of my life. I had struggled with arithmetic in grade schools, since I have great difficulty with memorizing. I have a similar problem with languages. In High school with Algebra, Geometry and Calculus, I soared into the A plus category. Along with my ability to get consistent 99 percentile rankings on ETS ability tests, my teachers began to recognize the possible genius beneath the weird kid from Stockdale.
I became interested in Astronomy and space travel about sixth grade at the same time that I became interested in liturgy and the Divine Office. When a seminarian taught some of us Gregorian Chant during the parish Vacation Summer School, I saw it as very challenging like rocket science. I yielded to my best friend who had always wanted me to be an altar boy. That, of course meant that I had to learn the Latin responses. I acquired a Latin-English Missal.
My dual science and religion pathway is evident in two of the most important books of that period. One was Knights of Christ which was an introduction to male religious orders. The other was Men of Mathematics. I particularly identified with the teen- age mathematician Evariste Galois who had great difficulty with the French educational system and its examinations even though people recognized that he was doing original work. So, the idea formed of becoming a Jesuit priest teaching either math or astronomy.
Ours was a public school in the days when they still had a strong Protestant flavor. I was turned off literature by an effeminate home room teacher who said his favor pastime was reading Shakespeare while listening to classical music AND drinking WARM milk. I hate WARM milk! My milk has to be as cold as possible! To add to all these disqualifiers, he was also an organist at a local Protestant Church.
Of course, my liturgical life included Latin, Gregorian Chant, and all the psalmody and poetry of the English Divine Office. It is interesting that the first money I ever earned in life was a $50 award for a science project exhibited in Pittsburgh. I promptly used it to by the four-volume set of the Roman Breviary in English which I still have.
Our public high school had only two years of Latin, therefore I was behind most of my fellow Jesuit Novice who had four years of Latin in Jesuit High Schools. It was actually in the Novitiate that I leaned to like classical music (we had a great music room).
When I left Novitiate for Wheeling Jesuit University, I still registered as a math major. It was not until I transferred to Saint John’s Minnesota that I registered as an English major with Philosophy minor. I still continued to take some Latin and Greek as a pre-divinity student.
While an undergraduate I discovered I could combine my science and people interests in the social sciences. I went to graduate school at Missouri which had one of the few interdisciplinary social psychology doctorates. I did not make it into either U. Michigan or Harvard which also had interdisciplinary social science programs. But Missouri gave me an NSF fellowship which began a graduate career of being supported by research funding.
I have few thoughts on what books high school and college students should be forced to read. I think it is more than reasonable to expect high school students go acquire some knowledge of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but my "honors class" (i.e., the smart kids) was assigned a translation that we all hated and nobody read. The teacher was so furious that he reassigned it and scheduled a test on a Saturday morning. There had to be a better way.
ReplyDeleteI hated Heart of Darkness but have since realized it is a masterpiece and have reread it a number of times. Not everybody is ready for everything in high school (or even college). I enjoyed The Scarlet Letter. We read A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I liked. I think we read A Separate Peace, which I don't remember at all. We read Great Expectations, which I also enjoyed. Some of the best "reading" experiences in the last ten years or so have been listening to audiobooks. One of the best was David Copperfield as narrated by Simon Vance. Walter Isaacson's biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein were both terrific.
I guess my approach, were I to teach young people, would be to get them to enjoy reading however I could, and then set them free to spend a lifetime in which reading was an important part.
Having seen most of my career in college textbook publishing , I am probably more aware than most that even for literature, publishers prepare a lot of material to make teachers' lives easier—test banks, teaching guides, and any number of aids to support teachers in the classroom and after hours. It is consequently easier for teachers to assign material that comes with these kinds of aids rather than to assign new books without this supporting material.
I read A Canticle for Leibowitz a lot of years ago, and liked it. Most memorable quote from that: "Bless me, Father, I ate a lizard."
DeleteThanks for an interesting insight from someone inside the textbook publishing world. Makes sense that teachers like it when there are some teaching aids to go with a book they assign.
"I guess my approach, were I to teach young people, would be to get them to enjoy reading however I could, and then set them free to spend a lifetime in which reading was an important part."
DeleteDeveloping an enjoyable lifelong pastime is not an argument that's going to save funding for lit instruction in public schools.
Unless English teachers can make a compelling case for literature as important to to an informed citizenry, the aristopopulists will throw it out of schools to reinforce the divide between working and ruling classes. It'll be AI generated romances and thrillers for the hoi polloi.
Whenever I read a book in my youth, it was an immersive experience. When reading The Grapes of Wrath, I was an Okie. My father gave me an abridged version of "War and Peace" when I was ten. I was in the book, I was Prince Andre as he lay dying. Even nightmarish books like "Brave New World", a place I'd never want to be but an experience nonetheless. To me, it doesn't matter if you like a novel or a short story if it puts you someplace you've never been or in the mind of someone completely different from myself. I'll leave it up to people with more expertise than I to decide what should be given our youth to read. I just hope they have the concentration and span of attention to complete it.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure your English teacher loved you!
DeleteIt is ironic that I got a lot of book suggestions from a column in Seventeen Magazine when I was a teen. Of course my mom thought Seventeen was trashy and focused on the wrong things. Which it probably was. But that is where I got the suggestion for A Canticle for Leibowitz, and another quirky vintage novel, The Mermaid Madonna. Had to get that one from interlibrary loan.
ReplyDeleteI never read teen magazines, but some of my girlfriends did, and I recall there was always some "cultural content" in amongst the instructions for using juice cans for hair rollers, how to accessorize your vinyl miniskirt with textured stockings, and five low Cal snacks to make with melba toast. Mademoiselle was actually a pretty good magazine for young women, as those things went in the olden days.
DeleteA Canticle for Liebowitz is a wonderful book. I put The Mermaid Madonna on my liberry wish list.
Seventeen was full of ads. A lot more of them than actual content. By the time I was actually seventeen I had moved on to other things. I used to read Cosmopolitan sometimes.
DeleteI read American Girl, then Seventeen, then Mademoiselle. Enjoyed them all. All of us in our small class in our Catholic women’s college in California were thrilled when one of our fellow students was chosen to model for the Mademoiselle back to college issue. We were also surprised because she seemed just averagely pretty. The photographer or editor or whoever chose her knew exactly what they were doing. She photographed beautifully- an absolute stunner with the right clothes, makeup, and hair. She stayed in New York to try to model full time but ended up becoming a doctor - a dermatologist to rich NY women, wrote a book about it, and launched her own line of skincare products. So decades later we were surprised again - nobody expected any of this from sweet, quiet, Janna.
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