You Shouldn’t Have To Read These Books In High School

You Shouldn’t Have To Read These Books In High School

The Great Gatsby is overrated. It’s a good book! A great book! It’s just not the very best book ever, especially not the best book to teach teenagers about the power of literature. If it were, then teens wouldn’t celebrate the glamour that the book tries to deconstruct. But it’s stuck in the high school literary canon, along with Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men. And at this point it seems like the main reason it’s taught to every high schooler is because it was taught to all the teachers, and no one’s bothered to check if it’s still the best choice.

My own high school stuck close to the classics, making conservative choices that I had to supplement on my own time. This is normal. But given little structure for finding the great books of my own era, or even the less musty ones of recent past, I flailed around, grabbing my mum’s copies of Grisham and Crichton, spending too much time on Palahniuk — all stuff I’d grow out of, and not regret but not particularly cherish.

I found plenty of good books, often by accident, but I didn’t have much of a mental model for how they all fit together in the modern literary world. It took me years to get a vague grasp of the last generation (or two) of literature so I could find my way productively as an adult reader. If I could go back, I’d give myself — and my classmates — more of a running start, replacing some of the old standbys with books that better reveal literature’s full potential.

A lot of this comes down to taste, and it should. The whole concept of the “canon” is less essential to our culture, especially as we see how many people were kept out of this canon, and how many were prematurely thrust into it. There are more good writers publishing more good books now, and they’re being disrespected by our obsession with a narrow set of “timeless” stories that are in fact showing their age.

What Should Go

Winnowing the current canon makes room for new and overlooked deserving works. The bildungsroman Perks of Being a Wallflower has earned enough respect to join some required reading lists; how about adding Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, or more books that address the modern teen experiences of constant online connection, helicopter parents, and daily life inside a neoliberal empire? Is this era and its literature any less deserving of our attention than a Boomer’s coming of age? Or is the canon actually a bit of an excuse to be lazy when building our curricula?

This isn’t a knock against the books themselves. Well, it’s a knock if you consider the entire high school canon to be the greatest possible books — in which case it’s weird that you want them forced on teenagers, and not voluntarily introduced when they’re ready.

Is Catcher In The Rye really a book best experienced as a teen? No! It’s best experienced as an adult appreciating Catcher’s hindsight on the teenage mindset, the way the book was intended. A teenager can’t fully appreciate the distance between author and protagonist. (Some can! And more power to them, and to all the books they choose to read on their own time.) It takes nothing from a classic like Catcher suggest that perhaps the time to appreciate it is in adulthood, and not as a teenager in 2018. If you support the canon because today’s teachers and schools can’t be trusted to pick the right books, then why do you trust them to teach these works in the light of social progress and our changing outlook on history?

Some of the current canon could simply become voluntary reading, like almost every book. But some works are still really useful as a shared reference point. There’s an excellent place for them: college, freshman year, as part of the core curriculum. A story like Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary doesn’t really hit home until you’ve gathered more life experience, but you can at least start to understand in college.

We’re also not suggesting a dumbing-down. Some YA should join the curriculum, but so should modern adult fiction. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated teaches voice better than A Clockwork Orange; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a far better history lesson than Heart of Darkness.

Frankly, anyone who wants to read Lord of the Rings will do so on their own, while Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea is a more meaningful contribution to a growing mind’s expanding horizons, and an excellent missing link between Harry Potter and more “grown-up” fiction. (So is Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy, but again, its perspective on the college and post-college years is best appreciated during or after your own.)

What Should Stay

What would we keep from the current canon? The older the book, the better the case. We’re not dropping Shakespeare, which is still essential for understanding most English literature that follows. Plus it passes an important test: it’s plenty interesting even when you miss the bottom layer or three of meaning. Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet are fun to read and stage.

The Scarlet Letter is frankly a banger. Anything old with a sense of humour — Silas Marner, for example—helps teens understand that old doesn’t have to mean irrelevant. One Hundred Years of Solitude and The House of the Spirits have enough wonder to paper over any gaps in a teen’s appreciation. While my high school skipped Lord of the Flies, I’m very glad I got my first read in before I became an adult. And almost any time a marginalized author managed to claw their way into the canon, they deserve to keep their spot. If Steinbeck and Fitzgerald stay, then Beloved and Anne Frank and The Bell Jar and Frederick Douglass and Jane Austen all stay. I’m embarrassed by the number of grown white men I meet who only read other white men, and I believe that habit starts in high school.

The point isn’t to build a new canon. The point is to destabilize the idea of the canon, one that has propped up too many mediocre artists and excluded too many brilliant ones, one that feeds into a monolithic idea of America that looks nothing like the country’s actual past or present. This is not only to re-center marginalized groups (in fact my personal suggestions are unfortunately skewed white as I’m still repairing my bad education), but also to encourage the idiosyncrasies of different readers sharing different but overlapping literary backgrounds. This will spur more people to stay readers throughout adulthood, as they approach literature as an endless buffet instead of a prix fixe.

That buffet includes a big dessert section of comic books, which should be treated not as a novelty but a full-fledged part of literature, one which has been especially useful for marginalized authors and stories.) This isn’t a new idea; the canon has always been fluid. But it could stand to be less viscous.

In that context, here is one highly personal, definitely not canonical, suggestion of how we might edit the high school curriculum.

Ditch

  • The Great Gatsby

  • On the Road

  • Of Mice and Men (replace with In Dubious Battle)

  • Pilgrim’s Progress

  • James Fenimore Cooper, but also that one Twain essay about James Fenimore Cooper performatively enjoyed by people who like the word “defenestration”

  • Brave New World (but keep 1984)

  • Death of a Salesman

  • Heart of Darkness, I mean good lord this has not aged well

  • The Trial and “The Metamorphosis” (replace with “The Village Schoolmaster” and “The Great Wall of China”)

  • Siddhartha

  • The Divine Comedy

  • Any Ibsen, DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, and David Foster Wallace (save it for college)

  • Any Camus or other mid-century existentialism (save it for your first broke and lonely year of adulthood)

  • Any Philip Roth (save it for when you’re a married college professor who hits on his students)

  • All but one O. Henry story (“The Gift of the Magi”) because we get it already

  • All but one Sherlock Holmes story (whichever he does the most coke in) because they are neither literary nor fun

  • All Edgar Allan Poe except “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Raven,” and that essay where he bullshits about his writing process for “The Raven”

  • Any Beckett unless you follow it up with some Stoppard to take the edge off

  • Anna Karenina 

  • The Brothers Karamazov 

  • The middle part of Gulliver’s Travels that no one remembers

  • Candide tbh

  • Any Ayn Rand

  • War of the Worlds

  • Animal Farm if you’re not ready to add a few chapters of Das Kapital

Keep

  • To Kill a Mockingbird

  • The Scarlet Letter

  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

  • Beloved

  • The Chosen 

  • The Bell Jar

  • Invisible Man

  • Paradise Lost 

  • Coleridge and Wordsworth et. al. why not

  • Any Twain

  • Any Wilde

  • Any Molière

  • Any Austen

  • Any Márquez

  • Any Shakespeare except the comedies

  • All the Greek stuff, sure, fine, maybe try War Music instead of The Iliad

  • Things Fall Apart

  • The Handmaid’s Tale

  • Beowulf, and read Heaney’s translation aloud

  • One—one—Vonnegut book, and leave a stack of his others on the teacher’s desk

Add

(Apologies for any of these that are already standard among better curricula. They prove that I am right.)

Novels and Memoirs

Short Stories and Poetry

  • Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (a typical college assignment). Particularly “The Library of Babel,” “Three Versions of Judas,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Also get a copy of “The Aleph” to replace the aforementioned Twain takedown of James Fenimore Cooper

  • Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood, to show that poetry is good actually

  • No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

  • “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU” by Carmen Maria Machado, a novella included in her 2017 collection Her Body and Other Parties, and an introduction to “weird fiction” that trounces anything by Lovecraft

  • “The Tale of the Hunchback” from the Thousand and One Nights, a story cycle with three levels of stories embedded within it, one of which I suspect inspired the barber episode of Atlanta

Theatre

  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, satisfying followups to studying Hamlet and Byron. The first is a good way to ease into surrealism, the second a way to humanize the giants of literature

  • Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play by Anne Washburn, which plays a game of Telephone with a Simpsons episode to dramatize the evolution of myth and literature

  • Angels in America by Tony Kushner, even though it’s kind of a door-stopper

  • Gloria by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, about media, the 21st century workplace, and the ways people get and keep fame now

  • Hir by Taylor Mac, a provocative but kind family drama about gender, the American empire, and the lies we tell the lower class

  • Familiar by Danai Gurira, a relaxing family comedy, sorry so many of these are from the last few seasons at Playwrights Horizons but that theatre is killing it right now

Comics

  • Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, your remedial textbook for appreciating the comic book as its own art and literary form, with its own techniques and capabilities

  • Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware, the Ulysses of comics, which uses many techniques described in Understanding Comics to tell a multi-generational story about the roles society assigns to men and boys

  • Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, a common introduction to the graphic novel and part of the young adult canon

  • Palestine by Joe Sacco

  • Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

  • Saga Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan

  • Maus by Art Spiegelman, the Breaking Bad of comics in that it’s clichéd to recommend it but only because it’s so unassailably good

These aren’t a “new canon” or a curriculum, but a collection of choices that could significantly add to a high schooler’s understanding and appreciation of literature. I leaned toward works that comment on the present, or that demonstrate literary principles in a more relevant and well-rounded way than some of the old standbys. High schoolers should read whatever they want on their own time, including everything in the “Ditch” section. Amendments and entirely different lists are welcome, and are in fact the whole point.


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