I apologize for any unintended offense.

I was never offended, Pix, and have always admired the way you teach. It's just that while The Bluest Eye is a more complex investigation of how racism damages, it still conforms to the broader outline I noted.

I know Emmett is going to be turned off when he gets to the girl being raped by her father. I know he will turn away from this book. From his point of view it's the same fucking thing. There will be no nuances absorbed. It will be miserable and he will have a miserable experience for bothering to care about these characters.

He has learned one thing in English class: literature makes him feel shitty. He doesn't want to feel shitty so he doesn't want to read it. It's pretty simple really.

And I'm not complaining that he occasionally has to deal with books that are uncomfortable or dark in theme. It's that more than half of the books he's read during his entire time in high school have had this particular shape to them. Like three-quarters of them. They just kind of circle around the dial of minority possibility pounding on this theme.

I mean, hard things happen in My Antonia but your take away there is Strong Women Are Cool and Often Overcome Their Circumstances. It's not socioeconomic racially determined fatalism.

It's too bad Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue won't be in the curriculum before he graduates. That's a book that might mean something to him.

The only comedies they ever teach are Shakespeare. And there's such a huge bias towards Naturalism. A generation who grew up watching Invader Zim and the Simpsons would have no problem understanding the meta-snark of Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49. Or Portnoy's Complaint. Teenagers would definitely get a book about masturbation.

Funny thing: I read Great Gatsby in high school (on my own, like Catcher in the Rye it was not part of our curriculum, too much of a yankee sensibility or somesuch) and thought it incredibly boring. All I remembered about the book a couple decades later was something about white flannel clothing. Re-read it last month and it was AMAZING. Heart-wrenching, actually. It just makes more sense to my adult self and was utterly irrelevant to my teenage self. Now I'm wondering how many other books I need to read again....

I had a similar experience with Gatsby.

And other things, like Wuthering Heights, were different when I read them as adults than when I did so as a teenager, too.

I discovered Philip Roth when I was Emmett's age. Not only did it amaze me by being so dirty, the other language felt like language I recognized. Roth characters are just folks, you know, more Yiddish-inflected than mine, but that was a big fuckin'deal. And, strangely enough. excellent preparation for the Anthony Weiner scandal...Weiner's a Roth character. Except if he were, photographing it would shrink it, or steal its soul or something, so in the press conferences, he'd apologize for something he no longer really has. "Goodbye Columbus" is erudite enough to study in school, I'd guess.(Portnoy's my favorite, too, but the school board would freak.)

Pornoy is OK I guess, as long as I don't have to shake hands with him.

I read Goodbye Columbus in 10th grade and it put me off Philip Roth for life. So sexist, and too recent to get a "historical" pass for same.

Yeah, TB. Nowadays, I bet he'd be all about hand sanitizer, but point taken. I don't know...maybe 1958 seemed long enough to be pass-worthy when I was fourteen, or maybe, like with Ian Fleming, I found myself identifying with the males? I haven't read it in some time.

Wouldn't shaking his hand be...well, like shaking the hand like tons of guys (and girls...), but eating organ meats he cooked be a bit dodgier? My memory of the book is severely patchy.

I have a categorisation question that I figure goes here, since it's not my writing.

I have a friend who writes YA (I know, who doesn't?) Her first book is 16 and over, she'd recommend, and her second she says is appropriate for a ten year old to read (even though the characters are older). Does YA formally span that wide an age range? And if so, is it still more helpful than confusing?

Harry Potter. The first 3 books I could easily recommend for age 8 to adult. Right around book 4, I think the books started gearing older with the 5th and 6th books a bit hard to take for younger children.

10 year olds are "middle grades" for books now, I think.