Amy, Jane Eyre does have moments of sadness, but overall it's happy. I think the happiness of a book is not that it is conflict/difficulty/ or ____________-free. But it's that the end leaves you with a sense of contentment and satisfaction that the world of the characters is well.

Ironically, we're teaching a unit on happiness right now which is filled with awesome stuff. We're reading a Dickinson poem, articles about International Happiness Day, part of the Declaration of Independence, a quote from John Locke and one from Samuel Johnson, several NYT articles, including one called "In Pursuit of Unhappiness" and some of the work Daniel Kahneman has done. It's fantastically fun and interesting and thought provoking. Students will also conduct individual research as yet undetermined on happiness.

That is, in many ways, the gift of nonfiction. There's so much out there and it's awesome and diverse and deep (in terms of lots of stuff around a topic).

We will also read Stiff which is a favorite of my students and if I have energy we'll read In Cold Blood which is one of the most page turning books I've encountered.

School-wide, we're also teaching Unbroken, Nickel and Dimed, Botany of Desire, Into the Wild. I'm also trying to get copies of League of Denial but it's only hardback so it's spendy. I'd also love to get the Telling Room but it too is hardback only.

The best units I've seen have paired fiction and non-fiction. I just saw one that paired Of Mice and Men and articles and research on euthanasia. Generally it leads to a lot of richness. I'd like to see Winifred Owen plus All Quiet on the Western Front along with articles on the centennial of WWI.

Ironically, we're teaching a unit on happiness right now which is filled with awesome stuff. We're reading a Dickinson poem, articles about International Happiness Day, part of the Declaration of Independence, a quote from John Locke and one from Samuel Johnson, several NYT articles, including one called "In Pursuit of Unhappiness" and some of the work Daniel Kahneman has done. It's fantastically fun and interesting and thought provoking. Students will also conduct individual research as yet undetermined on happiness.

I love this. Could you send me the deets?

Steph, my students totally enjoyed The Importance of Being Earnest. They wrote papers comparing how the play works thematically with how the movie does (same for Pygmalion ). In the lit class, students are going to read Picture of Dorian Gray independently while we do short stories. I hate short stories, but I can teach the stuff I need to more quickly and thoroughly using short stories. I feel like short stories are usually not plot driven enough for my tastes nor do they have happy endings. Except maybe Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings" which I can't use because it mentions fucking.

Sure! The only thing I have written up is "In Pursuit of Unhappiness." I have the rest of the articles and the order we are working in. I'm also co-teaching it one period with the psychology teacher (and she teaches AP Lang) so it's super fun. What's your email and I'll just send the link to the google doc.

Pairing fiction and nonfiction sounds great to me. If I remember right, aside from, like, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" et al, we never read any nonfiction in high school.

Amy, Jane Eyre does have moments of sadness, but overall it's happy.

My overall sense of Jane Eyre is very much resilience, so it doesn't automatically *feel* like a happy book to me when I think about it, despite the ending. But I know what you mean.

Great! School email is POOF. This email will self-destruct shortly.

My favorite high school books were Great Expectations, The Grapes of Wrath, and Hamlet. (okay, not a book). I actually didn't love Lord of the Flies but it was popular.

My English teacher wife went to international school and has no particular love for the Canon, so is always arguing for different. Our school does a pretty good job with different, and although there are certainly social message pieces in much of what we read in high school, I think they try to choose more books that are happy than sad, though I think there is sad to be had in lots of good analyzable literature.

I don't like that article though. Nonfiction doesn't make teachers better, it won't improve the word search, it won't create any better discussions than fiction. There should absolutely be some nonfiction in English classes, but the novel is the iconic style of writing in 19th and 20th century English and needs to be explored in any class claiming to explore the written language.

At least it's not Ethan fucking Frome.

Amen. Aside from the above (and Mrs. fucking Dalloway) we read pretty good selections. Moby-Dick, Moll Flanders, The Crucible, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Not "fun" necessarily, but at least not whining whiners who whine (I may be biased)(ETA: also, tipsy).

Plus, Pygmalion and Gulliver's Travels.

School-wide, we're also teaching Unbroken, Nickel and Dimed, Botany of Desire, Into the Wild. I'm also trying to get copies of League of Denial but it's only hardback so it's spendy. I'd also love to get the Telling Room but it too is hardback only.

Oh wow, reading this list (and the other stuff you mentioned) I can see how that would be awesome--I was having a hard time understanding what reading nonfiction in English class would entail!!

I'm a very fast reader, but it was a problem for me when it came to reading my science books--I'm not good at reading slowly, and while I could grasp paragraphs worth of English or history at a time, and maybe re-read for extra nuance, with the dense science concepts that didn't work and it was so hard to learn a new way to read.

So, I have a parental literary dilemma. Casper is 10 and in 5th grade. She goes to school with kids who love to read, and this is great, but the hot thing at school right now is Divergent. She named friends who have read it, and someone brought a copy to school and she read the first couple of chapters and she really wants to read it. So I Googled and saw that it's compared to Hunger Games, so I said I would need to read it first to see if I think it's appropriate because I'm concerned about the violence level. Last night I got halfway through and I honestly do not think a 10 year old who is happily reading Little House on the Prairie is the target audience for this book. As a parent, my instinct is to not let her read the book until she's at least a couple of years older. It's a hard YA, in my opinion.

As a librarian, though, I think everyone should have the freedom to read what they want. I know I read my seatmate's VC Andrews on the bus (but I was in 7th grade). So, what do I do?