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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?

What would happen if you told her that you didn't think she would enjoy it?

(And I agree with you, and I'd say it gets more hard-core as the book goes on. To provide more spoilery details, both of her parents die at the end of the book.)

Yeah, that's what I was thinking -- tell her you don't think she'd like it, and let the chips fall where they may. I mean, if you tell her she can't, I don't know if she's the kind of kid to sneak it or not, but that seems like a pretty likely result. At least if you warn her against it, you can comfort her if it's upsetting.

I wonder what modern editors think of calling reading slowly "the editor's gift".

Ha, I think of it more like "the editor's curse," in the sense that I used to be a decently fast reader, and now, after years of editing, I read MUCH more slowly, and with a much more critical eye, too. Of course, there are times when this is a good thing, but for most of my pleasure reading, I wish I could dial down my inner editor a bit.

flea, I applaud your instinct as a librarian, but as a parent, it's a totally different thing. I absolutely think Casper should be allowed to check Divergent out of a library if she wants, and I absolutely think that you as a parent should be able to tell her that you don't think it's right for her.

I took to reading the way otters take to water - I loved reading from an early age, read fast, and well above my grade level in school. When I hit 12 I was finally allowed to check out the "grown up" books from the public library (before then, I'd pull one off the shelf and hide in a corner to read it). The books we read in high school ... some of them I enjoyed afterwards, but they were taught so badly that it almost destroyed my love of reading. They were also censored - no mention of anything hinting at sex allowed (Julius Caeser, when someone's wife says "come to bed" ... not in our book).

I'm not sure what the downside is to letting Casper read the book. You can warn her that it's darker and more upsetting than other things she's read, but it's not pornography or some grotesque splatterpunk.

She might be sad because characters die? It's not like she's going to have night terrors after reading it.

I'm kind of for kids setting their own limits with reading.