A few days ago, the BookBub blog posted an article entitled “12 Books
We Should Stop Making High Schoolers Read”, which you can find here: https://media.bookbub.com/blog/2016/09/01/books-we-should-stop-making-high-schoolers-read/
On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to this list, since I teach high
school students—that is, high school students who suddenly find themselves
first-year college students at a small regional university in Oklahoma. They
haven’t magically transformed from twelfth grade to year one of college; they’re
still the same students who (largely) don’t like to read or write, and (mostly)
have avoided reading as much as possible. When ordering books for a prospective
class, I always think, “oh, can they really read book X? Isn’t it too hard? Will
they stick with it? Can I possibly make them see the big ideas here? Shouldn’t
I try something easier or more modern?” So on the face of it, this list is an
honest admission that students hate reading, so why not at least try to meet
them on their own terms? What’s wrong with switching out Moby Dick with The
Martian? (though I’ve got to think alliteration had something to do with
this switcheroo, since they have almost zero in common). If high school
students bitch about reading A Tale of Two Cities, why not substitute I
am Malala, a non-fiction book by a brave woman who is admittedly not a
writer and had a professional writer help her along (which doesn’t exactly
compare to Dickens, one of our greatest writers of novels). But hey, if it gets
students reading, why the hell not? Reading is reading, and all reading is
good.
