Follow Up to the High School Books post

Yesterday’s post focused specifically on books I read in high school. but I noticed, reading your responses, that I have read some of those other books, though sometimes not for class (I did read and love Brave New World for class, though, I’d totally forgotten!) and some for a class other than one in high school. I read To Kill a Mockingbird in middle school (loved it) and Frankenstein in college (ditto).

A few of you (JJ and Katherine) mentioned hating “puritan literature.” I’m not sure what you mean by that. I remember (vaguely) doing a Puritan section in my American lit class, even though most of what we read (Hello, The Crucible, which I also loved) was not necessarily written by Puritans. We also read The Scarlet Letter, which I liked fine but is not my favorite, and “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” which I promptly forgot until I got to Yale and had a good giggle over the fact that the mascot of Jonathan Edwards College’s mascot was a spider. What is the puritan lit you’re talking about?

I am very curious what Sharon’s Yonkers high school did have her read, I think Emilia probably made Carrie Ryan’s day by saying she liked The Forest of Hands and Teeth better than Farenheit 451, and I’m so jealous of Rhiannon’s roaring 20s party! I want to throw a Gatsby party now!

I think our reading tastes, as a blog community, are very similar. There’s a lot of love for Shakespeare on yesterday’s post, and Dorian Gray, 1984, and Jane Austen. And I’m glad to see I’m not alone in my dislike of Wuthering Heights, even though most of you think I should try the other Brontes anyway. (This is similar to even Steinbeck haters telling me to go for East of Eden. And I feel like I should, given that it’s Poe’s favorite book.) Perhaps it is unfair of me to think that I’ll hate one sibling’s work just because I hated another’s.And LJK set my mind at ease about my inability to recognize what was going on in The Sun Also Rises. I was always worried I was the only one in the dark.

(There’s a reason for this. I was shocked — shocked, I tell you — when Darcy proposed. I got much better at reading comprehension as high school went on. But I can still never guess “whodunnit” in a mystery, which is probably why I don’t usually enjoy mysteries.)

What I thought was very interesting is how some people (like Lenore and dragonfly) loved everything they were assigned to read and other people (like Rhiannon and Phoebe) had the joy of reading sucked out of them by the act of study. I loved studying literature and the more I learned the tools by which to interpret what I was reading, the more I enjoyed it. Though, like Phoebe, I hated being told that “X symbolizes Y” and that this was the only way to read something. I loved it when I got to college and learned in my literary theory class that a lot of people think that kind of crap is… well, crap. Viva la intentional fallacy!

(Yes, this is the only time I say that. As a writer, I rue the day I learned that I just had to accept that the something I want to say in my work doesn’t really so much matter.)

Do you think that students’ resistance to reading certain things is:

a) a product of teaching styles? (stop telling children what “green” means!)
b) a product of what they are reading? (stop forcing children to read particular bad titles — which is of course a slippery slope)
c) a product of individual students’ reading tastes?