In yesterday’s Washington Post, a local educator wrote in an editorial piece that teachers are teaching books that don’t stack up. Schnog is concerned by the continuing decline of reading for pleasure; she believes that the manner in which English literature is taught in America’s high schools drains the pleasure of reading from students. After “butchering” and diagramming poetry and prose that is utterly alien and irrelevant to their lives, teens aren’t interested in reading, and don’t see the point of great literature. Her solution: select readings better suited to their emotional maturity and intellectual needs. Seems simple enough, doesn’t it?

While I don’t necessarily agree with everything that Ms. Schnog says, I do think that a greater variety in the selected readings would lead to more engaged readers. How many times must a student read the same book/short story/play? I can remember reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for English, and then reading it again for World Civilization. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was required reading for World Civilization also, then read again for a semester long class covering Shakespeare. And the summer reading list? Well, reading Anna Karenina, The Catcher in the Rye, Huck Finn, and several other books probably didn’t do me any harm. Here’s the catch though: I was already an engaged reader. Perhaps I wouldn’t have chosen those books. Definitely I wouldn’t have chosen The Catcher in the Rye (oh, Holden Caulfield, you whiney, pretentious git). But I would have read other things that summer. Genre fiction. YA stuff. And maybe some nonfiction, too, since at that time I was obsessed with Eleanor of Aquitaine, a woman who kicked ass back when women were mostly footnotes in European history.

The love of reading, the willingness to pick up a book rather than a Wii or some other visual/technological toy is not born via high school reading. It’s born long before in most cases, I think. When our parents read to us as toddlers. When we learn to sound out words and string together sentences. When we manage to graduate past Dick and Jane to story books that include more than one sentence on a page with a matching illustration.

We can continue to alienate teen readers, or we can hear them, acknowledge their tastes, engage directly with their resistance to serious reading and move gradually, with sensitivity to what’s age-appropriate, toward the realm of great literature.

This is where Ms. Schnog loses me, with her fixation on “great books”. In particular, her desire to take the reading that teens do enjoy, which seems to be genre fiction in her experience (science fiction is the example used in the editorial), and to use that guide teens toward making better reading choices. Better choices? Serious reading? Only great literature is to be read seriously? This blinkered view of “classic lit-er-a-choor” and the value judgment that it includes drive me crazy. Any text can be read seriously. The source of text doesn’t influence the student’s ability to parse its language and imagery, or their opportunity to view the word through the prism of history, politics, economics, social upheaval or whatever prism they may choose. Ms. Schnog’s constant return to the traditional great books is part of her (and the educational establishment’s) problem. The examples given in her opinion piece are Shakespeare, Salinger, Dickens, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Fitzgerald, and Hurston. The single book that was published within the last twenty years, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, was dismissed as irrelevant and incomprehensible to her 14 year old son. Excepting Alvarez and Hurston, all dead or reclusive white men. Excepting Alvarez, nothing published after 1951.

Asimov is mentioned by a student, but ignored by Schnog. What about Philip K. Dick? J.R.R. Tolkein? Stephen King? Nora Roberts? Jennifer Crusie? Georgette Heyer? Lois McMaster Bujold? J.K. Rowling? Scott Westerfield? I could go on and on, listing writers who write genre fiction, fiction that may or may not ever be deemed “great” by English teachers, but by those authors write (or wrote) things that engage readers of all ages, including the teen readers that teachers so desperately want to reach.

This is just my opinion, but I feel as if the author recommended only half of a solution to the declining readership. Yes, engaging young readers by selecting read that speaks to them will help. But she missed the other half of the solution, or the other half of the problem — that the traditional “great” canon does not and cannot engage all students, the number of young people who read for pleasure will continue to decline.

My questions for other readers are: did what you were required to read in school influence your reading habits after? When did you fall in love with reading? Was it a function of education, or was it inculcated by your parents? And what do you think of summer reading lists — traditional and otherwise?

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