NR writers propose alternatives to the usual fare found on schools’ required reading lists.
NR writers propose alternatives to the usual fare found on schools’ required reading lists.
Editor’s Note: It’s that time of year again — the time when there’s a crackle in the air, the leaves are just starting to curl, and you get excited by the sight of fresh, blank notebooks. A few years ago, we here at NR collected “read this, not that” recommendations for a better high school reading list. It is our pleasure to bring you another such list from NR staff, with the hope of piquing, not dampening, students’ enthusiasm for books.
Cyrano de Bergerac instead of the Usual Plays
Typical reading lists might offer some Arthur Miller, maybe A Raisin in the Sun (civil rights shout-out), A Street Car Named Desire (watch those subtexts). All solid stuff. My nominee, however, would be what the critic John Simon called a fairy tale for adults. The play is romance, but it is splendidly done — passion, hurt, bravado, gallantry. Nothing can match the panache of Edmond Rostand’s couplets, but Brian Hooker’s blank verse translation keeps it formally on its toes. An anecdote from a stage production: Keith Mano’s wife, Laurie Kennedy, was playing Roxanne, the love interest, opposite Frank Langella as Cyrano, eloquent and ugly (heavily made up to be the latter). I forget who played Christian, the second male lead — handsome, brave, and plain-spoken — who borrows Cyrano’s words to woo Roxanne. Cyrano is the focus of all the many moments he is onstage, with one exception: the end of the fourth of five acts, when Christian is killed in battle and Roxanne, who has come to the field, embraces him, center stage. Langella was above them on a battlement, defying the enemy, where he sensed that the audience’s eyes were, for once, not on him, but on the pieta of love below. So he leaped down to get a part of the death. The actor playing Christian felt himself suddenly tugged one way, by Langella, then re-embraced by Kennedy. So it went as he wondered what the hell was going on, all the while doing his best to play dead. The drama of the play can sweep up non-actors too, and the first, third, and fifth acts all have climaxes differently but equally moving.
— Richard Brookhiser
O Pioneers! instead of The Great Gatsby
“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.” Plunk students down with Willa Cather’s novel for a more meaningful encounter with the American spirit than they’ll get from Fitzgerald’s glossy contrivance. Beauty and truth, love and loneliness, suffering and endurance are all out there on Cather’s prairie and pulsing through her prose. Instead of the eccentric on Long Island Sound, introduce kids to the heroically independent Alexandra Bergson on her Nebraska farm. If the main thing we want kids to get from reading is the desire to read more, assign this novel, whose last five words are “the shining eyes of youth!”
— Jessica Hornik
Out of the Silent Planet instead of Esperanza Rising
Whatever its superficial merits as a book that grapples with race and class in Depression-era California, Esperanza Rising is a bore of a book. At over 300 pages, it requires a great deal of class time and, like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, works far harder at driving home its Marxist inequality lesson than it does at providing young readers a reason to keep turning the pages. It’s a classic of the “books that teachers feel good teaching, but students dread” genre. In its place, and at half the length with thrice the excitement, should be C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet. The setting is lush and alien, with memorable characters around every corner and a protagonist who finds himself, like Esperanza, in an uncertain situation caught between the unknown and base violence. Student readers will experience wonder, be inspired to recreate the setting through various forms of art, and, with the reduced word count, be able to reread passages and better digest the material. Most of all, teachers and students will have to reckon with the complete fallenness of man — with the inhabitants of the “silent planet” — understanding that no matter one’s station, class, or ethnicity, we are given to cruelty, avarice, and short-sightedness. Lewis provides a more accurate depiction of mankind in science fiction than Pam Muñoz Ryan can muster in historical fiction.
— Luther Ray Abel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin instead of The Catcher in the Rye
I get it: The Catcher in the Rye is cool. Almost 75 years after its publication, its tale of directionless teen angst, alienation, and obsession with authenticity is what grownups think teenagers want to read. As a teen, I hated its whining and its pandering, and it doesn’t improve with age. Its only virtue is that half of its manuscript landed at Utah Beach on June 6, 1944, in the backpack of its author, J. D. Salinger. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by contrast, is deeply uncool. It was written by a busy, still-grieving mom for an audience of moms, and by a passionate Christian for an audience of passionate Christians. It’s flowery, sentimental, deadly earnest, and deeply unliterary. On top of that, it’s hard sledding, a story of slavery full of the n-word and other heavy racism of the day that shocks the modern reader. But it’s also, by far, the most important novel in American history. That’s reason alone why every American should read it. Published 99 years before The Catcher in the Rye, it reached a massive global audience and changed the country. Its moral passion is earned and righteous, and the first American book with a black protagonist gives a genuine variety of black perspectives on slavery. The fact that it is written from a perspective alien to modern teenagers is exactly why it should still be read. It’s also just great storytelling, with indelible characters and scenes that grab the heartstrings and linger in memory. If Harriet Beecher Stowe’s prose is more conversational than literary, that should be a plus for today’s book-deprived students.
— Dan McLaughlin
Lord of the World instead of Brave New World
Sampling dystopias is a staple of high school English classes. Few students will graduate without having at least been asked to read Fahrenheit 451, 1984, or Brave New World. High-power schools (or ambitious students) will read more than one and compare and contrast. But the conversations about a genre so concerned with the future are now too stuck in the past. It’s time to shake up the game of near-future social speculation. So swap out Aldous Huxley’s soma-drenched fable for Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World. Benson, a prominent Catholic convert from Anglicanism, wrote the book, one of the first modern dystopias, in the early 20th century. Surveying contemporary trends and developments — secularization, mechanized warfare, the rise of socialism — he found worrying, Benson conjures up an ultramontane fever dream. On a material level alone, its predictive power is impressive. Just four years after the Wright brothers flew for the first time, he imagined a future in which air travel is commonplace enough to be used privately, as well as in war — to drop weapons of explosive power beyond anything known in his day. And this is to say nothing of the spiritual potency of a disturbingly relevant work. It brings us a future at least as frightening as Huxley’s, if not more so, one that finds Christianity both institutionally weak and persecuted, while the unattached seek succor in alternative faiths and charismatic leaders. At various points in their lives, all three of the most recent popes have praised the book. Its story is compelling enough, and Benson’s imagination is rich enough, to warrant a place for Lord of the World in a high school curriculum — and not just in Catholic schools. Though that would be a good start.
— Jack Butler
East of Eden instead of The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men
Life supplies plenty of time for small and great depressions. And high schoolers are well aware these days that some things about the good ol’ days weren’t all that good. Give them Steinbeck’s mature, mid-century masterwork. So what if certain impersonal, “systemic” elements mold our lives? None of them relieves us of the freedom of choice. Between omnipotence and impotence there’s a universe where the individual is sovereign. According to this good book: thou always mayest. Also: Thou might enjoy an uproarious scene in which the U.S. government awards a middle-aged aerophobe a short flight in a shaky WWI-era stunt plane.
— Vahaken Mouradian
The Henriad instead of Romeo and Juliet
The reason why so many high schoolers think Shakespeare is boring is that they haven’t been exposed to the greatest of all of the Bard’s creations: Sir John Falstaff. You can get the basic, sappy plot of Romeo and Juliet through cultural osmosis or, if you must, from Leonardo DiCaprio. But Prince Hal’s coming of age from a bawdy, reckless, spendthrift prince to the valiant king of Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech? Or the fiery heat of Hotspur’s impetuous wrath? Or Falstaff’s iconic, roguish wit and dirty jokes? Ah, now that you can only get by reading the greatest of Will Shakespeare’s history plays. Read the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V as a finale — they will surely gentle your condition.
— Mark Antonio Wright
The Wind in the Willows instead of Animal Farm
Deep, personal friendships terrify communists, so what better way to defeat the Reds than by promoting a beautiful book about lasting connections over a moralizing, unfunny one. Orwell’s tale, while a classic, tells a basic and rather one-note story that leaves little to the imagination. Students would be better challenged and inspired by the book that A. A. Milne called “a test of character.” Published in 1908, this charming book was drawn from letters the author, Kenneth Grahame, wrote to his seven-year-old son, detailing the exploits of one Mr. Toad. This extravagant animal is constantly getting into hilarious scrapes and being pulled out of them by concerned friends. In Grahame’s book, the narrative is balanced by introducing readers to three other characters, Mole, Rat, and Mr. Badger, in addition to the wild Mr. Toad. For students learning to navigate friendships, they couldn’t do better than this book, which, as I wrote a few years ago, is“ a novel-length lesson in consideration of others, care for their good name, the meaning of being a gentleman, and how to rid ancestral homes of invading weasels and stoats.” But don’t take my word for it. A. A. Milne is the final authority on this tale: “When you sit down to it, don’t be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy: I don’t know. But it is you who are on trial.”
— Sarah Colleen Schutte