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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   4789 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

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If you were in charge of setting high school fiction reading curriculums, what books would you choose? I think Dune holds up, maybe Blood Meridian? But I’m not as well read as some of you

Rule 1 - no series

Rule 2 - A book that an avid book reader can finish in a day to two at most.

Rule 3 - It should be older than 30 years in age and it's value should already have been noticed by society rather than the teacher giving their own value score to a random book.

I'm with Pirsig on that one: I would make them write fiction, not read fiction. You can't really appreciate things until you've tried your hand at them. Food, furniture, fighting, fucking and yes, fiction.

Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It's literary enough to hit the checkpoints, and the story just rocks. Plenty of essays to be written about what it all means, especially during its reading before it all comes together.

The Northern Lights (American: The Golden Compass) would be great for middle school, as it is about standing up to groomers and keeping your integrity even when it's inconvenient. The strong gypsy representation and relative antagonism towards religion are both bonuses in my book.

Roald Dahl's The Witches is a good children's book about dealing with difficult changes, so put that in as well. Add The Chronicles of Narnia as well.

For high school... my school had a heavy focus on stories of disprivileged people, which I found helpful. One of the options was The Notebook by Agota Kristof, which is a great little read in spite of the beastiality and gang rape. We also had to read at least one book that reflected traditional life and culture in our region, which is something I think every school should do.

Ideally you'd want the kids to be exposed to at least one work of genre fiction and at least one work of literary fiction. At least one work reflecting liberal values, and at least one work subverting or critiquing liberal values. A few book-length works, and a few short stories.

I'm excited to see what the other posters come up with.

I wouldn't think either of those books are really that suitable. Dune is a bit pulpy and is on the fantasy side of sci-fi that uses technological premises to justify cool fights and exotic intrigues. Sci-fi that is more rewarding for in-class exploration focuses more on the social and philosophical aspects, imo. Blood Meridian is just far too bloodthirsty.

An English curriculum's canon wants do a few things (ideally all in the same book):

  • Introduce readers to culturally 'important' texts without which they would lack important context for a lot of other media

  • Exhibit technical expression in plot, prose style, tone, characterisation, and other unique devices, etc. that is legible enough to be useful as a tool to discuss these elements and their execution

  • Provoke the reader to consider broader ideas they may not have considered before

  • Actually hold a student's interest

Some texts hit on all of these points very well, which is why they're a mainstay in schools: Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Steinbeck's stuff, for example. You can also see the failure modes of some curriculums in trying to pursue one point at the expense of all others (it is easy to imagine someone fixated on the first point wanting to teach 12-year-olds Chaucer or the second point wanting to teach Joyce or Calvino without care for student interest, or conversely erring in the other direction and serving up the shallow YA lit of the day).

I think showing a range of techniques and big ideas is more important in the limited time you have, so my ideal English Curriculum would be heavily weighted towards shorter stories that could be consumed and dissected in a week or even a single lesson. Calvino is a lot more palatable when writing his cosmicomics, for example (the Distance of the Moon is keenly stylistic, heartbreaking, and poses interesting questions about sci-fi as a genre). DFW's Incarnations of Dead Children has a frenetic, heart-in-mouth pacing that deserves close attention (and god forbid you propose 8th graders read Infinite Jest). The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is both an important cultural touchstone and provokes questions that young readers latch onto hard, and it can be consumed in a half-hour. The Yellow Wallpaper, Orwell's Shooting an Elephant, maybe some of Saramago's absurdist stuff would also be on my ideal list.

(The other nice thing about short stories is that I can link to most of these online, and the short length is less intimidating for even adult readers to dive in and get something out of them)

An excerpt from Anna Karenina, Heaney's translation of Beowulf, the Scarlet Pimpernel (worth the inevitable pimp jokes) and an abridged Great Expectations, a good translation of a straightforward section from La Comédie humaine, Maccabees, Pride and Prejudice, Anabasis (extra credit for Watching the Warriors), same for Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, 1984. Some short stories from Guy de Maupassant and maybe Philip K Dick.

Definitely not Wuthering Heights. It's already hard enough to make kids read. Can we please stop giving them the impression that reading is painful?

I'd stick with the best of this particular "genre", so things like Animal Farm, 1984, etc.

The books you're recommending are good and I'm a fan of both, but they are well above the level we're talking about.

Blood Meridian is the best novel I ever read, but it's also a hard and unrewarding read for most people. I doubt it'd be suitable for highschoolers. If you want them reading McCarthy, then I think the Border Trilogy - either of the first two (All The Pretty Horses and The Crossing) or the whole trilogy - would be much better-suited on account of their more personable protagonists and less violent plots.

Dune I'm similarly not sure about. There are lots of people who just refuse to take Sci-Fi seriously. Maybe Dune can overcome this to some degree thanks to its fame, maybe it'll just cause a bunch of culture warring due do its mighty whitey plot, hard to say - but it's also been around for a long while; surely teachers somewhere must have experiences on how students react to Dune?

If there are any English teachers in our ranks, one thing I'd like to know before making suggestions is: what are the ostensible goals of the books in a high school fiction reading curriculum? Are we trying to have our students gain proficiency with certain types of language, or learn to interpret various kinds of story, or learn about the history of literature? Or something else? There are a lot of different ways you could answer that question, which would influence the books you'd select.

The Screwtape Letters, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Gig Economy.

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