Like all too many words, this one has been pretty oily lately. Must be a sardine (at times it smells quite similar). There was a discussion on X about the ‘classics’ kids get subjected to at school — many of which seem to be designed specifically to put as many kids off reading for life as possible. Larry was at his best, expressing his pithy feelings about THE GREAT GATSBY.
Various arguments – like the lyrical beauty of the prose, the wondrous depth of the understanding of the human condition were advanced, and defeated by the man. In general, I agree. School reading lists — and supposed literary virtue — often mean that is the last book many people read. I write for a living. I am a great believer in ‘the first fix is free’ with books, because I want all nice boys and girls, and even all nasty ones, addicted to books. Besides being a living for me – I genuinely believe their lives will be better places with books to enjoy.
I’m also wise enough to have worked out that there really is no one-size-fits-all book. People’s tastes vary hugely. It’s actually less obvious (but just as true) in groups with a high level of peer pressure (so if the cool kids are reading sparkly vampires almost all the girls are apparently in love with them — even the ones who really aren’t. Especially if you’re young and insecure (as most teens are, for example) fitting in and not being the ‘weird’ kid is life or death (which why kids who are ostracized kill themselves over stupid things). Most of us grow out of peer pressure (although there is a certain segment of the population who are forever at junior-high, and very worried about being thought ‘weird’.) but as we’re talking school kids peer pressure IS important.
Of course, ‘studying’ books is generally a sure way to kill any liking of reading. I will point out that one of my English Masters at school (sadly he left for a better job outside teaching after a term) did actually make the boys (all male school) in my class all avidly read… Shakespeare — by pointing out the obscenity, the backside humor, the sheer bawdiness of much of it. Shakespeare was not writing as ‘haigh-literatuchure’ and once we got that, it was easier going, even if the class was raucous at times.
The pitfalls are obvious — if schools want kids to read (possibly not) and parents want their kids to read, most of the ‘classics’ are things the kids might get to later, if at all, and might take some psychology, like ‘reluctant tolerance’ or ‘popular with role model/influencer’ – but then the product (like Harry Potter did) has to actually appeal, once gets read. And, well, game tie ins were always successful — and any book is better than none. Some of them are better value than the ‘classics’ like… THE SCARLET LETTER, or LORD OF THE FLIES (speaking of which – did you ever read of the real version – where the castaway boys thrived, looked after each other, and sang hymn every day?)
So: today’s question. Were there any prescribed books you actually enjoyed, and why?
Mad Genius Club 
41 responses to “Classic”
I liked Shakespeare, even while we were reading him in class.
Don’t underestimate the damage teachers can do. I had read and liked books before reading them in class, and then (long) after. Not during, and not until the taste wore off.
I agree. I’ve said this before, but it took me years after enforced high school readings to learn that books like Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island could actually be enjoyed.
i actually read Tom Sawyer on my own, before the “recommended” age and loved it! Thought Tom and Huck were awesome. Then I read it in class and never touched it again, though I re read anything!
I might have read it earlier myself if not for being ‘taught’ at a very early age that to call a work ‘literature’ meant it was ponderous, boring, and condescending in tone.
It’s a feeling I’ve never entirely lost. I still remember feeling dismay when I heard of writers like Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and Tolkien being considered as ‘literature’ because I knew it meant they’d be taught in school, turned into a hateful chore, and dissected mercilessly by people whose only interest in art is in slicing it apart and seeing what sort of a Frankenstein Monster they can make of it.
I find that several years will take the bad taste out of them.
Nope. 50 years later, I never touched it again.
Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Homer’s The Odessey
And I still don’t get all the hate from conservatives for Lord of the Flies, A book that’s not only exciting, but poignant and underlies the importance of following the right rules and how society can break down.
You don’t give kids downers to read, for one thing, not if you want them to keep reading. For another thing, it’s a downer that stacks the deck in favor of a particular outcome, and normal people hate that as passionately as cynical hipsters hate upbeat stories that stack the deck in favor of a particular outcome.
The closest actual real life incident had a very different outcome, although the kids involved were not the products of the English public school system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways
Your definition of ‘downer’ and mine are a little different. They get RESCUED at the end, and sanity and order is reasserted, along with a strong warning to try and prevent this from happening on the large scale.
Yes, terrible things happen, and what happened to Piggy and Simon hit home, but it’s intense and exciting and Ralph doesn’t give in.
I keep seeing that castaway story as a supposed rebuttal to LOTF. It’s a false comparison. The kids are all of similar age ranges, there were only six of them, and they all knew each other. The dynamics in LOTF were completely different. And if you don’t think there’s something to be said about the dangers of crowd mentality and finding or creating an enemy, then maybe you’ve blocked out all of 2020. Painted faces, masked faces (whether medical masks or rioters’ masks) I was thinking a lot about that book in 2020.
”You don’t give kids downers to read”
You don’t down them in downers and in misery, but darker elements?
My favorites in assigned reading included the Tell Tale Heart, Cask of Admontillado (spelling?) and Masque of the Red Death.
Oh yeah, and I point you to the runaway popularity of A Series of Unfortunate Events.
A spoken-word record of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (IIRC read by Vincent Price) was my first introduction to horror, and led me to read several other works by Poe in short order.
I heard that one too! It was great!
I love this reading of Masque of the Red Death. The narrator sets it to music, and they go together perfectly. I was transported to state of near ecstasy as I listened.
I listened to that one too! It was great!
I love this reading of Masque of the Red Death. The narrator sets it to music, and they go together perfectly. I was transported to state of near ecstasy as I listened.
I’m all for Edgar Allen Poe, especially paired with Vincent Price, but Lord of the Flies is more like assigning Hard Times to kids than it is to Poe.
Nasty crowd dynamics is something every kid in a school can figure out for themselves.
I liked it just fine.
More than liked it, I read the heck out of that book.
Kids can be very interested in seeing these things play out in an adventurous or fantastic setting.
An island that becomes a microcosm of the human condition, both civilizational and within the soul while being a rousing, intense, suspenseful and tragic adventure. A story that attains near-mythic heights in the battle of good and evil when my favorite character Simon (right up there with Fiver from Watership Down) has a conversation with what may or may not be a literal demon and learns that battle is played out in the human heart.
Yeah, I read the heck out of that book. Now I’m going to download my audiobook and listen to it again.
If you liked it as a kid, then there’s nothing more to be said; I hadn’t picked up on that from your earlier posts.
I know people who were given nightmares and put off Poe for life by its being assigned reading.
if I may ask, what do they read instead by preference?
There are plenty of people who would never read Poe or another author or genre regardless because it just doesn’t resonate with them.
Assigned reading I liked, almost forgot:
The Cask of Amontillado
Tell Tale Heart
The Masque of the Red Death
The Raven
Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Rip Van Winkle
The Odessey
Harrison Bergeron
Don Quixote (albeit at college level)
I read Larry’s rant (here) and was amused, but I’m also cynical. I was another one of those never-go-to-school-without-3-extra-books-to-read to get through the day types, from 5th grade on.
You see, Larry thinks that the problem is that the teachers don’t properly guide students into real (popular) classics that they’ll enjoy all their lives, so that they will keep on reading. Now, he’s not wrong about that (with rare exception, and those usually in the lower grades (who suffer less supervisory scrutiny)). But I don’t see school that way.
I think school is to teach you about bullshit, by close observations of the practitioners thereof and their limits. The more bored you are, the more you will arrange for your own entertainment/education (those extra books or other quiet-ish activities). It’s infra-dig to the other students who have less independence or more anxiety to actively disrupt the class (and it’s also not really much of a challenge to be the Disrupter Queen), and teachers will appreciate your restraint (that’s how you can tell if you’re doing rebellion right in a social context). Acing the tests is excellent training for how to regurgitate the conventional opinions that academics (or their imitators in your career) want as a method of approaching humanities in educational contexts. And that’s useful knowledge. Anything that illustrates the most useful ways to rebel (overtly or otherwise) is educational.
Ultimately, we all have to get our own educations, once we can read. The barriers put in our way by the educational systems are there to be overcome (itself a learning experience), but you also need to learn how to extract that education from the other tools available to you — and given today’s internet, there’s never been a better time.
Your worthy classmates, who can’t/won’t go down this path? Help where you can, homeschool if appropriate, publicize alternatives, and keep writing.
Books there was some kind of class-based requirement to read that I enjoyed:
-Scarlet Pimpernel in middle school, offered as kind of a counterpoint to Tale of Two Cities. I’ve been told that it really doesn’t work for boys, though.
-The Good Master by Kate Seredy: this was also middle school.
-Outlaws of Ravenhurst: somewhat over-prescribed in the conservative Catholic circles my family moved in, but it was fun the first time I read it, as a home school student.
-Pride and Prejudice: bought for a high school English Literature class in France I didn’t end up taking because we moved again. Read it on my own, a little ahead of the famous 1995 miniseries, so basically, I’m part of the last generation to read it untainted by a high-profile adaptation.
-Books that were hanging around the classroom or homeschool environment that I read without specific orders to do so: Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, possible other Sherlock Holmes, Odyssey, Marguerite Henry, Chronicles of Narnia, Howard Pyle’s King Arthur and His Knights, Jungle Book, The Hobbit.
-A friend in a different class was once reading 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, while my class was reading something stupid, possibly by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and I jokingly offered to swap.
Basically, the setups I’ve seen that worked best seemed to involve a classroom library equipped with a decent (say, 15/20+ books) selection of vetted, age-appropriate literature, and the kids were allowed to choose the ones they wanted and do reports on them.
There was a tendency at one time to hold onto children’s lit that was just too old to work for contemporary readers; so that the most kid-friendly thing you might find was the very long, saggy Treasure Island, and the second most kid-friendly thing was a bad public domain translation of Jules Verne. The relentless now-ness of the current focus is a vast overcorrection in the opposite direction. I don’t have a good feel for the more domestic/traditionally feminine sections of children’s lit, but I feel like a mix of Marguerite Henry, Jim Kjelgaard, J. K. Rowling, the less warped end of L. M. Montgomery’s work, and Kipling’s Mowgli stories would be a good start for any grade school/middle grade library.
*blink* Which end of L. M. Montgomery is warped?
Emily of New Moon trilogy suffers from protagonist-centered morality, and Pat of Silver Bush duology probably isn’t meant that way but comes off that way as well. I enjoyed them at the time, but later in life I felt like they were kind of bad role models, and finding out what a self-important neurotic(1) the author was in real life didn’t help, because it felt like those books were where that side of her personality was closest to the surface.
“Warped” was maybe too strong a word for it.
(1) I know it’s fashionable to trash on her suicidal husband, but I’ve never come away from a Montgomery biographical sketch without feeling sorrier for him than for her. He figured out long before she did that WWI was going to be a bad deal, for instance.
I love the Emily books far more than the Anne ones. Never really cared for Pat.
I liked the Emily books growing up more than Anne, (sucker for the gothic/supernatural bits) but like I said, I’m not sure I approve of them as a grownup.
I loved The Scarlet Pimpernel, and hated A Tale of Two Cities. Read both of them after college.
And yes, nearly all of my “classic” literature was voluntary outside of any class. My favorite book of all time is The Three Musketeers. And I think I read Swiss Family Robinson half a dozen times in grade school.
heh, you have good taste 🙂
High School/Junior High:
Liked: Harrison Bergeron, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Flowers For Algernon
Meh: The Red Badge of Courage, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Taming of the Shrew
Hated: Moby Dick, Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet
College:
Liked: The Oddysey, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyl & Mr. Hyde
Meh: The Tempest, The Time Machine
Hated: none
Most of the classics that I read weren’t for class, but for my own personal enjoyment or knowledge of the trope/quotes. There have been a few that I made myself power through, but most of them I enjoyed, or was at least ambivalent to them. I’m not really a fan of Shakespeare, but I’ll read him once in awhile.
I actually enjoyed The Red Badge of Courage, and Animal Farm. We also had a class that had Bradbury, and some of his stuff I like (Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes,) and some starts great then gets weird (The Martian Chronicles)
I really can’t remember much about what was assigned and discussed in class before about middle school. Some Poe and Dickens possibly. The rest must have been utterly forgettable dreck?
I do remember some of the stuff that was on the summer reading list about grades 6-10 or so (we had a short list every year and had to pick two, then write a 2-page or so book report on each one, to be turned in first week of school): The Red Badge of Courage, The Ox-Bow Incident, Last of the Mohicans, For Whom the Bell Tolls. In high school we did a bunch of ancient Greek plays and some Shakespeare, The Canterbury Tales, and Beowulf.
Then again, I was the kid who always got a blue ribbon for voluntarily reading library books over the summer break throughout elementary school. I think I needed at least 30 books to get the blue ribbon. (I graduated high school in 1987 for a reference point; I’m sure that any such programs to encourage more reading are probably long gone.)
They exist. The local library runs one.
But the standards are much lower.
I think three books over the course of two months was enough to max the program. (I might be wrong. It might have been four.)
Back when I was in school over summer vacation I used to see other kids from my grade school at the public library, taking book after book off the shelves, writing down the title, author, and a quick description of the plot, and hand that in when they returned to school. I and several other kids were seen as weirdos for actually trying to read the books.
If I remember how mine worked, the books had to be checked out. We were given cards with space for up to 10 book entries. Each book entry had to be signed off on by my mother or grandmother who attested I had read the books. Each time I went back to the library for more books, a library employee stamped next to each completed line. When you filled up the card, you were given another one with 10 more lines. Had to go back to the library pretty much every week for more books over the summer to get to 30.
Once I aged out of that program, I started reading random articles from my father’s 1965 (?) encyclopedia set over the summer breaks. Also my mother’s 1960’s Time Life science & nature books.
This was when few had home computers and access to the rudimentary Internet. Plus no TV’s in the kids bedrooms. There was not really a lot for a somewhat introverted kid on the far edge of the school district to do after the other kids my age moved away.
I loved Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, The Count of Monte Cristo…I bet there are more that are prescribed but I can’t remember but the catch is that I found them for myself. Our fifth grade teacher actually got us to like The Taming of The Shrew and The Merchant of Venice by having the class take parts and read aloud a simplified version of the plays over the course of the year and we got to talk about what we thought of the characters. She didn’t care if we were literary about it, just that we understood it. And enjoyed it.
The only fiction I can recall being assigned to read in school was Crime And Punishment and Tender Is The Night. Didn’t read more than a few pages of either. But, then, by the time I was in high school it was pretty obvious to everyone that I wasn’t going to graduate, so no one pushed me to do school work.
Crime and Punishment was considered college level when I encountered it; Fitzgerald I’ve successfully dodged for many years.
Tolkien. Tolkien was the only “assigned” reading I liked–because I had already read and loved Tolkien (and, in fact, as it was 9th grade, got permission to skip the actual assigned book–The Hobbit, which I had read when I was 6–and did Lord of the Rings (for the third or fourth time) instead.)
As for Shakespeare…I like to point out to folks nowadays that Old William was the Elizabethan Era’s version of Michael Bay, and if Shakespeare could have had things asploding in all his plays without burning down the whole city, he 100% would have.
I wish I could wave a wand and make sure Lord of the Flies would never be taught below college level, ever again in the history of the world.
First, it’s not a book for kids, just as Animal Farm is not a book for farm animals. It is an allegory, written for adults, about facism or communism or the cold war or the horrors of English schools or something, using kids as characters to make its point. It is not a book FOR kids.
Second, it’s a horrifying book for certain kids. When I was forced to read it, I was already a voracious reader. In particular, I had read a lot of plot-driven fiction, mostly SF, some fantasy. And as I read it, I recognized the plot elements. There was a geeky kid (like me), wearing glasses (like me), in a strange environment (like most SF), surrounded by a relatively hostile peer group (like me in middle school). And I read the book more and more eagerly, wondering how the geeky kid was going to escape his predicament and win the day, and whether I could apply his solutions to my own hostile environment.
And then they killed him.
And I got mad. What the H@ll kind of lesson was a geeky kid supposed to learn from that?
If I had been more the depressive type, I might have killed myself at that point, because that was clearly the fate that Great Litrachur thought geeky kids deserved. Instead I got mad. At the author, who thought a kid like me did not deserve a happy ending, and at the teacher for forcing the author’s opinion down my throat.
I finished the book, because I had to. I wrote a book report, because I had to. I stood up and presented it in class, because I had to. And I left out all the personal stuff above, because I had already learned never to let my persecutors smell fear. But I did manage to convey my extreme dislike of the book, and I received one of the worst grades in my entire school career, because the teacher thought the book was Great Litrachur that everyone must love.
It’s not the only book in the standard US school curriculum that really should not be taught to kids (A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye, etc …). But it’s by far the worst. The mere fact that there are kids in a book does not mean it is a book for kids.