You Shouldn’t Have to Read These Books in High School

The Great Gatsby is overrated. It’s a good book! A great book! It’s just not the very best book ever, especially not the best book to teach teenagers about the power of literature and the essence of America. If it were, then teens wouldn’t celebrate the glamour that the book tries to deconstruct. But it’s stuck in the high school literary canon, along with Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men. And at this point it seems like the main reason it’s taught to every high schooler is because it was taught to all the teachers, and no one’s bothered to check if it’s still the best choice. My own high school stuck close to the classics, making conservative choices that I had to supplement on my own time. This is normal. But given little structure for finding the great books of my own era, or even the less musty ones of recent past, I flailed around, grabbing my mom’s copies of Grisham and Crichton, spending too much time on Palahniuk—all stuff I’d grow out of, and not regret but not particularly cherish. I found plenty of good books, often by accident, but I didn’t have much of… Read full this story

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