> Unsurprisingly, it was canonical classics. As Horowitch points out, I am just “one public-high school teacher in Illinois,” but while professors at elite univ

> Unsurprisingly, it was canonical classics. As Horowitch points out, I am just “one public-high school teacher in Illinois,” but while professors at elite universities sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables [...] Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading. An unabridged translation of Les Miserables is 3-6x as long as any of those other books. I feel like that could explain a difference in being able/willing to finish those books by itself. At the same time, updated language and abridgment are extremely normal in translations and would be very appropriate here. I'd be surprised if those choices aren't already considered by professors assigning Les Mis in anything but a class on Les Mis for seniors or grad students. Presumably a competent abridgment would cut much of 'going on for chapters about the sewer system' or whatever. The OP talks about such translation techniques working for her class when she teaches The Odyssey! I don't see how Les Miserables is very different, but maybe the translation(s) she uses for the Odyssey are really exceptional. An unrelated point the OP kind of gets at but doesn't focus on, in favor of diversity and recency of authorship: the mere fact of assigning reading and setting a schedule for it often sucks the pleasure out of it, doesn't it? I read two authors of classics put down in the OP as 'vanilla' and 'dust-covered', Dostoevsky and Hugo, for pleasure in high school... and by my senior year of high school was skipping many (if not a majority) of assigned readings in favor of bullshitting my way through based on second-hand summaries. (The books I skipped included both titles by 'dead white men' and more contemporary titles by authors of other backgrounds.) If I hadn't the pleasure of choosing the classic texts I did read as referred to above, I probably would have given them a shallow and resentful treatment, too. Aside: after looking them up, the books the OP lists as examples sound way more interesting than the 'non-canonical' texts I was assigned in high school, and I'm envious of their students in that respect. The non-canonical texts in my school days were infrequent and also often felt like second-rate additions to curriculum: slim volumes, simple language, facile premises.