5 ms·

A quick Public Service Announcement: Go back and read all those books you were supposed to have read in high school. It turns out, they are actually really go

A quick Public Service Announcement: Go back and read all those books you were supposed to have read in high school. It turns out, they are actually really good. And now you're old enough and have had enough life experience to understand and relate to them. I remember kinda liking "The Sun Also Rises" in highschool literature class. There were these people travelling around Spain and drinking a lot. I could relate. At some point in my late 20s, I came across a copy and read it again. Turns out it's an awesome book, and about more than just swilling wine. So the thought occurred that since one of those terrible highschool literature books was good, maybe more of them would be. I grabbed The Great Gatsby. Awesome book. Whatever JD Sallinger thing they had us read. Awesome. Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Oscar Wilde. Hell yeah. And all those authors had tons of other great stuff they'd written. And there were lots of authors in the last hundred-odd years. It kinda kicked off a lifetime of seeking out the Good Stuff. One minor downside, as long as we're doing a PSA, is that doing this will kill your ability to read Airport Bestsellers of any genre. You'll need actual good writing from here on out. Fortunately, there's lots of people still doing that so they should be able to crank out new good books faster than you can read them.

karamanolev 1y ago
This reply rings true, but also had me thinking. If rereading those books when you're old enough makes you appreciate them, are they ideal for high school? Do they teach you what's good writing if you can't recognize it yet? Does it make sense to, then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and understand more in high school? I don't have the right answer, but the question seemed relevant.
- jl6 1y ago
  Fair point, but I also think initial exposure to things you don’t yet understand is a useful step towards understanding them.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    Not so sure. Engaging students' attention, even if they aren't ready to fully grasp it, is great exposure. Forcing them to scan their retinas over black-and-white patterns for hours, not so much.
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    They have to be able to reach high enough to get some of it. It has to repay their time in high school. It should also show them there's more to reach for, but they need to be able to get some of it. For me, Gatsby was... not entirely terrible. It was mostly a waste of my time, but looking back I can see some of the themes were at least somewhat worthwhile. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an absolute waste of my time. If Joyce is worth an adult reading (which I doubt to this day), then don't make high school kids read him.
- bruce511 1y ago
  >> Does it make sense to, then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and understand more in high school? I guess it depends on the goal. My opinion is that reading hard books at school simply turns people off reading completely. If the reading is fun there's more chance students will carry on reading. So if the goal is "teach kids that reading is fun. So they do it. Which means their ability to read goes up" , then yes, the books should be more fun. (We read a Spike Milligan book, which certainly engaged the class more than Wuthering Heights did.) On the other hand if the goal is to understand "literature", then books with themes and character development and so on is necessary. And of course can put some kids off reading for life.
  - Suppafly 1y ago
    >My opinion is that reading hard books at school simply turns people off reading completely. The thing is, most of these books people are complaining about aren't actually 'hard books', especially when read at a chapter or two per week with a teacher guiding you through all the major themes. The goal isn't to teach kids that reading is fun, it's to teach them critical reading skills. There is something to be said about reaching the students where they are, but we already dumb down things too much to allow the slower students to keep pace. They can learn about reading for fun in remedial reading classes.
- hoseja 1y ago
  Indeed. It's a giant, unrecognized problem with pedagogy. Things are taught from the position of already understanding them and the messy confusing process of actually grokking anything is mostly ignored and students are left to figure it out alone.
- StefanBatory 1y ago
  So that when you go back to them, you can look at your memories when you were younger.
- aimor 1y ago
  How else are you supposed to know that you've grown since highschool if you can't reread Catcher in the Rye in a different light?
- aaronbaugher 1y ago
  It's probably good if the book requires you to stretch a bit, and even if you don't totally get it yet. My parents never put any limits on what I could read, so I stumbled over the Poe shelf at the library at a fairly young age. There was plenty I didn't understand, but plenty that I could, and some stories still stick with me. But I remember when my niece told us they had them reading Nietzsche. Her main takeaway seemed to be that they were Very Smart because they were reading Nietzsche. She didn't have a clue what she was reading, so if any of it stuck with her, it was probably as likely to be misunderstood as understood.
- Suppafly 1y ago
  >This reply rings true, but also had me thinking. If rereading those books when you're old enough makes you appreciate them, are they ideal for high school? Possibly, good books hit different at different ages and can be appreciated at each of those ages for different reasons.
bcoates 1y ago
100% agree with you that it's worth going back and reading The Books You Should Read as an adult who can just read them as books and not some sort of obligation. That said. some of them are still stinkers that only a weird boomer could love. I'm looking at you, A Separate Peace & fucking anything by Joseph Conrad (sorry). Half the pleasure of reading these books as they were meant to be read (as books, and not at frogs to be dissected in class) is that you get to discover it for yourself--a mix of life-changing gems and I-guess-you-had-to-be-there meditations on being a failson in the twilight of British imperialism
tshaddox 1y ago
Idk, Dickens and Melville are pretty hard to get through.
- wink 1y ago
  Try Joyce as a non-native speaker :P
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    My god.
  - SilasX 1y ago
    In the YouTube comments for the song "Informer" by Snow ("Informer, <lots of words>, a licky boom-boom now"), someone refers to it as "the final boss of learning English". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSffz_bl6zo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSffz_bl6zo (Edit: can't find that specific comment, link just goes to the music video.)
  - tshaddox 1y ago
    I’m a native English speaker and I felt like a non-native reader when I tried to read Ulysses.
- skyyler 1y ago
  Moby Dick seems to be very love-it-or-hate-it. Some people can't make it through two pages; some people can't put it down once they start.
- Suppafly 1y ago
  >Idk, Dickens and Melville are pretty hard to get through. If you're reading for just funsies, sure. But none of their works are particularly long, even reading a few chapters here and there, it'd take a week for each at most.
- scop 1y ago
  Haven’t read Dickens, but Melville was a revelation for me. His short stories are great, but Moby Dick is a work of glory. It’s hard to explain why, but Moby Dick basically bifurcated my life: there was the time before I read it and the time after. That being said, I would have hated it in high school and am glad it wasn’t assigned. It was something I could only appreciate in my 30s.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
notpushkin 1y ago
Do you have a list of books you can recommend? (I was born and raised in Russia, so I imagine my school books list is quite different from yours; I would, of course, like to read from both.)
- lolcatzlulz 1y ago
  I'm not sure I'd recommend all of them but the first 20ish books on this list are an accurate representation of what I was assigned in school. https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/478.Required_Reading_in_High_School https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/478.Required_Reading_in_...
wink 1y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this. People are different and not everyone has to enjoy so-called literature that is not pure entertainment. I have shelves full of books I had read before finishing school, and 90% of what we read in English lessons (I am German) was ok, and yet I hated 90% of what we read (or supposed to read) in our German lessons. Maybe it was the selection, maybe it was implicit bias (I also liked English lessons and my teachers, and didn't like either for German). Just some from memory (annotated Shakespeare was ok, I liked Poe, I liked Huxley) So no, except for a few you would not manage to convince me to give them a second chance. And also no for your last point, some Dan Brown novels were ok and I didn't enjoy the rest in the first place ;)
- StefanBatory 1y ago
  Do you read books in English in your English lessons in Germany? I'm Polish, longest text we've ever read at English class was one page. At university, by the way.
  - wink 1y ago
    Been a while, but yeah, we read shorter stuff in class, and had some books we had to read on our own to discuss and you also had to give at least one short talk on another book you read.
IAmBroom 1y ago
Agreed. We read selections from The Canterbury Tales, in translation, as high school freshman. Our genius history teacher made us promise not to tell our parents, and let us read one of the dirty ones. I was sold. Later, I learned Middle English, and read the entire Tales. He's brilliant. Reliably funny and engaging (except for one chapter, obviously written in spite after being swindled IRL!).
mjevans 1y ago
I loathed Gatsby in high school. It's RUINED for me. I could never go back and read it. There's far too much else I'd rather have cross my eyeballs so many other stories in the library. By having a work unworthy of my experience and tastes wasted on me at a young age my emotional investment in it is already squandered. Have a big list of OK books. Have some representative excerpts from them, and let the kids pick books they're going to enjoy. The point surely is NOT to haze / torment the kids with 'bad' books that discourage reading generally.
SilasX 1y ago
I agree with the suggestion to try it, because I've had similar experiences myself in a different area: history. Even reading the dry Wikipedia articles made the old topics seem much more interesting than I remembered them being in school, and did a better job at communicating the significance. However, I wouldn't be so optimistic about your experience being universal. As an experiment, I just started re-reading The Great Gatsby. While it's much better than I remember, it still felt like a slog and failed to hook me in a way that such prized "you have to be familiar with this" literature should be. And I still think they could have done a better job communicating what's so good about it. Relatedly, I only recently learned that some (most?) people actually like iambic pentameter, that it adds to the joy of hearing the lines read. This is a revelation, since it ... doesn't do anything for me. But that fact feels like it's important subtext that could have been communicated, and I could have been pushed in that direction -- that seems like the obvious move. And yet it just wasn't. Sure, they taught that Shakespeare used it, but only as a dry "oh hey this is one thing to note about his works" not in a "oh and this is a big part of its appeal". There are a lot of missed opportunities for teaching appreciation of literature.
- JadeNB 1y ago
  Couldn't agree more about history. I was a good student who couldn't stand history (called "social studies" in my school), did the minimum to get through it wth good grades, then never took a college history course that wasn't required. Then one day in the library I was looking for a big thick book to pass a chunk of time, and grabbed Shirer's "The rise and fall of the Third Reich." Not only was it fascinating on its own, but it referenced so much of the history that underlay the events of WWII that it sent me off on a hunt to fill in that missing background. And, well, now I'm hooked! (I'm not sure if I didn't enjoy the grade-school stuff because of what I now recognize as its jingoism (it's so much more interesting to read the history of people making choices for human reasons, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes just wrong, than of godlike heroes helming countries foredestined for greatness!), or just because I wasn't ready for it.)
BeetleB 1y ago
I read Gatsby, Conrad and Salinger as an adult. Not impressed. Sorry. > One minor downside, as long as we're doing a PSA, is that doing this will kill your ability to read Airport Bestsellers of any genre. Thankfully not true for me
-__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
I read The Great Gatsby outside of formal education, for my own benefit, during my college years, in a non-U.S. country. I thought it was the opposite of "actually really good", I found it to be a resolutely mediocre experience. At no stage did I get any inkling as to why it might be considered "a great book". Another that baffles me is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. People can read it if they want, but if they find it dull four chapters in, just walk away, sometimes "the greats" are just culturally significant, or not your style, or whatever. There are lots of good books out there though, and I'm glad you discovered something above the airport bestsellers. May I suggest to absolutely anyone Hunger, by Knut Hamson Ask The Dust, by John Fante American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis Lullaby, by Chuck Palahniuk Porno, by Irvine Welsh
- -__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
  Women, by Charles Bukowski, I should add

karamanolev 1y ago

This reply rings true, but also had me thinking. If rereading those books when you're old enough makes you appreciate them, are they ideal for high school? Do they teach you what's good writing if you can't recognize it yet? Does it make sense to, then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and understand more in high school? I don't have the right answer, but the question seemed relevant.

jl6 1y ago
Fair point, but I also think initial exposure to things you don’t yet understand is a useful step towards understanding them.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  Not so sure. Engaging students' attention, even if they aren't ready to fully grasp it, is great exposure. Forcing them to scan their retinas over black-and-white patterns for hours, not so much.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  They have to be able to reach high enough to get some of it. It has to repay their time in high school. It should also show them there's more to reach for, but they need to be able to get some of it. For me, Gatsby was... not entirely terrible. It was mostly a waste of my time, but looking back I can see some of the themes were at least somewhat worthwhile. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an absolute waste of my time. If Joyce is worth an adult reading (which I doubt to this day), then don't make high school kids read him.
bruce511 1y ago
>> Does it make sense to, then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and understand more in high school? I guess it depends on the goal. My opinion is that reading hard books at school simply turns people off reading completely. If the reading is fun there's more chance students will carry on reading. So if the goal is "teach kids that reading is fun. So they do it. Which means their ability to read goes up" , then yes, the books should be more fun. (We read a Spike Milligan book, which certainly engaged the class more than Wuthering Heights did.) On the other hand if the goal is to understand "literature", then books with themes and character development and so on is necessary. And of course can put some kids off reading for life.
- Suppafly 1y ago
  >My opinion is that reading hard books at school simply turns people off reading completely. The thing is, most of these books people are complaining about aren't actually 'hard books', especially when read at a chapter or two per week with a teacher guiding you through all the major themes. The goal isn't to teach kids that reading is fun, it's to teach them critical reading skills. There is something to be said about reaching the students where they are, but we already dumb down things too much to allow the slower students to keep pace. They can learn about reading for fun in remedial reading classes.
hoseja 1y ago
Indeed. It's a giant, unrecognized problem with pedagogy. Things are taught from the position of already understanding them and the messy confusing process of actually grokking anything is mostly ignored and students are left to figure it out alone.
StefanBatory 1y ago
So that when you go back to them, you can look at your memories when you were younger.
aimor 1y ago
How else are you supposed to know that you've grown since highschool if you can't reread Catcher in the Rye in a different light?
aaronbaugher 1y ago
It's probably good if the book requires you to stretch a bit, and even if you don't totally get it yet. My parents never put any limits on what I could read, so I stumbled over the Poe shelf at the library at a fairly young age. There was plenty I didn't understand, but plenty that I could, and some stories still stick with me. But I remember when my niece told us they had them reading Nietzsche. Her main takeaway seemed to be that they were Very Smart because they were reading Nietzsche. She didn't have a clue what she was reading, so if any of it stuck with her, it was probably as likely to be misunderstood as understood.
Suppafly 1y ago
>This reply rings true, but also had me thinking. If rereading those books when you're old enough makes you appreciate them, are they ideal for high school? Possibly, good books hit different at different ages and can be appreciated at each of those ages for different reasons.

bcoates 1y ago

100% agree with you that it's worth going back and reading The Books You Should Read as an adult who can just read them as books and not some sort of obligation. That said. some of them are still stinkers that only a weird boomer could love. I'm looking at you, A Separate Peace & fucking anything by Joseph Conrad (sorry). Half the pleasure of reading these books as they were meant to be read (as books, and not at frogs to be dissected in class) is that you get to discover it for yourself--a mix of life-changing gems and I-guess-you-had-to-be-there meditations on being a failson in the twilight of British imperialism

tshaddox 1y ago

Idk, Dickens and Melville are pretty hard to get through.

wink 1y ago
Try Joyce as a non-native speaker :P
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  My god.
- SilasX 1y ago
  In the YouTube comments for the song "Informer" by Snow ("Informer, <lots of words>, a licky boom-boom now"), someone refers to it as "the final boss of learning English". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSffz_bl6zo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSffz_bl6zo (Edit: can't find that specific comment, link just goes to the music video.)
- tshaddox 1y ago
  I’m a native English speaker and I felt like a non-native reader when I tried to read Ulysses.
skyyler 1y ago
Moby Dick seems to be very love-it-or-hate-it. Some people can't make it through two pages; some people can't put it down once they start.
Suppafly 1y ago
>Idk, Dickens and Melville are pretty hard to get through. If you're reading for just funsies, sure. But none of their works are particularly long, even reading a few chapters here and there, it'd take a week for each at most.
scop 1y ago
Haven’t read Dickens, but Melville was a revelation for me. His short stories are great, but Moby Dick is a work of glory. It’s hard to explain why, but Moby Dick basically bifurcated my life: there was the time before I read it and the time after. That being said, I would have hated it in high school and am glad it wasn’t assigned. It was something I could only appreciate in my 30s.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

notpushkin 1y ago

Do you have a list of books you can recommend? (I was born and raised in Russia, so I imagine my school books list is quite different from yours; I would, of course, like to read from both.)

lolcatzlulz 1y ago
I'm not sure I'd recommend all of them but the first 20ish books on this list are an accurate representation of what I was assigned in school. https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/478.Required_Reading_in_High_School https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/478.Required_Reading_in_...

wink 1y ago

I'm not sure I agree with this. People are different and not everyone has to enjoy so-called literature that is not pure entertainment. I have shelves full of books I had read before finishing school, and 90% of what we read in English lessons (I am German) was ok, and yet I hated 90% of what we read (or supposed to read) in our German lessons. Maybe it was the selection, maybe it was implicit bias (I also liked English lessons and my teachers, and didn't like either for German). Just some from memory (annotated Shakespeare was ok, I liked Poe, I liked Huxley) So no, except for a few you would not manage to convince me to give them a second chance. And also no for your last point, some Dan Brown novels were ok and I didn't enjoy the rest in the first place ;)

StefanBatory 1y ago
Do you read books in English in your English lessons in Germany? I'm Polish, longest text we've ever read at English class was one page. At university, by the way.
- wink 1y ago
  Been a while, but yeah, we read shorter stuff in class, and had some books we had to read on our own to discuss and you also had to give at least one short talk on another book you read.

IAmBroom 1y ago

Agreed. We read selections from The Canterbury Tales, in translation, as high school freshman. Our genius history teacher made us promise not to tell our parents, and let us read one of the dirty ones. I was sold. Later, I learned Middle English, and read the entire Tales. He's brilliant. Reliably funny and engaging (except for one chapter, obviously written in spite after being swindled IRL!).

mjevans 1y ago

I loathed Gatsby in high school. It's RUINED for me. I could never go back and read it. There's far too much else I'd rather have cross my eyeballs so many other stories in the library. By having a work unworthy of my experience and tastes wasted on me at a young age my emotional investment in it is already squandered. Have a big list of OK books. Have some representative excerpts from them, and let the kids pick books they're going to enjoy. The point surely is NOT to haze / torment the kids with 'bad' books that discourage reading generally.

SilasX 1y ago

I agree with the suggestion to try it, because I've had similar experiences myself in a different area: history. Even reading the dry Wikipedia articles made the old topics seem much more interesting than I remembered them being in school, and did a better job at communicating the significance. However, I wouldn't be so optimistic about your experience being universal. As an experiment, I just started re-reading The Great Gatsby. While it's much better than I remember, it still felt like a slog and failed to hook me in a way that such prized "you have to be familiar with this" literature should be. And I still think they could have done a better job communicating what's so good about it. Relatedly, I only recently learned that some (most?) people actually like iambic pentameter, that it adds to the joy of hearing the lines read. This is a revelation, since it ... doesn't do anything for me. But that fact feels like it's important subtext that could have been communicated, and I could have been pushed in that direction -- that seems like the obvious move. And yet it just wasn't. Sure, they taught that Shakespeare used it, but only as a dry "oh hey this is one thing to note about his works" not in a "oh and this is a big part of its appeal". There are a lot of missed opportunities for teaching appreciation of literature.

JadeNB 1y ago
Couldn't agree more about history. I was a good student who couldn't stand history (called "social studies" in my school), did the minimum to get through it wth good grades, then never took a college history course that wasn't required. Then one day in the library I was looking for a big thick book to pass a chunk of time, and grabbed Shirer's "The rise and fall of the Third Reich." Not only was it fascinating on its own, but it referenced so much of the history that underlay the events of WWII that it sent me off on a hunt to fill in that missing background. And, well, now I'm hooked! (I'm not sure if I didn't enjoy the grade-school stuff because of what I now recognize as its jingoism (it's so much more interesting to read the history of people making choices for human reasons, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes just wrong, than of godlike heroes helming countries foredestined for greatness!), or just because I wasn't ready for it.)

BeetleB 1y ago

I read Gatsby, Conrad and Salinger as an adult. Not impressed. Sorry. > One minor downside, as long as we're doing a PSA, is that doing this will kill your ability to read Airport Bestsellers of any genre. Thankfully not true for me

-__---____-ZXyw 1y ago

I read The Great Gatsby outside of formal education, for my own benefit, during my college years, in a non-U.S. country. I thought it was the opposite of "actually really good", I found it to be a resolutely mediocre experience. At no stage did I get any inkling as to why it might be considered "a great book". Another that baffles me is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. People can read it if they want, but if they find it dull four chapters in, just walk away, sometimes "the greats" are just culturally significant, or not your style, or whatever. There are lots of good books out there though, and I'm glad you discovered something above the airport bestsellers. May I suggest to absolutely anyone Hunger, by Knut Hamson Ask The Dust, by John Fante American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis Lullaby, by Chuck Palahniuk Porno, by Irvine Welsh

-__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
Women, by Charles Bukowski, I should add