Regular Readers and Honored Ones
Then there is the tracking issue. It seems fine for an honors student to read two books while regular-level students read one. But it's depressing that students on the regular track at Chantilly High School get saddled with the treacle-fest Tuesdays With Morrie while the honors students tackle Tess of the D'Urbervilles and "Twelfth Night." Worse, some schools ask only their honors students to read over the summer. (Lower down in the grades -- ninth and tenth -- the main trend I picked up was the colonization of many lists by the unconvincing and cliché-ridden sci-fi "classic" Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. After ill-advisedly making it part of my summer reading this year, I would recommend that even ninth-graders treat it like an interplanetary virus. Stephen King's much better.)
Sometimes book selections tell a story about educational inequality across the region -- which is when debates over the canon start to seem like a self-indulgent parlor game. Three of the books on the mandatory 12th-grade list this year at Hyattsville's Northwestern High School -- the high school nearest to my home -- might (and Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents does) appear on other 12th-grade lists. But the final one, Probably Still Nick Swansen by Virginia Euwer Wolff, is recommended by the School Library Journal for grades six through 10. In that case, do you lament the choice or just hope the book snares a few 18-year-olds who never before had encountered a book they liked?
"I tell them about books I'm excited about -- ones I want to have long conversation about when they come back in the fall," Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of the just-published Why Read?, told me when I called him to ask him about his philosophy of summer reading recommendations. "There's a self-serving aspect to it." His personal approach points up what's missing in the summer lists: one mind passing on a sense of excitement to another. Students could be excused for looking at most lists and wondering whether any human being was ever really thrilled by the books. (Last spring, Edmundson talked up Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude; Ann Marlow's How to Stop Time, a memoir of heroin addiction -- "If I taught in a public high school I wouldn't breathe a word about it" -- and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, the last of which had at least three dozen eager takers. "I batted a thousand," Edmundson said.)
The institutional, dutiful tone of many lists explains why a reading list posted on the Web site of Arlington's Washington-Lee High School for an 11th-grade AP English class caught my eye. Yes, students get the expected classic, The Grapes of Wrath, but they also get a literary sampler plate: an Annie Dillard essay called "The Chase"; a polemical piece by the philosopher Peter Singer ("The Singer Solution to World Poverty" -- i.e., give away all your stuff); a couple of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet; a whimsical commencement address that spread quickly through the Internet several years ago, mistakenly attributed to Kurt Vonnegut ("Wear sunscreen. . . . Floss"). Those wouldn't be my choices, exactly, but that's the point: You can perceive a distinctive human intelligence behind them, one reader's enthusiasms. And the list casts a wide net, since students who find Dillard a dullard might warm to Vonnegut's skewed humor, and vice versa.
Where the Wild Books Are
As I looked over all the summer reading area students have been doing -- with an almost physical sense of envy, given my own constricted reading time now that I'm a new parent -- I began to formulate a theory inspired by a passage that 12th-grade AP students at Sherwood High were asked to ponder over the summer as they read. It is a passage from Thoreau: "In Literature, it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and The Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the Schools, that delights us."
List-making itself, I was going to say, plays a part in taming the classics. What's less unruly than an "appropriate" book, given an imprimatur by a school board? Hamlet ossifies into an assignment to be checked off. Beloved gets swept under the rubric of simplified multiculturalism and is correspondingly reduced. And almost by definition, the cleverest new books can't make it on the lists, because someone would object.
But in the end these objections, while defensible, are pointy-headed and irrelevant, because the competition in our culture isn't between stultified reading lists and that imagined literary Eden I alluded to earlier, populated by universally eager young people surrounded by adults who are also passionate readers. No, the battle teachers are fighting is between reading and not reading. And in a non-reading culture you have to choose sides. Sure the teachers, the creators of these lists, could stand to indulge in some more free and wild imaginings. But they're fighting in a culture war -- one of the few non-creepy ones -- and mandatory reading lists, however ungainly, are one weapon at hand in the struggle.
Chris Shea, who lives in Hyattsville, Md., is a columnist for the Boston Globe's Sunday "Ideas" section.
