Grim literature in the high schools?

Parents Forum
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<p>"I think that joy can be profound.</p>

<p>Anyone who reads the newspapers and the history books has by now pretty much learned of the depths of human depravity. But there is very great joy in life, too. And it’s very hard to find in the newspapers and history books."</p>

<p>I so agree, QM. Perhaps this should be a goal in the reading curriculum. The fact that it would be a challenge to do makes it all the more necessary. It is easy to hit them hard with dark and depressing, the challenge is to uplift and inspire. I would love for my daughter, and all students, to have a teacher who could do that.</p>

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<p>The books I’ve read so far (junior year):</p>

<p>The Crucible
Of Mice and Men
The Scarlet Letter
The Great Gatsby
Bodega Dreams</p>

<p>Can there please be a book that doesn’t end in death?</p>

<p>I asked my English teacher “why don’t we read happier books?” and she replied “because these books have messages”. I said “don’t happy book have strong messages as well?” and she had no response.</p>

<p>Can’t we read, I don’t know, Midsummer Night’s Dream? Pride and Prejudice?</p>

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<p>I looked through the IB list for language, linked by shoboemom in #77, and came up with a set of possibilities. My list is Euro-centric and would need to be supplemented by more knowledgeable people. Also, there were many books on my “I’ve been meaning to read that” list; but I can’t comment on those yet. Also, some of these I read 40+ years ago, so my memory may be faulty at this point.</p>

<p>A short list of classics:
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Sophocles, Antigone
Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote
D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers</p>

<p>Not in that same league (in my opinion), but I’d still recommend them:
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany (deaths, one quite grisly, but not grim in my opinion)
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (This book has a special place in my heart as the only book worth reading in the “library” of the Stalagluft where my dad was a POW for a little over 7 months of WW II–the men passed it around.)
Thornton Wilder, Our Town (I have always really liked this. I think early high school is the right time to read it)
Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
Chaim Potok, The Chosen,
Arthur MIller, The Crucible (not grim in my opinion)
George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion</p>

<p>Purely for fun:
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy</p>

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<p>Interesting and extensive list in post 77, shoboemom. It includes some surprising choices - Jurassic Park, Murder on the Orient Express, works by Robin Cook? I enjoy that stuff, but they seem to be sheer escapist reading. Maybe they’re on the list to inveigle kids who don’t like fiction into reading novels. </p>

<p>I see a lot of great books on the list, but most of them do have serious themes, if not grim ones. Perhaps on the less-grim side: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (the heroine overcomes, but she has a LOT to overcome); The Bridge of San Luis Rey (but not a happy book, either); The Hobbit; The Miracle Worker (but not a novel). Since Chekhov and Sophocles are listed, I’m surprised there’s no Shakespeare. I liked that there are several works by John Irving, but his subject matter can be troubling. Probably Jane Austen is the best bet for less-grim literature. But even if it’s possible to substitute more positive literature, what grim works won’t the kids then be reading? Some are too worthwhile to lose from the curriculum.</p>

<p>People always die, and I think it takes a lifetime of reading and thinking about it to finally get our heads around that fact. People also commit great acts of cruelty, and we wonder why all our lives. Maybe that’s why grim themes are so pervasive in great literature - we need literature to come to terms with what’s negative in life. Of course, there’s joy and fulfillment in life as well (if we’re fortunate), but perhaps we don’t wonder why they exist so much. Anyway, that’s my Sunday morning take on it.</p>

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<p>@QM- How on earth can you say The Crucible is not grim? It’s about a group of schizphrenic girls who’s accusations of witchery cause the deaths of dozens of dozens of people.</p>

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<p>Our 5th grade ciric. includes Yellow Fever and My Brother Sam is Dead. Add to that a filed trip for Yellow Fever walking tour of Philly. After 5th grade, it all seemed more pleasant.</p>

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<p>In the category of essays, autobiographical writing, and other non-fiction:</p>

<p>Nelson Mandela, A Long Walk to Freedom
I cannot begin to express how incredibly heroic and deeply admirable Nelson Mandela is. I have to set this one apart from the rest of the list.</p>

<p>John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
If there are objections to this book, I would withdraw the suggestion. I read it many, many years ago. Assuming that it is authentic, I think that it is good for communicating the African American experience of the 1950’s or early 1960’s to a young, white audience. (I could be wrong about it, though.)</p>

<p>Matt Ridley, Genome. A really excellent non-fiction book, one chapter per human chromosome, and very enlightening</p>

<p>Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dream</p>

<p>Henry David Thoreau, Walden</p>

<p>Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys</p>

<p>Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life</p>

<p>Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Globalization has become so much a fact of life that this book might be beside the point now.)</p>

<p>James D. Watson, The Double Helix–this could be paired in an interesting was with Brenda Maddox’s Book about Rosalind Franklin (or one of the other biographies of Franklin, though they are not on the list).</p>

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<p>:) My sons read all of Austen before they were teens. I’m trying to remember if they read them right after Goose Bumps, which were sort of their beginning-to-read-books. They loved Jane. Funniest stories ever. Mine weren’t early readers, and so I had to read them entire Rings trilogy as well as the Hobbit out loud, at least twice, but drew the line at the Simillarion. I am in the “not more elves!” category myself. :wink:
[‘Tolkien</a> was not a writer’ - Telegraph](<a href=“'Tolkien was not a writer'”>'Tolkien was not a writer') </p>

<p>I have been mulling and agree with mythmom that grim is subjective. My children always loved scary. I never did (after being traumatized at a very young age by the evil fairy in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty) and never watched any scary movie until viewing with them. It was an interesting experience because, although I still cover my eyes and tend to jump in my seat, it has been a desensitizing experience. After a while I understood all Disney villains are consigned to a deep and dark pit. If I had watched more Disney, earlier, maybe my childhood nightmares would have been lessened? I still don’t like Tarantino but can sit through parts of Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill(s) to be companionable. I won’t go to the theater for them, because I can’t sit still or control my gasps, and startle others in the audience.</p>

<p>When my children were young, Bruno Bettelheim’s “Uses of Enchantment” was very popular (and now quite discredited) and I wonder what mythmom thinks about that sort of research?</p>

<p>Beloved. I read this while breastfeeding and it was meaningful to me in ways it would never be today. A pregnant friend could not finish it. I kind of group it together with the Alien movies in terms of “stories about mothers that may be too intense (or grim) to deal with while gestating or lactating or both.” (We could put Medea there, too.) I never saw the Alien movies till I watched them with the kids. I watched the last two by myself because they are done with the series. Too boring. I love those movies for the maternal themes. </p>

<p>Never Let Me Go and The Road. I read both at the request of one son who wants me to read along with him and then discuss. He read them outside any class, just for pleasure. Both were much too grim for me and prompted the discussion: are these books more unsettling to parents than those without children? I think Steven King said that the most frightening story he could imagine was a child in danger.</p>

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<p>milkyway531: I have been making a distinction between “tragic,” which The Crucible certainly is, and “grim,” which I don’t find it to be. mythmom remarked that this distinction is not a clear one, and may be personal in any event. So I apologize if you have found it grim.</p>

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<p>I will leave the choices among the books by Jane Austen to the Austen-o-philes. And congratulations to alh for getting boys to read them!</p>

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<p>I don’t think I ever got my boys to read anything. If so, we would have read Narnia (which they still haven’t looked at) instead of Hobbit, Rings. We would have read Alcott, instead of London. The Brontes instead of Dickens. We would have read Little House. I could go on and on. I look forward to grandchildren.</p>

<p>adding: Hitchhiker’s Guide, oh yes! rivaled Austen for laughs.</p>

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<p>The IB list seems to have a single book by Connie Willis, namely The Doomsday Book. Who picked this, out of everything Willis has written?!!!</p>

<p>On the one hand, I think there are elements in this book that have high literary merit. There are some incredibly memorable interior scenes, and there is also intense irony that “we bring our dooms upon ourselves”. </p>

<p>On the other hand, the plot line in The Doomsday Book involves time travel by an Oxford historian to the time of the Black Plague. The plague is described with some (no-doubt accurate) gruesomeness. For the sheer percentage of main characters who die, it is hard to outdo this book.</p>

<p>Among Willis’s books that I have read, I prefer The Doomsday Book to Bellwether, which is fairly light. More about Willis in my next post.</p>

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<p>D.H. Lawrence</p>

<p>I used to adore Lawrence. Now he is in my category of male writers whose time has come and gone. Out of the canon (cannon??) with him! (imagine Lewis Carrol’s Queen of Hearts) I have replaced him with Rebecca West, who deals with the same time period, places imho. Suffragette who lived and wrote a really long time. My favorite novel: The Fountain Overflows - favorite short story: There is No Conversation. I would pair West with HG Wells, her lover with whom she had a child before she was 20. I think. I’m not checking any facts here.</p>

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Funny story in this regard. Fourth grade gifted class did a unit on poetry. The intention was to just go over the first couple of stanza’s of Poe’s “The Raven”, but the kids loved it and so they read the whole thing. As they discussed what it all meant, many kids were convinced that Lenore could not possibly be dead and had all sorts of convoluted explanations for what was going on.</p>

<p>So the IB list - yep a lot of depressing ones.</p>

<p>Reading the pair of Antigones would be fun.</p>

<p>I love A Passage to India - all about the class of two cultures, the unfairness of colonialism etc. It concerns a purported rape, so yes a bit grim, but ultimately it’s about forgiveness I think.</p>

<p>My son loved the use of language in* Catch-22*, but hated the structure. Ultimately he was glad to have read it though.</p>

<p>Why is Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose on this list? I consider her a very middling fantasy writer. Robin McKinley does this sort of thing much better.</p>

<p>Cyrano de Bergerac is so sad, but you can watch the movie with Gerard Depardieu.</p>

<p>We read *Cry the Beloved Country *in high school - so depressing.</p>

<p>Loved Dune in high school. It’s certainly in the sci fi canon - interesting thoughts about ecology and religion.</p>

<p>Ender’s Game is an easy read - is it grim? Well it’s about exploiting kids for training in a war, and it starts with a pretty horrific scene, but I think it ends on the note that humanity can rise above the violence and misunderstandings.</p>

<p>Loved Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business in high school. Recommended to me by a girl whose Dad had been an opera star. It’s a complicated book - lots of Jung - first of a trilogy. </p>

<p>Cynthia Voigt’s Izzy Willy Nilly? Really? She wrote some wonderful books, this is one of her worst. Didactic, preachy. Blech.</p>

<p>I loved Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. I find most of the Raj books fascinating. One of my reading goals is to read more books by Indian writers to get the other perspective.</p>

<p>Ursula LeGuin - always an interesting writer, though* Lathe of Heaven* is not the one I’d have put on a reading list.</p>

<p>Maggie Girl of the Streets by Steven Crane - don’t recommend, it’s a downer, but it along with Hard Times, The Jungle and a couple of others we read coupled with the history curriculum, not as great literature.</p>

<p>Oh I see My Antonia on the list, that should have been on the “books I hated in high school list”. I’ve never been so bored in my life!</p>

<p>I loved all the Jane Austen recommendations.</p>

<p>I loved Rebecca, but not as serious literature.</p>

<p>For totally enjoyable and silly you could read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Quintessential silly British boys humor a la Monty Python.</p>

<p>Puzzled by Lord of the Rings trilogy (choose one). Uh - it’s one book choosing one, makes no sense at all.</p>

<p>Raskin’s *The Westing Game *is fun, but my kids read it in fourth grade. Why is it on a high school list?</p>

<p>Could say a lot more about that IB list - what a strange mixture of high and low art, and stuff from elementary school level to stuff that deals with pretty difficult issues, (rape, death, torture). It’s not* all *grim though at least. There are some weird choices though - why read Wilde’s Dorian Gray, when his plays are more fun?</p>

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<p>I am just so grateful for this discussion. I think it is important. For IB and AP, the classes are divided with a focus on American writers in 10th grade (D is just finishing 10th), then English Lit in 11th, and World Lit in 12th…in case you are inspired to make suggested lists. ;-)</p>

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<p>Thank you Mathmom! The right choices in reading selections could make such a huge difference!</p>

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<p>Freshman year of high school my daughter’s assigned summer reading book was Angela’s Ashes and then the first book of the year was The Kite Runner. In my opinion, that is no way to get any 14 year old to love reading. I don’t think Kite Runner is even appropriate for 14 year old kids.</p>

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<p>QuantMech, I love Connie Willis, well at least when she’s on the top of her game, and in some ways *The Doomsday Book *is brilliant, but really, do we want to read a book where everybody dies. Really? And she’s so good at humor. Why not read Bellwether, or To Say Nothing of the Dog? Which might even lead you to read Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the dog).</p>

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<p>My sons loved Kipling. One discovered Pearl Buck on the grandparents’ bookshelves. We talked a whole lot about “the other perspective”</p>

<p>I am torn about mandatory reading lists. On the one hand I think anyone should read whatever they want. No one ever censored my reading and I never censored my children. On the other hand, life is short and childhood is limited. One of the most fascinating discoveries of my homeschooling group was how much 9-12 year olds love Shakespeare. Of course, they aren’t reading it in the same way high school or college students do, but it seems to me it was an excellent time to read it. We were fortunate to live in an area with many excellent productions and to be able to arrange classes/workshops with a local theater group for our children to put on their own productions. All the kids just adored memorizing their parts. They loved all the plays. Some of the boys thought the history plays the best thing ever written. ever. even better than those D&D booklets.</p>

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<p>My kids read a slightly abridged version of The Tempest in fourth grade (kept the language, but summarized some scenes, the children’s author who worked on the summaries is no slouch, going blank on who it was.) They all went to see a play at an outdoor festival as part of the class and loved it. (I think it was* Twelfth Night* that year.) Oh and they all went to a festival of children producing scenes from Shakespeare plays as well.</p>