Most of the Books I Was Forced to Read in High School Were Crap

There’s a comfortable myth about high school reading lists. The books were masterpieces, the story goes, and we just weren’t old enough to appreciate them. Reread them at forty and you’ll finally see the genius.

I don’t buy it. Most of the books I was forced to read in high school were crap. I was a teenager in the 1970s, and I’ve had a long time to change my mind. I haven’t.

You know the list I mean. The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, A Separate Peace, Silas Marner, Ethan Frome. The same few dozen titles have been handed to American teenagers for generations, and most of them were picked long before any of us were born. They came with a reading schedule, a quiz on Friday, and a five-paragraph essay about symbolism at the end.

I’ve loved books my whole life, and I’ve written more than 113 of them. The ones that hooked me were almost never on a syllabus. Roger Zelazny’s Amber series, read cover to cover several times. Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.

Nobody assigned me those. I found them, and they kept me reading.

The masterpiece argument bothers me for that reason. It does real harm. It lets the people who choose these lists off the hook, and it tells every adult who secretly hated those books that the problem was them. Millions of kids walked out of English class convinced that reading is a chore. I’d say the books had a lot to do with that.

A post went around a book group this week making the masterpiece argument, and hundreds of people agreed with it. Plenty didn’t. One reader said she was an avid reader in high school and the assigned books were “the worst of the worst.” Another reread The Catcher in the Rye as an adult and called it a terrible book for high school or anyone. Those are my people.

Were the books we read in high school any good?

Some were. Most weren’t. My scorecard is short. Animal Farm and 1984 were fantastic. I loved both, and I still do. Half the country treats Moby-Dick as a punishment. I liked it. Huckleberry Finn I liked.

The Scarlet Letter I couldn’t get into. The Great Gatsby I didn’t like. Of Mice and Men I didn’t like. The Grapes of Wrath I didn’t like. A Christmas Carol I read even earlier, in grade school, and found mediocre. The movies are better, depending on the movie, because a good cast and a good director can lift a story that sits flat on the page.

The rest of that list, the Silas Marners and Ethan Fromes and A Separate Peaces of the world, I can sum up in one line. I read them, I didn’t like them, and I’ve never felt the urge to go back.

That’s a lot of years of required reading, and a handful of winners. If a restaurant served you that ratio, would you keep going back? I wouldn’t.

What do the books students like have in common?

Look at my winners again. Animal Farm. 1984. Moby-Dick. Huckleberry Finn.

Every one of them is a story first. Orwell wrapped big ideas in a farm full of talking animals and a man trying to stay human in a nightmare, and you turn the page because you need to know what happens to Boxer and Winston. Melville goes off on whales for chapters at a time, and I’ll admit some of those chapters are a slog, but there’s a madman chasing a monster across the ocean and you want to see how it ends. Huck is on a raft going somewhere.

Now look at the losers. Most of them are mood pieces, character studies and slow tragedies. In most of them the meaning hides in symbols, and the reader digs it out for a test. They might be fine books for an adult who chose them. For a fifteen-year-old who didn’t, they’re a wall. I’ve written about why some books connect and others don’t, and it applies here too. Readers come back to stories that pull them forward. Prestige doesn’t keep anybody turning pages.

Why do schools pick books students hate?

Because the books get chosen for teaching, and students come second.

A teacher needs a book with themes to discuss, symbols to find, and an essay question at the end of every chapter. The Scarlet Letter is wonderful for that. There’s a giant red symbol right in the title. Whether a teenager will want to read it is somebody else’s problem.

Then there’s inertia. Who decided a fifteen-year-old needed Ethan Frome? Somebody, decades ago, and nobody has questioned it since. A book lands on the list, the teacher builds lesson plans around it, the department buys a hundred copies, and it stays for forty years because changing it is work. Nobody asks whether it still reaches anyone.

Add the book report, and you’ve finished the job. One woman in that thread remembered Silas Marner by title alone, and nothing else, except that she was forced to read something boring and confusing and then write what she thought her teacher wanted to hear. The system teaches it every year. Reading becomes a chore you fake your way through.

Teachers matter, and the thread was full of people saying so. A retired English teacher described teaching Elizabethan dancing while her class read Shakespeare, and having students write by candlelight with quills while they read the Brontës. That’s a teacher who understood that a book needs a doorway. Most of us didn’t get that teacher. We got a reading schedule and a quiz on Friday.

Is it true we were too young to appreciate the classics?

Sometimes. Mostly, it’s an excuse. I don’t doubt that some people reread Of Mice and Men at fifty and see things they missed at fifteen. Life adds context. One man in the thread reread Steinbeck with students and said the book showed him the Depression better than his history training ever did. Good for him. That’s a real experience.

But the argument has a hidden assumption, and I hate it. It says the book is always right and the reader is always wrong. If you didn’t like it, you weren’t old enough, smart enough or patient enough. The book never gets blamed. Why is it always the reader’s fault?

I think it’s a terrible way to approach reading. Books are made by people, and people make mistakes. Some books are overrated. Some were great for their time and haven’t aged well. Some were only ever popular with the people who choose what goes on reading lists. Telling a reader they were wrong to be bored is how you turn a kid who loves stories into an adult who never opens a book again.

And plenty of us did grow up, did reread, and still didn’t like them. I’m old enough now. I still don’t.

Why the old classics read better as stories than as poems

Some of the oldest stories in the world grabbed me hard, as long as nobody made me read them as poetry.

I read the first part of Dante’s Inferno in an edition that turned it into narrative prose, and I loved it. I hated the poems. Same with the Iliad and the Odyssey. I was deep into the Greek material, the gods and the wars and the long road home, but only as story. Put it back in verse and I was gone.

I’ve got nothing against poetry. My point is about doors. The story of a man walking down through the circles of hell is as good an idea as anyone has ever had. If the only way in is a translation of medieval Italian verse, most readers will never get to see it. A prose version opened that door for me, and Dante has stayed with me ever since.

Schools could learn something there. Teach the story first. Let students fall for Odysseus before you ask them to scan the meter.

Is it worth reading a hard book that turned out to be wrong?

Yes, and I have a strange example. I read Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I read all six volumes. It was a tough read, and it was interesting. I’ve also come to accept that a lot of it is out of date. Historians have spent two centuries correcting Gibbon, and he came to the wrong conclusions in a lot of ways. I’d still tell anyone with the patience to read it.

I also got about halfway through a volume of Josephus. It was a good translation, and it was a bit much for me. Gibbon was harder than anything on my high school list, and I finished it. So difficulty was never the problem. The problem is being forced to read something that gives you nothing back. Hard and rewarding is worth it. Hard and dull is homework.

What should high schools assign instead?

I’m not a teacher, so take this as a reader’s opinion. This would have worked on me.

Start with stories that move. Orwell proves a book can carry big ideas and still be a page-turner. Give students the books that make readers, and save the slow literary novels for later, when they’ve got the habit and can choose them for themselves. Let students pick some of their own books. The kids who read Michener and Uris on their own time, like one reader in the thread, weren’t getting less out of it. They were getting more, because they wanted to be there.

Use the movies. A good adaptation is a doorway, the way the films did more for A Christmas Carol than Dickens’s own text did for me. I wrote about that on Charles Dickens Day.

And stop treating dislike as failure. A student who says a book is boring is giving you data. Listen to it.

Why it matters for every writer

Writers should care about this more than anyone, because school reading lists shape who becomes a reader. Every kid who decides books are boring at fifteen is a reader you’ll never reach at forty. It also teaches a lesson about our own books. Nobody is forced to read what we write. They have to want to. The books that survived my high school list would’ve survived without it, because they hold a reader by the collar. That’s the job, whether you’re Orwell or a first-time novelist.

If you want help building a book people choose to read, more on craft is in the Writing Hub, and my book coaching is built for writers who want readers to finish what they start.

Animal Farm never needed a teacher to defend it. That’s the test every book on that list should have to pass.

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