My sister teaches high school English in Connecticut. Last week, in a twitchy back-to-school moment, she posed a question on Facebook about "the 10 books that have stayed with you in some way." Her newsfeed buzzed with comments from her fellow teachers and from former students, and it caught my eye.
The question Lynn tossed into the maw of social media made me stop and think. But—maybe because I spend my winters evaluating high school transcripts— I put a different twist on her query: All these years later, do any of the dozens of books I was assigned to read in high school still resonate with me?
From my quiet corner of suburban Connecticut (during the disco era), Miss Evenski’s ebullient discussions about Romeo and Juliet gave me my first taste of Shakespeare. I vividly recall Mr. Scarpa's hilarious impersonation of Boo Radley. (There was a reason why he advised the drama club…) I remember my ambivalence to The Old Man and the Sea as well as my baffled reaction to the first pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as kindly Mr. Wilson read aloud the passage about the "moo cow mooing down the road..." I’d never read anything like it.
With my sister’s question stuck in my head, I asked my colleagues in Bendetson Hall about the high school-era reads that resonated with them. Nineteen of the 23 admission officers responded to my email (a healthy yield, you could say) and—from high schools in California and New Mexico and suburban New Jersey—they remembered an eclectic list of 57 different books: The Bell Jar, Native Son, Pride and Prejudice, Coffee Will Make You Black, All Quiet on the Western Front… The various novels of Steinbeck and Hemingway were consistently popular, as was the usual array of Shakespearean classics, but To Kill a Mockingbird, Hamlet and 1984 were mentioned most often by Tufts’ admissions staff.
Meghan, who recruits in Africa, remembered the impact of reading The Hot Zone, a book she read for 9th grade agriculture: “It stuck with me and it has renewed relevance with the Ebola outbreak.” Jen picked The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “I didn't understand it,” she confessed, “But it's stayed with me for the way Joyce used language. Moo cow.” And Meredith highlighted The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner: “I remember this book being frustrating but I loved it because it made me feel uncomfortable,” she said. “It’s told from many perspectives and some of it is stream of consciousness, and I’ve been meaning to reread it recently.”
Meredith is on to something. I've also thought I should reread a few of them. While a hazy nostalgia preserves my affection for several of the books--like the scribbles in my yearbook telling me to “have a nice life..." remind me of the (now) distant friendships of my younger self--I don't know if I own the plots and themes of these classics of American and world lit like I own Gone Girl or Life After Life or The Book Thief. And I feel like I should. Why else would the faculty at Shelton High School (circa 1978-81) have made me read them?
And that begs a question: Do teenagers fully appreciate the books we are (were) assigned to read in high school English class? To make it more personal, I’ve been wondering whether my 15-year old self had enough life experience, enough wisdom, to understand what I was assigned to read. Yes, I wrote the critical papers, and I got an A. (I was a humanities kind of kid.) But did I "get" the book?
So I'm (figuratively) going to back to high school. I'm going to reread five books—and one essay—from high school English that stick in my craw: A Separate Peace, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Night and Emerson's essay Self Reliance. And, now that I’m more of an “old man” myself, I'm going to give The Old Man and the Sea one more try. Maybe Mr. Carlson knew something I did not when he made me read it.
I’ll let you know how my second spin through AP English turns out. I have a feeling I’m going to like what I’ll be reading.