Of all the books you have read for school, what has been your favorite and why?

In “If You Could Add One Book to the High School Curriculum, What Would It Be?,” Concepción de León, Lovia Gyarkye and Tas Tobey asked a group of writers what texts they think all students should read. Here are a few of their answers:

I’d love to see Octavia E. Butler’s novel PARABLE OF THE SOWER read in more high school English classes. It’s a brilliant, endlessly rich dystopian novel that pairs well with “1984” or “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and it’s also a fascinating exploration of how crises can fuel new religious and ideological movements. — John Green, author of “Turtles All the Way Down” THE BIBLE, particularly the old, beautiful translations (I personally enjoy the King James). I am no longer religious, but I regard it as a great tragedy that more people don’t study the Bible. As a work of literature the Bible has everything: poetry, philosophy, storytelling, myths, fictions, riddles, fables, parables, allegories. Its sentences both provoke and obscure, often resisting a single interpretation. They do not yield easily to our understanding. I’ve long felt that there is great value in reading a text that does not open itself up too easily, that keeps some of its secret meanings hidden. What you learn is a critical skill, the patience to read things you do not yet understand. — Tara Westover, author of “Educated: A Memoir” I really wish someone would have pointed me toward the criminally neglected but astonishingly brilliant and entirely original essay collection THE OMNI-AMERICANS, by the genuine Renaissance man, Albert Murray. In our current moment of identity politics and multicultural Balkanization, Murray offers a vision of America in all its grandeur and maddening complexity. I wish I had read him in high school because it took me entirely too long to understand so simple and irrefutable a truth: “But any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.” — Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of “Losing My Cool: Love, Literature and a Black Man’s Escape From the Crowd” I would love to see Nicola Yoon’s THE SUN IS ALSO A STAR added to a high school reading curriculum. This book is about immigration, isolation and family, wrapped up in the guise of a love story. As an immigrant myself, it would have meant the world to me to read about characters experiencing and surmounting the struggles that closely mirrored my own. — Sabaa Tahir, author of “An Ember in the Ashes”

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

— What book, play or collection of poetry or essays would you add to the high school curriculum and why?

— What have you learned from this text? What do you think it could teach other high school students?

— How does it relate to the subjects you study in school, the lives of teenagers or the world today?

— What new ideas or overlooked perspectives might it add to the curriculum? Why do you think these are important for students to learn?