The Great Gatsby is overrated. It’s a good book! A great book! It’s just not the very best book ever, especially not the best book to teach teenagers about the power of literature and the essence of America. If it were, then teens wouldn’t celebrate the glamour that the book tries to deconstruct. But it’s stuck in the high school literary canon, along with Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men. And at this point it seems like the main reason it’s taught to every high schooler is because it was taught to all the teachers, and no one’s bothered to check if it’s still the best choice.




My own high school stuck close to the classics, making conservative choices that I had to supplement on my own time. This is normal. But given little structure for finding the great books of my own era, or even the less musty ones of recent past, I flailed around, grabbing my mom’s copies of Grisham and Crichton, spending too much time on Palahniuk—all stuff I’d grow out of, and not regret but not particularly cherish. I found plenty of good books, often by accident, but I didn’t have much of a mental model for how they all fit together in the modern literary world. It took me years to get a vague grasp of the last generation (or two) of literature so I could find my way productively as an adult reader. If I could go back, I’d give myself—and my classmates—more of a running start, replacing some of the old standbys with books that better reveal literature’s full potential.

A lot of this comes down to taste, and it should. The whole concept of the “canon” is less essential to our culture, especially as we see how many people were kept out of this canon, and how many were prematurely thrust into it. There are more good writers publishing more good books now, and they’re being disrespected by our obsession with a narrow set of “timeless” stories that are in fact showing their age.

What Should Go

Winnowing the current canon makes room for new and overlooked deserving works. The bildungsroman Perks of Being a Wallflower has earned enough respect to join some required reading lists; how about adding Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, or more books that address the modern teen experiences of constant online connection, helicopter parents, and daily life inside a neoliberal empire? Is this era and its literature any less deserving of our attention than a Boomer’s coming of age? Or is the canon actually a bit of an excuse to be lazy when building our curricula?


This isn’t a knock against the books themselves. Well, it’s a knock if you consider the entire high school canon to be the greatest possible books—in which case it’s weird that you want them forced on teenagers, and not voluntarily introduced when they’re ready.

Is Catcher really a book best experienced as a teen? No! It’s best experienced as an adult appreciating Catcher’s hindsight on the teenage mindset, the way the book was intended. A teenager can’t fully appreciate the distance between author and protagonist. (Some can! And more power to them, and to all the books they choose to read on their own time.) It takes nothing from a classic like Catcher suggest that perhaps the time to appreciate it is in adulthood, and not as a teenager in 2018. If you support the canon because today’s teachers and schools can’t be trusted to pick the right books, then why do you trust them to teach these works in the light of social progress and our changing outlook on history?

Some of the current canon could simply become voluntary reading, like almost every book. But some works are still really useful as a shared reference point. There’s an excellent place for them: college, freshman year, as part of the core curriculum. A story like Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary doesn’t really hit home until you’ve gathered more life experience, but you can at least start to understand in college.

We’re also not suggesting a dumbing-down. Some YA should join the curriculum, but so should modern adult fiction. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated teaches voice better than A Clockwork Orange; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a far better history lesson than Heart of Darkness; frankly anyone who wants to read Lord of the Rings will do so on their own, while Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea is a more meaningful contribution to a growing mind’s expanding horizons, and an excellent missing link between Harry Potter and more “grown-up” fiction. (So is Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy, but again, its perspective on the college and post-college years is best appreciated during or after your own.)

What Should Stay


What would we keep from the current canon? The older the book, the better the case. We’re not dropping Shakespeare, which is still essential for understanding most English literature that follows. Plus it passes an important test: it’s plenty interesting even when you miss the bottom layer or three of meaning. Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet are fun to read and stage. The Scarlet Letter is frankly a banger. Anything old with a sense of humor—Silas Marner, for example—helps teens understand that old doesn’t have to mean irrelevant. One Hundred Years of Solitude and The House of the Spirits have enough wonder to paper over any gaps in a teen’s appreciation. While my high school skipped Lord of the Flies, I’m very glad I got my first read in before I became an adult. And almost any time a marginalized author managed to claw their way into the canon, they deserve to keep their spot. If Steinbeck and Fitzgerald stay, then Beloved and Anne Frank and The Bell Jar and Frederick Douglass and Jane Austen all stay. I’m embarrassed by the number of grown white men I meet who only read other white men, and I believe that habit starts in high school.



The point is to destabilize the idea of the canon, one that has propped up too many mediocre artists and excluded too many brilliant ones.

The point isn’t to build a new canon. The point is to destabilize the idea of the canon, one that has propped up too many mediocre artists and excluded too many brilliant ones, one that feeds into a monolithic idea of America that looks nothing like the country’s actual past or present. This is not only to re-center marginalized groups (in fact my personal suggestions are unfortunately skewed white as I’m still repairing my bad education), but also to encourage the idiosyncrasies of different readers sharing different but overlapping literary backgrounds, which will spur more people to stay readers throughout adulthood, as they approach literature as an endless buffet instead of a prix fixe. (That buffet includes a big dessert section of comic books, which should be treated not as a novelty but a full-fledged part of literature, one which has been especially useful for marginalized authors and stories.) This isn’t a new idea; the canon has always been fluid. But it could stand to be less viscous.

In that context, here is one highly personal, definitely not canonical, suggestion of how we might edit the high school curriculum.

Ditch

The Great Gatsby

On the Road

Of Mice and Men (replace with In Dubious Battle)

Pilgrim’s Progress

James Fenimore Cooper, but also that one Twain essay about James Fenimore Cooper performatively enjoyed by people who like the word “defenestration”

Brave New World (but keep 1984)

Death of a Salesman

Heart of Darkness, I mean good lord this has not aged well

The Trial and “The Metamorphosis” (replace with “The Village Schoolmaster” and “The Great Wall of China”)

Siddhartha

The Divine Comedy

Any Ibsen, DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, and David Foster Wallace (save it for college)

Any Camus or other mid-century existentialism (save it for your first broke and lonely year of adulthood)

Any Philip Roth (save it for when you’re a married college professor who hits on his students)



All but one O. Henry story (“The Gift of the Magi”) because we get it already



All but one Sherlock Holmes story (whichever he does the most coke in) because they are neither literary nor fun

All Edgar Allan Poe except “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Raven,” and that essay where he bullshits about his writing process for “The Raven”



Any Beckett unless you follow it up with some Stoppard to take the edge off

Anna Karenina

The Brothers Karamazov

The middle part of Gulliver’s Travels that no one remembers

Candide tbh



Any Ayn Rand

War of the Worlds

Animal Farm if you’re not ready to add a few chapters of Das Kapital

Keep

To Kill a Mockingbird



The Scarlet Letter

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Beloved

The Chosen

The Bell Jar

Invisible Man

Paradise Lost

Coleridge and Wordsworth et. al. why not

Any Twain

Any Wilde



Any Molière

Any Austen

Any Márquez



Any Shakespeare except the comedies

All the Greek stuff, sure, fine, maybe try War Music instead of The Iliad

Things Fall Apart



The Handmaid’s Tale

Beowulf, and read Heaney’s translation aloud

One—one—Vonnegut book, and leave a stack of his others on the teacher’s desk

Add


(Apologies for any of these that are already standard among better curricula. They prove that I am right.)



Novels and Memoirs

Short Stories and Poetry

Theater

Comics

These aren’t a “new canon” or a curriculum, but a collection of choices that could significantly add to a high schooler’s understanding and appreciation of literature. I leaned toward works that comment on the present, or that demonstrate literary principles in a more relevant and well-rounded way than some of the old standbys. High schoolers should read whatever they want on their own time, including everything in the “Ditch” section. Amendments and entirely different lists are welcome, and are in fact the whole point.