Time to rant about the concept of “required reading”

Is this my favorite topic? My least? It’s certainly one of my more practiced perspectives. And when I say “practiced,” I mean to myself. In my bedroom. In front of a mirror. Sometimes while throwing things. More-so when I was in high school.

These days, I don’t throw things.

Just to make sure we’re straight on our definitions here and we’re all on the same page, the “required reading” to which I’m referring for the sake of this post is the assigned reading you’re given in school, especially middle school and high school in my experience. Both summer reading books and during the school year reading of which your teacher might have a classroom set of books to pass out. And all of it was the bane of my existence when I was in school, to the point that I’m still mad about it. And I graduated high school ten years ago.

If it isn’t clear from the fact that I’m a novelist and the fact that I’ve written about it in prior blog posts, I love reading. I read a little bit of everything. Science fiction, fantasy, YA, maybe some literary fiction. Nonfiction on topics ranging from big data to race to memoirs from just about anyone (even people I’ve never heard of). Also manga and graphic novels (anyone who tells you that doesn’t count as reading is a killer of joy and can safely be ignored). I pick up new recommendations from friends from time to time and pay attention to social media for cues of what might be a new book to pay attention to. Or I just scroll through the library catalog and request more books than I can reasonably read in three weeks (but I can’t dare miss!).

And I hated required reading.

I was assigned a wide variety of books to read in middle school and high school. To name a selection of those I remember:

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

• My Antonia by Willa Cather

• Beowulf

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

• A BUNCH of Shakespeare (Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet…)

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (3 DIFFERENT TIMES - 8th grade, 10th grade, and junior year of college)

And a bunch more (I’ve got an actual list on Goodreads to track them if you’re interested). I feel like the list above doesn’t do justice to all the plays I read but we don’t have all day. The gist of this is that I read a lot of books for school.

A lot.

of very

old

books.

…

*sigh*

Look. I get that they’re “classics.” I get that the books are on lists of “books to read before you die.” I even get that some of them are really solid! I learned through all this reading that I really love absurdism in plays (The Zoo Story by Edward Albee and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett really intrigued me).

But here’s the problem: I had to spend so much time reading these books that I didn’t care about, which meant I couldn’t read the books I wanted. Which created a very problematic cycle that continued on into my adulthood.

I’ll explain.

Dozens of critiques have been written about how required reading kills the love of reading in kids so that, as adults, many don’t read as much as a book a year. It’s a component of what I want to talk about but it’s not the whole thing. So for the sake of this explanation, I’m going to focus on my personal experience.

I’d also like to start off by saying this: I really did read these books! I know there’s a lot of discourse around the “books you were assigned to read in high school but never did.” I read every. Single. One. Even Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, though the reading was due the same day as local scholarship essays and the scholarship essay site was so broken that I had to retype every single one of my 20-ish essays and it took until almost 2 in the morning for me to finish the reading (and I got up at 5am to get to school on time) even though I’d actually paced my reading pretty well over the two week assignment. That’s not to say I remember all of the required reading. But I did truly read all the books.

And I am saying, at 28, that this was largely such a waste of my time.

I knew it would be, even at fifteen. But no one listens to an overtired fifteen-year-old girl. Because, well, sexism and ageism and the absolute denial that a 5am wake-up time for a teenager is fiercely unreasonable. And I know I’m not a teacher and there’s probably a very real reason these books are included in the curriculum that I don’t know.

Needless to say, I hated required reading. I hated the way I spent hours pacing around the house just to stay awake as I paged through Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad which had almost no paragraph breaks (I just wanted to take a break!). I hated how Wuthering Heights taught me that human beings are selfish and awful and the world is nothing but darkness.

I hated how I wasn’t given The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins as an assignment but other students were.

I was in the gifted program in school, as I’ve mentioned before, and in the advanced English classes once gifted transitioned onto that path. While sometimes the two tracks of English classes read the same books for class, sometimes those tracks diverged. And I still remember that while my freshman year I had to read The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and (most of) Mythology by Edith Hamilton, two years later, the freshmen in the “not-advanced” track were given The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

That year, I decided to put off my summer reading and read The Hunger Games before I completed the reading I was “supposed to.” I didn’t know a lot about the book; only that it was one I wanted to read. So I planted myself in the living room and cracked open the book.

The first time I looked up from the book, it was to cry.

Now, I very VERY rarely cry while reading. I can count the times on one hand, maybe two. But The Hunger Games broke me. I sobbed. And I loved that I cried.

I felt so very seen in this book in a way I rarely did. I was already a writer by this point, plotting what I didn’t realize was a dystopian novel, and this book made me feel not alone as a writer. Not to mention not alone as a teenage girl, something that society seemed determined to make me feel. And I felt hope. Because even in this bleak future, I saw a spark. I saw light. I saw love. This was the kind of book I needed to read.

And because of required reading smothering me, I almost didn’t.

But the impact of required reading didn’t end there. I read so few YA (young adult) books as a teenager, even though it was what I wanted to write as an author, because I simply didn’t have the time. On top of all the required reading of books I didn’t really care about, I had so many other assignments. Plus drama club! A musical or play too! Show choir practice, anyone? I hardly slept. Reading was a luxury I was rarely afforded.

Once I reached college, I could breathe a little (which is VERY BACKWARDS but not the point of this post so let’s shelve that one for another day). But this finally meant I could pick up the YA books I missed. The rest of Gallagher Girls by Ally Carter! The Mara Dyer series by Michelle Hodkin! The Fault in Our Stars by John Green! And soooo many others.

Thing is, I read them and was angry.

I read these books and the 16-year-old girl in me felt seen. I learned about hope. I learned what it feels like to hurt and who to trust with that hurt. I learned what it meant to be uncomfortable in my own skin and scared of being in a world that judged me. I felt unalone.

But that 16-year-old girl was nearly 20 now. And she was playing anthropologist, trying to figure out what the world wanted from her because she never learned.

And then the articles came out about how adults should feel “bad” about reading YA.

These articles shouldn’t have broken me. Why should I care about what some stranger on the Internet thinks about me? But I was so tired. When was I supposed to read these books then? These books that allowed me to be known and unalone? Not when I’m a teenager, when I have all this required reading to complete. Not when I’m a young college student, when I should feel bad for reading these “less than” books. And I was so tired of always being so much less.

Required reading has a significant impact on our society. And I would venture to say that it’s certainly not a good one. Today, the only good all the required reading has done for me has been on Buzzfeed quizzes and trivia challenges. Sometimes I recognize a motif or reference in Doctor Who a little better. But that’s all. Young adult fiction, on the other hand, allowed me to find characters like me. And those unlike me! And realize the similarities between us are greater than the differences.

I’m fortunate in the fact that I didn’t let drowning in required reading assignments kill my love of reading. But it does for a lot of people. And that’s more than just a sad truth; I’d go so far as to say it’s probably a negative for our society at large.

Reading teaches us empathy. It teaches us how to get along with others. It teaches us to think critically and consider all the data before us before we make a decision. If required reading is supposed to be teaching us to become lifelong readers, it’s failed its job. And if it’s trying to instill values in us, it’s fallen short on that as well.

I know that ranting about the concept of “required reading” won’t change anything. I sincerely doubt required reading will ever go away. I recognize that this type of reading challenges readers and introduces readers to complex ideas. I also recognize that it’s easier to offer summer reading with few options because a teachers need to be capable of creating assignments. There are practicality considerations. And frankly, reading widely and picking up books that aren’t necessarily in your niche can be incredibly healthy.

But we need to recognize that these decision we’ve made have sprawling impact throughout our society and all of our lives. For me, personally, it made my teen years very isolating, since I didn’t have time to pick up the books that would have assured me that I was not alone.

And now, all we can really do to fight back is to read. Read whatever you like. Manga! Comics! Audio books! Picture books! All of it counts. Hardcore science fiction? Why not! Did you actually rather like those classics in school? Awesome; there’s plenty more to check out!

Just…keep reading. Keep learning. And keep knowing you are not alone.