I'm chuckling about The Red Badge of Courage. My DD read it for ninth grade English, and yes, it was definitely not her cup of tea, so to speak. She slogged through it anyway, but it was rather like getting her to drink a wheat-grass shake or something. wink I feel this way about both Steinbeck and Hemingway.


DD felt the same way about Walden, much to my amusement. One of the funniest one-liners I've ever heard from her was when she learned that her 11th grade English class would be reading The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail.

"Hmm. {long pause} Jail-- I mean, having read Walden, I can speculate personally that he SHOULD have been incarcerated for writing such self-absorbed, smug, ignorant DRIVEL, so don't get me wrong. I'm just wondering what they charged him with..."

(uhhhh-- wow.)

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Notice - you won't find Dahl, Mysterious Benedict Society, Captain Underpants, Mr. Men series, or Far Side on these lists. At least Tomie dePaola's, Stega Nona, is on the Mensa K-3 list, but not Art Lesson or Tom. No Pratchett or Pythonese books, of course. Nothing bawdy like Marcia Williams's, illustrated Chaucer book. Didn't see Harry Potter either.
The MENSA high school lists are the older version of the NEH lists, and yes, they tend to completely ignore anything published in the last forty years, nevermind anything controversial.

That's another reason why I mentioned the ALA lists. Those kinds of books do (increasingly, anyway) make some of those lists.

Recent publication is hardly a barrier to high quality. The Book Thief (which appears on the modern NEH list for 7-8th) is a fine example. Even Harry Potter can be read as allegorical in much the same way as Lewis' Narnia series.


We've found that many 'fluff' books tend to be "gateway" books. This is how my daughter has wound up reading classics. She read some news articles that led her to the contemporary non-fiction of Michael Pollan, and wound up interested enough to tackle Orwell's 1984, and eventually even Sinclair's master work, The Jungle.


The updated NEH lists are here:

The K-8 list.

and the high school list, also updated;

NEH's college-preparatory reading list This one is largely derived from the College Board's recommendations.


It's helpful to me to remember, when I attempt to parse out what is "Art" versus trashy pop culture...

that to their contemporaries, Dickens and Austen were both writing contemporary popular fiction intended for mass consumption, not posterity. Dickens' work was frankly propoganda in many ways.

With that in mind, I figure if a work of literature or art 'speaks' to a person, then it is meaningful and worthwhile for them personally.

I, um, loved Wuthering Heights. blush





Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.