Topic: Must Read
Last week National Review Online featured an interesting discussion about required reading for high school students. Many good suggestions were made, but for my money the best comment came from that notorious iconoclast, John Derbyshire, who opined that most adolescents are neither willing nor able to tackle the Great Books. Here’s his comment in full. It got me to thinking about my own adolescent reading habits, and it wasn’t long before I realized that Derbyshire was quite right.
The stuff I read for pleasure when I was, say, 14-17 years old had only an occasional chance relationship to Literature as the intelligentsia would understand it. Plenty of Golden Age science fiction (my father was a fan)—Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, etc. Certain war novels—I was still in my teens when I read The Caine Mutiny, The Cruel Sea and Twelve O'Clock High. The Sherlock Holmes stories. Tales of horror and the supernatural. H.G. Wells, of course—The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, etc. But Shakespeare? Tolstoy? Dickens? Dostoevsky? Nah. To the extent that I could, I shirked all such reading assignments handed down by my teachers. I did read Nineteen Eighty-four when I was about 16, and as I recall it was the first book that intimated to me that literature might have a higher purpose than entertainment.
Years later I did get around to reading the big names. But I taught myself to be a reader among my father's stacks of paperback originals. I cherish the memory of that apprenticeship, and I suspect that if we let today's teenagers follow their literary inclinations, more true readers might, in the long run, be produced.
