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I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale.

That's funny, what I am hearing from high school students is that overwhelmingly the curriculum has been replaced by contemporary books. Few seniors I talk to have read anything in school written before 1900. Maybe they read one or Shakespeare in the modern English version. There seems to be a lot of assigned books written in recent years, often some sort of depressing coming of age story.

I think English class should be a mix of core classics, plus books that students can pick out to read on their own and then do a report on. For the independent reading, students could pick out Harry Potter or a compelling young adult fiction.

But English at its best should also be connecting us to a common culture that we share with our parents and our ancestors, who are the people that built everything around us. These are books that we might not pick out to read on our own, but society as a whole is better off if everyone reads them and they are part of our common culture. However, I think Gatsby and a lot of high school books actually fail this test. I do like Shakespeare

> Game Of Thrones

I think this is a bad choice for a number of reasons. First, I'd worry it would be corrosive to the morals of my teenagers. Second, it tries to be "gritty realistic" in its medieval setting but actually a lot of that setting and psychology of the characters is not at all realistic. Third, I wouldn't trust any high school teacher to be able to highlight these things and build effective lessons from it.

"often some sort of depressing coming of age story."

I think that while this isn't anywhere near the whole problem, the selection of books is very slanted in certain directions and that is a part of the problem. I'd call it "politics" but people would think I mean left/right, but that's not really what I'm referring to here... there are definitely some tendencies in the books chosen by literature teachers, by the type of people who would become literature teachers, and while there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, they can end up badly overrepresented.

You've got the broody coming of age stories (which is basically synonymous with "discovering how awful the world is"), the stories about how awful everything is and particularly how awful mankind is, the poems about how depressing everything is, the stories about how nihilistic the author is, the stories that make minimal sense on their own because they are just carrying "literary" symbolism as they make a depressing literary point, etc.

A bit more diversity in some of the literature lists wouldn't go amiss... and again, I'm not really talking about "left/right" or the modern sense of the term, but just, casting a wider net in the general sense. It is not actually illegal or unethical for students to maybe occasionally enjoy a book in school. It is not invalid to maybe study a comedy, an actually funny comedy, in the pursuit of learning about humor, for instance.

> Game Of Thrones

I think Game of Thrones is actually a great example of why we shouldn't be teaching Game of Thrones... I made a historical reference to Savonarola the other day, and when the person didn't know what I was talking about, I said "You know when the religious zealots in GoT take over the city..." GoT is really at it's best if you have an understanding of English history (War of the Roses, etc) such that you can pick up on where all of the references come from - I have no idea if Martin intended Savonarola as his muse, but my point is that historical references and books of the past are the foundation blocks of modern literature and cultural references, so I'd much rather see them taught, as the kids can pick up on modern lit on their own.

>These are books that we might not pick out to read on our own, but society as a whole is better off if everyone reads them and they are part of our common culture.

This, we already lose a lot by not being familiar with the canon that well educated students were learning in the past, we shouldn't shrug off the more recent canon that we share with our parents and grandparents. It's the same reason a lot of irreligious people still take time to learn some of the basic stories from the bible, there is so much christian influence in our society that you miss out if you aren't at least a little familiar with the mythology that things are based on or referencing.

Yes, everyone I've talked to about this has said it's all contemporary literature now. One mother was telling me her son is bored in literature class because the books all have female protagonists now. Much like in modern movies, it seems some schools/teachers are trying to make up for there being too many boy-centric stories in the past by making it all girl-centric today. Unfortunate that they aren't trying to find a balance.

One thing that's popular in the schools in my area now could be called "death studies": taking a semester to read and write things about death, even visiting cemeteries and other death-related activities. While I'm sure some of it is very interesting and engages some kids who were bored by the usual material, it seems like it could be dangerous for some teens to spend a lot of time thinking about death for a few months. But the parents who've mentioned it all think it's "cool" and have no concerns about that.

Back when I read Dickens or Gatsby I hadn't read enough history to really understand what was going on because I'd was missing a lot of context that changed the meaning of events in the book. Gatsby could serve as launching point for learning about the history of the automobile, prohibition, traffic safety, attitudes towards Jews, New York development and geography, and a lot of other things.

In college, I took a history class called Shakespeare's Kings where we read through most of the Henriad. It presented post-hoc, editorialized versions of history (the plays) against how we currently see it. It's too bad literature isn't generally approached this holistically.

> why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter?

So I read Harry Potter (as an adult). The first book, it was ok. Then it went down hill. Harry Potter was or simply became a marketed franchise: Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, ….

What's even to teach in Harry Potter? Yes, reading it en masse is a YA shared experience but that's it. I've never heard a Harry Potter quote. OTOH, I noticed that Careless People alluded to and quoted Gatsby.

Relatable is overrated. Books should be challenging but not too challenging. I remember reading Animal Farm at the perfect age but 1984 a year too soon. I tried reading Catch-22 in 7th grade but didn't get anything. Later, I read it 24 hours straight my first week in college, cackling the whole way through.

I remember the assigned 'relatable' books if slightly. You will relate to this. That is the assignment. I remember them as characters being kind of my age, maybe even in my school. This is the reason I didn't like Catcher In The Rye. OTOH, Winston Smith was definitely not my age, definitely not in my school and unquestionably not me.

Relatable books strike me as engineered epistemic closure. I want to know what the author thinks, not what the author thinks I think.

There's plenty of material in Harry Potter to serve as a useful book for the basics of literary analysis. The quotability isn't really relevant to that. There's bravery, slavery, love, loss, fascism, resistance, classism, racism, journalistic integrity, crime and punishment, the hero's journey, and more.

There are plenty of very good reasons I can think of to standardize a curriculum as much as possible, not the least of which is the demand you're placing on 25 year-olds being paid $40k a year. They can't teach what they don't know themselves and they can't reasonably be expected to read in a level of detail necessary to teach every book every individual student might enjoy and prefer being taught. They can, on the other hand, become experts on an accepted canon that stays largely the same year to year. You're otherwise recreating the JavaScript framework treadmill that everyone here hates so much but for people earning 1/10th the salary.

Back in my HS days, there was a lot of individual choice of books allowed. Effort was tested by writing of "book reports". I read much of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky that way.

LLMs, unfortunately, can write you a "book report" on almost anything.

We teach old books because no one would ever agree on what new books to teach.

This is what teachers told me when my sons were in high school 2004-2010. Any mention of drug use, sex or race would result in complaints from a few parents.

There's an almost religious fight against "popular" books - they won't even consider thinking about reading the Lord of The Rings - let alone modern popular novels.

Picking "old books" at least means you pick for some level of quality (usually) because they've lasted that long in print.

You also don't need to get kids to read Harry Potter; they're already reading that on their own.

Who in 2025 is actually against putting Lord of the Rings in the curriculum because it is too "popular" or not old enough? It's the same age as a lot of other classic high school texts (1984, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, etc.) And I think it's quality is actually even more appreciated now than when it became popular. It seems like it is just inertia keeping it out, plus most of the people who want to reform the curriculum want newer books than Lord of the Rings.

Also you might want school texts to be relatively short. LOTR is not.

That is true! From what I have seen and heard from the schools around me, every year the assigned texts are getting shorter and with a lower reading level.

>I don't want to read a Dickens book or Gatsby, I want to read a book that is relatable

Gatsby is a timeless story of class division. The upstart nouveau riche verses the entrenched institutionalists. You could write a version of it set in practically any time or culture.

Something nice from a cyberpunk series would work well.

Snow Crash comes to mind as an, offhand, likely safe enough for teens book that isn't boring.

Maybe if you censored out the underage sex?

I reread that book recently and that immediately raised a red flag where the author makes it seems like the girl consents as in "well, I guess this is happening" then proceeds to portray her as a enjoying it and not really getting into the details of how a person/body may react regardless of a woman's (in this case) consent. This is much better portrayed in My Brilliant Friend with all the complexity of emotion of the victim towards the act and their reaction. I really wish if one thing could be changed about that book is just simply making the 15 year old character an adult.

I do remember an attempted rape, but I didn't remember the underage part. Probably I was more focused on overpowering an attacker as a positive aspect. It was _many_ years ago that I read that book.

Yes, you should teach the book that has a sex scene between a 15 year old girl and a 30 year old man to high school students.

Read your first sentence as: "I have a racial insight on this topic", and it still mostly worked.