My daughter sticks an invisible dagger in my heart every time she declares that she doesn’t like to read. I have no idea how it happened. When I was holed up in the house all big and bulky during my pregnancy, I ate books. Classic books, trash lit, how-to guides, anything I could get my hands on.
When she was a baby, even up until she was a fourth, maybe fifth grader, we read together every night. She loved the Junie B. Jones series, and I even passed down books I used to adore when I was a budding gal like her, like my Sweet Valley High and Fabulous Five collections. In mint condition, if I do say so myself.
Alas, the love of the written word just hasn’t been passed on to Young Harris (insert long, baleful moan from her writer/editor mother). That she can recite every word to “We Found Love” but gives me a long, blank stare when I quote a line from Charles Dickens, even A Christmas Story, makes me feel like I failed the child.
I don’t think her school is helping the situation, either. I remember reading books together as a class and discussing them and that was back in the ancient 80s and 90s. Not once, ever, never, has that child come home with anything that she was instructed to read chapter by chapter and be prepared to talk about the next day. I’m glad it’s her last year at this school and keeping my fingers crossed for the high school she’s gearing up to go to.
Ever the drum major for education — and the do-it-yourself go-getter — I stopped by the library and brought home Little Women, thinking maybe, just maybe if I sold it hard enough, it would resonate with her like it did with me at that age. Unfortunately, it became a door stop, a lap desk when she needed something to bear on when she was writing, I think it even held a bum window open at one point. Getting her to actually read it was like pulling teeth; getting her to enjoy it proved completely impossible.
But like it or not, there are just some books that she has to, has to, has to read before she leaves my house, one way or another. I don’t care if she downloads them to her iPod and relishes in the convenience of audio books. It ain’t reading, but hey — I’ll take it. Heck, I think there are certain classics that all kids need to have scratched off their lists before they can call themselves ready to graduate:
25. Great Expectations Charles Dickens
24. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
23. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
22. Call of the Wild by Jack London
21. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
20. Art of War by Sun Tzu
19. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
18. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
17. Something, anything by Edgar Allan Poe
16. Fences by August Wilson
15. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
14. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
13. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
12. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
11. The Bible (you don’t have to believe in its teachings to glean historical and sociological perspective from it, so calm down)
10. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
9. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
8. Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
6. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
5. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
4. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
3. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
2. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
1. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
What would you add to the list of must-reads for well-rounded kids?
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Comments 114
Night and A Separate Piece, both great Holocaust stories.
South Carolina College Preparatory track, had to read all of those but the Art of War by the 9th grade. And everyone puts down our education system.
I'd exchange Hamlet for Romeo and Juliet. Kids relate better to the star-crossed lovers, despite Hamlet's reputation as a moody adolescent. Plus there are important lessons in Romeo and Juliet about adolescent crushes, like don't kill yourself over a girl or boy. And rather than Sun Tzu, if you must have an important philosophical work on the list, Machiavelli's "Prince" will inspire more debate than "The Art of War." Plato's "Republic" is also important for its influence on western literature and culture. I consider it essential reading.