That being said, anyone who knows me knows that a book has to be pretty bad in my estimation before I'll consider getting rid of it. Boring, dry, dumb. Yep. Off to Goodwill with them. There are a few that I'm finding are not just keepers, but perhaps books that I'll someday look for in nice hardcover editions for my "Library."
John Updike has become one of those authors. I never had time to think anything about him until Em got me started on this list, but he's rapidly become one of my favorites. True, it can be argued that when you start out reading what is considered the author's "masterpiece," chances are you're going to be a bit biased. The second of Updike's books that I'm in the process of right now is "Rabbit at Rest," a story that really seems to personify the end of the 1980s, waking up to the 1990s. I really can't say enough about the entire series, but I won't, because you'd be bored.
Truth is, what I really think about as I read through this list, and come across books like this, is the sort of literature that our kids are reading in school. Did you look forward to the reading lists that your English teachers tossed at you the first week of September? I never did. You see, I ended up stuck in a wide variety of basic English classes through high school. I had one teacher in 10th grade who asked me why the Hell I was in her class, and not the CP or AP course, and all I could do was shrug my shoulders and say, "I don't know. This is where they stuck me."
Something to do with poor grades in earlier grade levels, I'm sure, as though that were of the slightest importance...
But it has got me thinking - Maybe kids are being introduced to the wrong kinds of books these days. Perhaps high school reading lists are a bit too mundane. What if we actually let the kids read the work of John Updike, Junot Diaz, or Annie Proulx, where yes, there is sex, and drugs, and violence, but also along with those things are real consequences of those choices. AIDS, addiction and death, as well. As I recall high school, it was anything but innocent, so why do we, as parents (or they, as school boards) insist on prescribing the same stuff that was really only avant garde in 1969? Who knows.
The thing about "kiddie lit," is that though I make fun, its important that these kids read something for fun, but for crying out loud, once we're done assigning them homework on discussing the merits of Mark Twain's work in today's society, let's at least point them toward writers like Updike, Hell, even Willa Cather, or Pearl S. Buck when they graduate, so that once they're done reading what the state says is literature, they can see for themselves what REAL literature is all about.
No comments:
Post a Comment