Roald Dahl, not just for kids

Short stories and novels discussed: James and the Giant Peach, George’s Marvelous Medicine, Boy, The Umbrella Man, Lamb to the Slaughter, Galloping Foxley. Spoiler-free

I’ve always thought that one of the worst things that gets set aside when entering the high school reading curriculum is a sense of enjoyment. Sure, a lot of the novels we read are “the greats” but so much of the focus is on their potential to be analyzed, to be referenced in essays and exams, and so little on whether we actually enjoy them.

When it comes to literature, something being classed as part of the literary canon almost frees it from any possible critique. Either you enjoyed it and you truly understand what art is, or you didn’t and you clearly just didn’t get it. When it comes to more popular fiction, we are allowed to have tastes. We are allowed to say “oh I just didn’t really like Girl on the Train. I’m not that into thrillers,” but heaven help you if you say you didn’t enjoy Ulysses because you found it rambled a lot. I’m not even saying we need to pit “popular fiction” and “literary fiction” against each other (and that’s not just because the concept we have of literary fiction is very white male-centric; that’s a discussion for another day). I just think that there is a point in which students stop getting asked the question “did you like the book you read?” Fun and enjoyment stop mattering.

When we are in elementary school, the books our teachers read out loud to us are rarely boring. In fact, their entertainment value is amongst their most prized quality. How else are you going to get kids into reading? I was in elementary school when I decided I wanted to be a writer. I fell in love with books, with stories. I found myself with the itch to create my own. We had a yearly writing contest throughout the entire school section and every student participated. It was mandatory, yes, but overall not percieved as a chore.

The problem with only reading highly literary works throughout high school is that it creates this image of literature as something ineffable. How am I, a high school student, meant to write the next Catcher in the Rye, the next Handmaid’s Tale? Books don’t only exist to be analyzed. Most people read because they enjoy it, first and foremost.

Enter Roald Dahl. Tried and tested. Children love his books. They are gruesome, unpatronizing tales of young boys traveling in a giant peach along insect companions, of children creating a medicine out of the strange chemicals they find in their household. They were the kind of books I loved to read that made me want to write. As I grew up, I was delighted to find out that Roald Dahl’s writing wasn’t just for children. He had dozens of short stories published, targeted at adults.

It is these short stories that I think should make it onto the high school curriculum. When I was in a high school creative writing club, every short story anyone produced always centered around a twist, a surprise ending. That’s the kind of story you like writing when you’re fifteen. Gotcha stories. And Roald Dahl, in his adult fiction, is the master of the twist. To quote David L. Ulin from the New Yorker, “At the same time, Dahl comes off as more knowing, or perhaps more winking, as if he and we, a writer and his readers, were in cahoots together. For him, the act of storytelling, at its heart, is a collaborative game.” Part of the charm of Dahl is the way his stories make you, the reader, feel like you were part of the process. They’re fun. They make you want to create something like that.

The other benefit of short stories, of course, is that they’re short and they are plentiful. If you like one, there is another waiting, equally tantalizing. There is still plenty to analyze in Dahl as well. “The Umbrella Man” speaks to subversion of expectation, while placing the reader in the same shoes as the protagonist. We can focus on the power of diction in “Lamb to the Slaughter” as it has the most masterful use of the word giggled I’ve ever encountered. You can talk about the nature of biographical writing by comparing “Galloping Foxley” to excerpts from Dahl’s autobiography Boy. The point is the style of story produced by Dahl is the kind of story teenagers like to write, when they do. It is important to show how the process of reading and of writing can be fun, can be eye-winking tongue-in-cheek proud-of-yourself work. It can be indulgent. As long as it starts somewhere.

Reading and writing have a symbiotic relationship. The more you do of one, the better you are at the other. If we find ourselves reading things we truly enjoy, things that mirror the kind of work we want to create, we feed the creative impulse to write. And it is so healthy to write. One study found that expressive writing can be instrumental in processing trauma. Another that practicing writing can have great positive effects in self-esteem, in logical thinking, and reduce neural blockages caused by the stress of boredom.

So many people graduate high school thinking they don’t like to read. Worse are the people who read daily, who always have a book on the go, but think it doesn’t “count” because it isn’t part of that literary canon we’ve been taught to value. It’s too fun to actually be literature. As children, we write the stories we want to hear. As adults graduating high school, so many of us lose that urge. Something needs to be done in later school years to reminds students that writing, like reading, really is fun.

We are living in a dystopian future straight off the pages of a book

Books discussed: 1984, Brave New World, A Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games trilogy, A Separate Peace. Spoiler-free

I don’t actually think we are living in a dystopian future. At least, not completely. But if I’m honest, analyzing that is neither the point of this article nor this blog. Dystopian literature has seen a boom in popularity in recent years, particularly in the YA genre. Books like Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, released in 2008, the same year as the biggest economic downturn in contemporary teens’ memory, that feature teenaged protagonists who are seemingly the only ones able to see through the indoctrination of a dystopic future are popular among adolescents for… well, obvious reasons. In a post-truth world, it is not only adults that feel the brunt of the political climate. Children, and teenagers especially, are also affected, also warrent their own reactions. While I do think that The Hunger Games is a worthwhile book to be read in school perhaps at a younger age (it is on the docket of my local elementary school) I don’t think it is best suited to high school.

The pros of The Hunger Games is that it is enjoyable; the cons are that I don’t think there is as much to analyze in the writing as might be appropriate for a high school English literature class. I don’t think it quite confronts the dystopic future enough, nor portrays enough nuance to be of real sustenance for close and careful analysis.

If you think about the dystopian literature you read in high school, the first book that comes to mind is likely George Orwell’s 1984. 2017 saw Penguin Random House reporting a 9,500% increase in sales of the novel, so its relevance in the modern age remains, if not indisputable, tangible. I do think 1984 is an important book to read because it does prepare you to grapple with a political climate that is scarily similar to the content of the book. But like I said above, I don’t think we’re living in Airstrip One, completely; we still do have freedom of speech, and surveillance is… not as extreme. I think the problem with only reading 1984 in high school is that it provides students with only one path to relate modern day nuggets of dystopia to the literature. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, if all you have is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. I personally think the modern political climate is much too complex and nuanced to simply come at it with a hammer and call it a day. I think if we want to equip high schoolers with methods of analyzing contemporary politics through the lens of literature we need to provide an alternative.

Enter Brave New World. To be fair, it is a book that does make it onto the high school curriculum often enough, but nowhere near as often as 1984 (an anecdotal fact; I tried to find data on this but couldn’t; please do correct me if I’m wrong). However, I don’t think many students will have gone through the experience of reading the two back to back. There is a very good reason for this: reading two dystopian future novels in a row can get a bit “same-y”. However, I was a massive nerd in high school (which I guess is not surprising considering I’m running a blog about the high school reading curriculum) and I got the chance to do this because while I was reading 1984 in class, my book club was reading Brave New World. (On a side note: I cannot recommend book clubs enough, especially for high school students. They help you gain important critical skills while having a really good time discussing books you get to pick with your friends. Granted, as stated above, big nerd talking.)

I think literature needs to be more interactive for high school students. Often times, when we’re in younger stages of schooling, there is a bigger push for creative interaction with the books we’re reading. From my personal experience we have:

We read the Flat Stanley series in second grade and the teacher then made a life-size version of Flat Stanley, which we all got to color in.
My sixth grade teacher had us do book projects rather than book reports, meaning you had to make a presentation of the book in any format you chose. I made a miniature replica of the Chocolate Room from Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with real candy once and a Wonderland tourist guidebook after reading both Lewis Carroll’s Alice books another time.

I think the element of enjoyment when interacting with the books we are instructed to read in our teens is lost. Literature becomes serious, something to be read quietly, discussed in an orderly fashion, and dissected thouroughly through written pieces. Why do you think I liked book club so much? Because I could make interesting (or what I thought was interesting when I was a pretentious sixteen-year-old) commentary that got to the core themes of a novel or I could make a complaint like “this chapter was really boring” or I could say “I would totally date Finny from A Separate Peace“. Projects like fan fiction are a fantastic extension of reader engagement.

So how do these points all go together and why am I getting teens to read not one but two dystopian novels within the same month?

Because I think that would be a fantastic way of engaging teens in a classroom setting. 1984 and Brave New World are essentially opposite takes on dystopia: is it a hell that we pretend we’re happy with or are we coerced into so much superficial happiness that we don’t notice the hell? Is it a world of our computers spying on us or our avoiding the emotional impact of a tragedy by scrolling through memes? Which reality most closely resembles our own? Is it both?

While I think an adolescent might feel patronized in being told to make a miniature candy replica out of a scene from a children’s book, my experience from high school is that teens like to debate. Even the shyer kids, the quieter ones, if you got the right topic in class, would pipe up with a point. I think having access to two antithetical analyses of what defines dystopia gives them more tools to unravel their understanding of their own surroundings. (Note: I think that The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is also a brilliant, and equally relevant, piece of dystopian literature and there is no reason it shouldn’t also be on the high school curriculum. I simply don’t go into depth with it because I think it the other two novels mentioned are on opposite ends of a spectrum while The Handmaid’s Tale is,
as proclaimed by Atwood herself, inspired by Orwell and his writing, meaning it falls clearly on the 1984 side of analysis rather than being an opposite opinion to anything. It should still be read, possibly in the final year of high school, if anything as an analysis on the relationship between gender and dystopia. See: both books I mention are written by men and would provide an interesting contrast. Anyway this is a really long digression, but I wanted to make sure I gave Margaret Atwood justice.) It means an opportunity to teach trans-media concept-building with assignments like “bring in one news story that relates to either book and explain why.” It means many people can have different opinions and still show they are correct through textual and research-based backing.

More importantly, taking this approach relates the literature read in class to the real world, to a tangible truth. Generations today have access to information like none before them. Teens today can’t scroll through Facebook without getting at least a snippet of information about a current political event. As people who share literature with the generations that come after us, we have a choice. We can either simply proclaim that the themes universal and relevant, or we can give them the tools to prove that they are.

Why do we bother with Shakespeare?

Plays mentioned: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Henry V, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Some Twelfth Night spoilers.

Let me guess. When you were in high school English class, you read Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet? Maybe you had King Lear sprinkled in there, or Hamlet or, if you were lucky, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but you definitely read Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. There is a range of reactions to Shakespeare, from indifference to elation, annoyance to enjoyment, and, since his work is such a pillar of our high school reading lists, it is worth asking the question: is he worth it?

The short answer is yes.

I have my reasons. In fact, I even understand why the two abovementioned plays are such constants on the syllabus, but I think the main reason we read Shakespeare is because he really is that good. Why we might not get as much enjoyment out of Shakespeare as we possibly could when we’re in high school is because of how it’s taught.

There are two extremes to misinterpreting Shakespeare and those are: missing out on his brilliant sense of humor, and completely reducing him to his brilliant sense of humor. The latter camp mostly exists, as far as I know, through memes on the internet about how Shakespeare is just “1,000 dick jokes strung together by an increasingly ridiculous plot”. (Note: I have a sense of humor. I understand that memes are jokes. I just want to give as broad a look at the topic as possible). It is irreverent teens rolling their eyes at their teacher “over-analyzing” the Bard, claiming he would have laughed himself out of his grave if he knew how seriously his plays are taken. The former is best encapsulated by the Laurence Olivier style of reciting lines, where Shakespeare is read like poetry and the clever turn of phrase is often smoothed over in a drone of prettily read monologue.

The major problem with the first side of the argument is that it completely eliminates the skillful balancing act that is a Shakespearian play. I mean, the man isn’t just puns and raunchiness; he is puns and raunchiness and universal characters and somehow keeping a running motif while working exclusively in iambic pentameter for that section. The problem with the second is that the lines lose their literal meaning and clarity. Shakespeare becomes inaccessible, any fun or playfulness quashed. The brilliance of Shakespeare is that he is both: irreverent and serious, funny and meaningful. A pun can be both a funny joke and a clever usage of language and theming.

“All the world’s a stage//And all the men and women merely players” from As You Like It. Is “the world” a play on the fact that the theatre where Shakespeare put his plays on was called “The Globe”? Yes, likely. Is it also an interesting obversation about the fourth walls of theatre, calling into question where play-acting ends and reality starts? Also, yes. One does not cancel out the other. If anything, they strengthen each other, the pun drawing the present audience in.

Now that I’ve finished the mandated “analyzing Shakespeare lines” portion of this commentary on Shakespeare, I can move on to how this plays into the high school curriculum. In short, I think Shakespeare is a lot more approachable than we give him credit. He didn’t write exclusively for a uniquely educated aristocratic class, making inside jokes no one outside of a specific social stratus of Elizabethan England could ever hope to understand. He wrote for the masses, for everyone.

Why I think Macbeth is a good play for the high school curriculum

I’m pretty sure I’ve made this point in every piece so far but, it’s short. I don’t think I can stress how helpful it is when literature is short in high school. At age 16, I was balancing 14 classes. I was much more likely to carefully read a play that was less than 2,500 lines than one that was over 4,000 (looking at you, Hamlet).
It has witches. Witches are awesome.
It has ghosts. Ghost are awesome. Really, what I’m saying is its supernatural elements make it an engaging read. There is a lot of plot in Macbeth so the actual story pace is gripping… as long as you don’t have expansive, rolling shots of Scottish wilderness sprinkled constantly throughout (looking at you, 2015 Kurzel adaptation of Macbeth)
The themes are clear and at the forefront of the play. I’ll use an example. One of the themes of Macbeth is ambition. This can be seen clearly not only in the actions of the protagonist but in side characters, in monologues, in dialogue, in the way the plot actually develops. You can always dig deeper for more nuance, but this specific play generally has a clear entrance point.
Lady Macbeth is one of the best Shakespeare characters out there. The most Slytherin to ever Slytherin. Imagine every deliciously cunning, brutally ambitious character out there. This is their mother. Really, if you haven’t read the play, just read it. It is my favorite Shakespeare play.

Why I think Romeo and Juliet is good for the high school curriculum

It stars teenagers. If the wild popularity of YA has proven anything, it is that teens like to read about teens.
Again, it has clear theming. Romeo and Juliet has the extra bonus point of being part of the cultural conciousness. You don’t usually approach it without some idea about it, its plots, its themes. You may have already watched an adaptation based on it, like West Side Story or Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride. Having a starting point is always helpful.
Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet exists. Okay, this point is half a joke, but it does link into a discussion I wanted to have so bear with. Also, this specific adaptation contains the best version of the “do you bite your thumb?” scene out there, really captures the chaos, and Harold Perrineau is perfect as Mercutio.

You may have noticed that adaptations have come up a lot in this essay (blog post? researched internet rant?). That is because I think the biggest mistake you can make when approaching Shakespeare (and most plays really) is to just read them. Technically, they aren’t meant to be read. They’re meant to be watched, or performed. I don’t think the high school curriculum puts enough emphasis on the watching part.

Shakespeare’s language is difficult. Like I said above, the man loved to pun, but he also loved to engage in such fun actions as: literally inventing words, messing with syntax to make his point more emphatic, relying on a vocabulary from the 1600s. All of this can be so alienating to a new reader. All of this can still be alienating to an experienced reader. It can be so easy to forget that these are words that are meant to be said by actual people, to get lost in the rhyme and rhythym and forget that they are supposed to convey emotion. To focus so heavily on the symbolic reading that you forget there is also a literal interpretation.

(Side note, The Toast’s “Dirtbag” Shakespeare series does a perfect job of striking a balance between treating Shakespeare with the reverence of an anarchic teen at a student council rally, and having a really good understanding of what Shakespeare is trying to get at)

A lot of this is solved when you get to see a Shakespeare play. The actors in it have poured over this work, have done their side of the analytical burden, and are able to produce a closer version of the way the words are meant to sound. Yes, it is important for high school students to also read the plays and be able to mark their own interpretations, but when done without the counterpart, without the performance, the works lose their resonance and their humanity. My first recommendation to someone who says they don’t like Shakespeare is to tell them to go see a play. It serves as a good reminder that Shakespeare is funny, is tragic, is actually pretty good at creating complex human characters that also serve as explorations of nuanced themes. Plays were not made to be read, they were made to be interpreted.

As a final point, while I understand why Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth make it onto the curriculum, I don’t necessarily think they are the best options either. The themes in Macbeth, for instance, aren’t quite so personally relatable to high school students. They won’t find themselves in a position to seize power over Scotland anytime in the near future, probably. Romeo and Juliet is a bit better, high schoolers have likely have had a crush before where they feel like if they don’t do something about it they will die, but sometimes the play’s existence in the cultural conciousness is to its own detriment. You might be sick of hearing about it before you even get to it. So, my suggestion is to bring in a play that is fresher, with themes that might be slightly more relevant to today’s modern identity-politics-oriented world: Twelfth Night.

For one thing (and this is my last point about adaptation), it would mean you can justify watching She’s the Man for school. For another, it is a play all about liminality, about pushing the limits of what is societally acceptable, questioning why things count as societally acceptable; it is about performance of the self. That is, these are themes that could resonate closely with teens’ actual experiences, even if they’ve never had to dress up as their twin brother to help the Duke get with a lady who is totally into them instead while starting to think the Duke is looking pretty fine. Also, the play is funny. I emphasized the importance of performance earlier. Twelfth Night opens itself to the possibility of being read aloud in class, of being truly enjoyed. As someone who was in and watched many classroom interpretations of a selection of scenes from Romeo and Juliet, I can say it is easy to tune out. None of us are professional actors and it is easy to fall into the whole “reading Shakespeare as poetry” act, which is (potentially scandalous claim) neither fun to watch nor act. You know what the most engaged I’ve ever seen a classroom in Shakespeare is? When a friend (who is, in fact, much shorter than me) and I read out, not even acted just read aloud, the scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Helena and Hermia fight and most of it consists of Helena basically finding creative ways of calling Hermia short and Hermia getting really mad about it. It is easier to find a quick way to engage with comedy; all you need to do is laugh and you’re in. You’re involved.

(Note: I suggest Twelfth Night instead of Midsummer Night’s Dream because I think its use of drag opens the possible discussion of gender and gender presentation, and further of identity, in a way that could be really interesting to link to modern sensibilities).

In short, I think Twelfth Night is a play high schoolers could have a lot of fun with while also finding in it relatable themes, topics to identify with. It is easier to put on a successful amateur adaptation of a scene from this play than, say, from Romeo and Juliet because a lot of the comedy can be physical: characters disguised as other characters and the dramatic irony that ensues. Everyone is passionately in love, except no one really knows to whom (except Angelo, who totally knows what he is about). Like I said, the laughter is a way in. And that, I think, is what is often missing when introducing teens to Shakespeare. A way of getting their foot in the door.

You probably shouldn’t read Lolita in high school

Books mentioned: Lolita, Battles in the Desert(no spoilers unless you consider information about the premise a spoiler)

Okay, so I am aware that the entire conceit of this blog is talking about books I read in high school. And I am aware that this is only the second post and should probably be in line with that. But I did not read Lolita in high school. If it helps, this is going to discuss a book I read in high school and Lolita absolutely plays into it, so bear with.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is a part of our cultural zeitgeist, for better or worse, with two movies (that probably should not have been made), the word “lolita” making it into major dictionaries, the acknowledgement that it is “one of great works of art of our age” and the absolute horror that is Lolicon. My question when I first approached it, as it always is when I confront the kinds of books that make it into the “literary canon”, was: is it really that good?

Yes, yes it is.

To this day, I use Lolita as a standard for creative writing, as a shining example to turn to when I want to discuss the multilayered aspect of writing with a biased narrator: what is being said, how it is being said, and what can be percieved by a reader. It is masterfully-written and elegantly-crafted, probably the best lesson in unreliable narrators there is out there. I mentioned earlier that the movies should probably not have been made and the main reason behind that is because it gives answers to questions that, in the book, you the reader are meant to grapple with and discern the answers for yourself.

A shining example would be the presentation of Humbert Humbert’s attractiveness. Early on in the book, he describes himself as: “I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor.” claiming he could “obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose.” From the very subject matter of the book to our own sense of morality, we generally enter Lolita knowing that we are going to be encountering an unreliable narrator. Everything is put into question, particularly with Humbert Humbert’s perception of himself in the romantic world and in relation to women. The movies, however, give an answer to whether we should trust his assessment of himself in their casting of stud muffins James Mason (1962) and Jeremy Irons (1997) for the starring role. Rather than have to filter Humbert Humbert through a perception he has of himself and draw our own conclusions, we get a more objective lens of him. In the book, every detail we are presented must be questioned and scrutinised, which in turn encourages critical reading. Of course, the other problem with the movies is that book Lolita is not a real person (althought horrifyingly based on one) whereas actresses Sue Lyon (16 to Mason’s 1953) and Dominique Swain (17 to Irons’ 49) are, but that is not the topic of this particular post and deserves more in-depth analysis anyway, so I will leave it at that.

It is the creation of a narrator that is at once remarkably eloquent and charming and unreliable and despicable that warrants Lolita‘s fame, and I think it is deserved. The reason I don’t think it should read in high school, though, apart from the obvious “a discussion of Lolita between adults and minors will always be awkward and difficult to navigate skillfully”, is because it is a difficult book to read. Humbert Humbert is good at the art of convincing and I think it would be dangerous to potentially leave high school students with the incorrect message that this is a love story. And the reason I think this is a real danger is because there are adults in this world that think of it as a love story. One edition of the novel has the cover touting an assessment of it by Vanity Fair as “the only convincing love story of our century“. Moreover, the cultural perception we have of a “lolita” archetype and the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is of “a sexually precocious young girl“. We blame the child, who is around twelve when meeting Humbert Humbert. You know what’s normal: being prepubescent and having a crush on a teacher, or a baby-sitter, or the handsome and charming (maybe) boarder that is renting out a room in your house? You know what isn’t: reciprocating. There are a lot of missreadings of Lolita out there and I think this particular article does a good job of going into in depth analysis.

But for short-hand, here’s a rule of thumb: if you think Lolita is about love, then you’ve fallen for what Humbert Humber is feeding you and it is worth going back to the source material to reexamine. If anything, the crux of the novel is about the fallibility of perception, readers included.

So, I don’t think Lolita should be a part of the high school curriculum. But as mentioned at the start of this piece, bring it up was mostly a way into discussing the book I actually want to discuss and I actually did read in high school: José Emilio Pacheco’s Battles in the Desert or Batallas en el Desierto in its original language. Being set in Mexico and very engrained in Mexican history, I do think you get an extra layer out of it if you are Mexican, or at least research the political climate of the country over the last half century, but I think it serves as an excellent substitute to Lolita as an exercise in “seeing through the writing”. There are a couple of factors that play into this.

It is easier to disentangle. Battles in the Desert also portrays a relationship between a teenaged boy and an adult. However, the followed perspective is that of the adolescent Carlos; he is a teenaged boy with a crush oh his friend’s mom, and it is never treated as anything other than that by the surrounding characters. Because for the course of the narrative he is around the age of the students that would be reading it, if not a bit younger, it is easier to identify with him. Him misunderstanding the nature of his relationship with his friend’s mom is analogous to his not understanding the political climate that surrounds him. It is a feeling recognisable by many adolescents first engaging in political awareness.
The narration is less sweeping. It is narrated reflectively by an older, wiser Carlos, so the lens of writing wavers between the thoughts he had as a young boy and his retrospective knowledge of the events. There is a lot to dissect, but it is easier to grasp where truth ends and perspective begins because the narrator himself ruminates on it.
It is short. It was originially published as a short story in a newspaper, although I read it in the format of a short novel. The main benefit of this is the increased potential for it to be re-read. The best thing you can do for your understanding of Lolita is to read it at least twice. But at 336 pages, that is a big ask for high school students that already have a lot on their plate. Battles in the Desert is 68 pages long. Even if you just reapproach certain paragraphs or sections to bring them up in a report or presentation, you’re going to end up re-reading the majority of it anyway and, in doing so, gaining a more comprehensive understanding. A second read allows more reflection, with the benefit of knowledgability, and prepares a reader more for reading through the writing, getting at the crux of the piece.
It provides an interesting entrance into literature in history. Lolita and the sentiment in it is very much informed by its historical backing but in a way that is complex and layered, difficult to unpack, and subtextual. Battles in the Desert brings its historical leanings to the forefront, providing a clearer path to analysing the role both a character’s and the writer’s own historical context can inform the mood of a novel. It even provides an interesting avenue for exploring historical events that succeed it. I remember learning about the presidential term of Carlos Salinas de Gortari and being in awe that Battles in the Desert was actually written seven years before it and set almost half a century prior, so parallel was the sentiment in the novel with the sentiment felt by the Mexican people in the earlier 1990s.

Both books I talked about are excellent books that I think everyone should read at some point in their lives. However, I think every book has its moment to be read. The critical skills and analytical practices that are engaged with in the reading of Lolita might best be practiced first by high school students on a book like Battles in the Desert. At least, it might be a better avenue in an academic setting to begin exploring these themes. Whether or not its attachment to its setting in Mexico City would be alienating to a foreign audience is up to debate. Pacheco himself has doubted whether anyone not from Mexico City would understand his books, but it is my belief that the themes and realities he expresses, while culturally specific, are also universal. Besides, with the advent and subsequent popularities of movies like Roma, we have learned that cultural specificity (in the case of the film, also linked to Mexico’s capital) is not a deterrent for audience enjoyment.

Catcher in the Rye is overrated

Book mentioned: Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar. Spoiler-free.

Catcher in the Rye was one of the most disappointing reads of my adolescence. I read it in 10th grade English class when I was 15 and as soon as I turned the final page, the first thought that ran through my head was “Really?” This was supposed to be THE book of the 21st century. This was the book that got John Lennon killed. And as far as my 15-year-old brain could tell, all it was was 277 pages of some snotty teen wandering around and judging people.

As I got older, I wanted to understand why I had such a profound dislike for the book. As far as I could tell, it was a combination of reasons.

An overabundance of hype: Catcher in the Rye is one of those books that always makes it onto must-read lists. It’s an American classic. It has a legacy of violent reactions. It always makes it onto banned books list (which is usually the best place to find your next book). How could something ever hold up to a reputation like that? It’s a lot of pressure for a paperback.
I was the wrong age. A friend at university really enjoyed Catcher in the Rye when she read it. Lots of people enjoy Catcher in the Rye when they read it. With the advantage of hindsight, I think Catcher in the Rye has two potential readings, each informed by the age you are when you read it. You are a teenager and you take Holden’s word as gospel. He’s right. Everyone is a phony and no book has ever really captured that feeling of drifting through a world feeling like the only real thing that exists quite like this one. You are an adult. You read it with a twinge of nostalgia. Catcher in the Rye is like a pressed flower of your adolescence, a beautifully preserved rendition that captures all the complexities of emotions. With some distance, you can see when you were being silly or angsty and when your worries were legitimate and lasting, but there is a comfort in knowing that those feelings are universal. I may have been at just the wrong age, too old to identify fully with Holden (I thought he was whiny and waxed faux philosophical) but too young to recognise that I, without realising it, was still actually just like Holden (I was definitely whiny and waxed faux philosophical).
It isn’t Salinger’s best. A couple years after I read Catcher in the Rye I read Franny and Zooey and really enjoyed it. During high school we read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and I had no complaints. Catcher in the Rye was his first novel, published ten years before his second. Maybe he just had some skills he needed to perfect. Maybe I’m going to get hunted down for suggesting that literary genius J.D. Salinger wasn’t always a literary genius. Who can know?

Whatever the reason, I think high school is a difficult time to read the book. By high school, you’re starting to become self-aware (only starting) and beginning to notice the difference between angst and emotion. But you still feel it and it still feels dreadfully real. But you are aware of the judgement towards angsty teens. But you’re an angsty teen. But you’re totally not an angsty teen, you can see past that… right? Right? Holden Caulfield is an excellent scapegoat to an almost-self-aware-ashamedly-angsty teen, someone you can point to and say “now that’s angsty”. It’s a pity to miss out on the experience of enjoying a book just because you read it at the wrong age. To fear identifying with the main character so much that you reject the entire novel. So, my suggested solution would be to make it assigned reading in middle school, when angst is so new you don’t even recognise it as angst. If I could go back and create the perfect conditions for me to have enjoyed Catcher in the Rye, I would in a heartbeat. Maybe it would have worked. Maybe I would have still thought it was overrated. But in either case, I do think middle school me would have gotten more out of it than high school me and isn’t that more important?

But wait. What ever will high school students be able to read to assuage their teenage angst, to find a character they identify with, and to feel a little less alone in this strange and changing world?

THE BELL JAR.

OH YES.

THE BELL JAR.

Published around ten years after Catcher in the Rye but set in the same decade, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is a moving, deeply emotional rendition of what it is like to be on the cusp between adolescence and adulthood. When I first read it a couple of years ago, I was completely shocked. While Catcher in the Rye had a legacy as a piece of philosophical fiction (that I read as angsty), The Bell Jar had a legacy (at least in pop culture) as a piece of angsty work. The first time I ever saw it referenced was in the excellent Ten Things I Hate About You, read by the amusingly moody Kat Stratford. The book recieves another handful of mentions in other movies and tv shows, always being read by teenage girls, always framed as a reaction to angst. (Note: there is a strong case for the way in which material enjoyed by adolescent girls is universally despised and looked down upon because apparently teenaged girls aren’t allowed to enjoy anything, but if I make that point then I start using phrases like ‘patriarchy’ and ‘engrained misogyny’ and suddenly my point deviates entirely away from the very excellent book that is The Bell Jar and this one thing ever mentioned about this multiparagraph commentary is a single point writting in parentheses). But, this is probably the most wrong I’ve ever been about the book. It is one of the best, if not the best book I ever enjoyed, and it scratched the itch I thought Catcher in the Rye would scratch all those years ago. What the protagonist felt, her struggles, her insecurities, her worries, I identified with in a way that felt so personal that I’m in awe of how many acquaintances that have read it, with their varied personalities and expriences, agree. Its semi-autobiographical nature lends it a candor that is painfully real and relatable. What I thought would be angst is actually a struggle with mental health, an account that reveals personal struggles that underline universal problems. What do I want to do with my life? Where am I going? Why do I bother? Is there a point to all these activities I do and attempts I make?

If it’s not on a high school reading list, it should be, especially for seniors. I can’t imagine a better audience than a group of students about to leave the situation that has marked their norm for 18+ years. But it isn’t tied to an age or a moment in life. I read it my final year of university, a friend read it when they were between jobs, my mother read it on the winter holidays. It is a book about choice and the anxieties behind them and there will never be a moment in our lives where we are not making choices.

Catcher in the Rye is a book I read in high school and I wish I hadn’t. The Bell Jar is a book I read in high school and I desperately wish I had. Do I think the reason I read the one and not the other is because one stars a male teenaged protagonist while the other stars a female teenaged protagonist? I didn’t say that. (But yes).

I could end this with a more salient conclusion, comparing the two, speaking to their virtues (because I do think both are worth a read), but instead I’d rather quote Sylvia Plath in one of the most beautiful and haunting images I’ve ever had the pleasure to read (what was that I was saying earlier about the dangers of over-hyping something?).

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”