Literary Blindspots You Blame On Your High School English Cu

I don't recall ever reading any Russian literature in high school or before, even though I was always in the advanced English classes. We did read a bunch of Jane Austen and one George Eliot book. The only assigned reading I recall outside of the Anglo classical canon was an essay from Michael Ondaatje. The deepest we ever got into American classics was The Great Gatsby, but otherwise we read Canlit or British stuff.

The only book I recall from outside the literary canon was a James Clavell novel I did a book report on, and I only picked it because I'd already read half of it and I wanted to spare myself some work.

Man I will totes win this thread:  

All of your typical public high school curriculum assigned reads have objectionable content, and my private church school didn’t want us learnin no swears or working out that people sometimes question principles they’ve grown up with or anything vulgar like that. Anything “worldly” was right out. My English teacher had to fight to be allowed to teach a single Shakespeare play.

Joke’s on them; my older cousin taught me all the swears when I was in second grade, & my parents didn’t censor my reading. But classic lit didn’t have dragons or magic* or robots** in them, I didn’t have any friends outside the church & had no idea what you were “supposed” to read in high school. If it was on my grandma’s shelf I’d read that kind of lit if I needed a book, but mostly I never touched any of that biz til I was...god probably in my early 20s. Maybe later. Didn’t even know most of it even existed.



*have never ever figured out why my parents didn’t ban sci-fi/fantasy. TBH they probably legit did not care as long as I was being quiet for once.
** I mean obviously I found Jules Verne

I just googled for that Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels to see if there was anything there which was obviously missing for me. Wanted to see if there were any there which I probably should have read when I was younger but never did. After looking at that, I'll say that I never read "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Vonnegut nor "Animal Farm" by Orwell. Those feel like books I should have read when I was at least school-age.

I've only read 10 of those books. Hell, I'm a librarian and I've only even fucking heard of like half of those books. Who are these people?

About eight years after I graduated, I ran into my old high school English teacher out in the wild (a Dandy Warhols show). I ended up introducing myself as one of his ex-students and he ended up laying down the emotional burden that he'd felt his career was a waste of time and he'd never actually gotten anything through to any of his students (I know this was a plot of an old Twilight Zone episode, but this did really happen). He asked me if I could name anything I'd actually gotten out of his class that I'd carried with me, probably expecting me to extol that slogging through Catcher in the Rye had actually changed my life in some profound way that didn't involve killing any of the Beatles. And I really didn't have anything. Luckily the girl I'd taken to the concert held a Literature degree and could actually give a real answer about something he'd assigned and that meant something to him (she'd never gone to that school), but that's always been the moment that stuck out about high school English curriculum.


As for stuff I think I was supposed to have read, we did one or two Hemingway short stories but I've still yet to read a novel, a few Faulkner stories but nothing novel-length (I hated the short stories but ended up reading a few books as an adult--one or two decent ones plus Intruders in the Dust which I hold as the worst experimental novel by a respected author), nothing from the nineteenth century women's section aside from a few Emily Dickinson poems I found dreadful (I now have an appreciation for Jane Austen after having read her during my sleeping with a Jane Austen fangirl period but still have no desire to touch anything Bronte), F. Scott Fitzgerald (which I've read on my own and found the Great Gatsby to be vastly superior to anything else he put out, save the last chapter only of This Side of Paradise) or Moby Dick (I don't even know if that's common high school curriculum anymore). What I remember was the typical Twain (which I liked), Dickens (the only author I felt I was actually taught how to read), Shakespeare (virtually no opinion), and for some reason Russell Banks (which I remember was promptly dropped from the curriculum afterward).

I had a similar experience with a teacher that my friends and I encountered in the wilds at a horse racing track a few years after we graduated from high school. He did not have any existential crisis though about wasting his career. He was drunk and bought us overpriced beers. We chugged said beers and then yelled at horses with him.

Capital Region nonsense that all of maybe three people on this forum will understand. AW YE YE!

Unfortunately he did not treat us to breakfast on a morning enchanted or otherwise.