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READING AND WRITING IN THE 21ST CENTURY
The Cool Books Project
Independent School Readers
Winter 2008
Editor’s Note:
Fabulous core works of literature have been the staples of English classes for years — literature considered essential to a good education. But every year, teachers introduce students to new, rarely taught books, ones that the teachers have enjoyed enough to want to share, and from which they believe students can both learn and draw pleasure. What follows is a short list of such “cool books.” We are grateful for the teachers who have contributed to the list. We will continue to collect short descriptions of noncanonical books of merit — books that other teachers have used in class with success — and post them on the magazine's website (www.independentschool.org). If you are interested in contributing, please send your 200-300-word write-up to The Cool Books Project — and encourage colleagues to do the same. - The Pencil Test, by James Guilford
- View With a Grain of Sand, by Wislawa Szymborska
- Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer
- Only the Little Bone, by David Huddle
- No-No Boy, by John Okada
- Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie
- Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, by John Mandeville, and The Travels of Ibn Battutah, by Ibn Battutah
- Enduring Love, by Ian McEwan
- Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- Maus and Maus II, by Art Spiegelman
- This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski
- Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko
The Pencil Test, by James Guilford
As a new teacher, I have been searching for the perfect novel for teen readers. The perfect novel would deal with present-day manifestations of race, class, gender, and body-image issues without preaching and proselytizing. The perfect novel would be substantial enough to include in an English/language arts curriculum and yet engaging enough to keep students hooked. The perfect novel would challenge assumptions about the abovementioned concepts and yet fall outside of the usually suspects of socially conscious text. The Pencil Test by James Guilford — who is, himself, a former independent school teacher — is perhaps that novel.
The plot of The Pencil Test is rather unassuming. Kendry Clare, a middle-class white teen, moves to an all-black neighborhood. At her new school, Kendry’s desire for belonging and popularity leads her to tell a lie. Beneath this plot lay a maze of philosophical concepts. The Pencil Test complicates the hackneyed — albeit pertinent — themes of race, class, and gender with questions concerning the ability to define oneself, the contextual nature of power, the impact of naming, and the menace and utility of categorization. The author of The Pencil Test admits an investment in postmodern and postpositive ideology, and the influence of these philosophies reverberates through the text. The book’s narrative clearly posits the subjectivity of value systems, the absences of a single or absolute truth, and the ability of the individual to determine her or his purpose.
As a social justice text, The Pencil Test addresses issues relevant to teens in a contemporary context. As a curriculum piece, the novel allows for the study of various skills and elements. As a cool book, The Pencil Test engages readers with an intriguing plot, an aplomb narrative, and fully-realized characters. View With a Grain of Sand, by Wislawa Szymborska
Witty, mordant, poignant, Wislawa Szymborska's poems convey, in the framework of 20th- and 21st-century historical and scientific perspectives, existential exhilaration. Even the reluctant readers among my 12th-graders find the writing of this Polish poet (b. 1923) immediately approachable and provocatively philosophical. Never abstract or preachy, Szymborska, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, speaks in a colloquial voice, understated and ironic. (The lucid, idiomatic translations of Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanaugh in View With a Grain of Sand — selections from works published between 1957 and 1993 — are utterly convincing.) Among her great subjects are time (the juxtaposed valence of the immediate — the passing sensation — and the infinite), history, memory and loss, awareness of the body in both its beauty and mortality, and the consolations of sentience, however transitory. "Our Ancestors' Short Lives" and "Soliloquy for Cassandra," for example, question the nature of self with reference to contrasting temporal frames: its instantaneous reality and its potentiality, its paradoxically unknowable yet hyperconscious unfolding in history. "Tortures" bluntly but unhysterically chronicles humans' capacity for cruelty to one another as it simultaneously contemplates the inescapability — the definitiveness — of our corporeality. "On Death, Without Exaggeration" is a kind of postmodern "Death, Be Not Proud": "Whoever claims that it's omnipotent / is himself living proof / that it's not." Szymborska's work over and over again commemorates the miracle of the quotidian: while registering manifold sources of woe, she celebrates the wonder of existing at all, of mere percipience. The puniness of our being in cosmic space and time is balanced by its piquancy. Laughing so hard that they cry, the angels in "Slapstick" — and Wislawa Szymborska — find what is characteristically human in the absurdity of physical comedy: the capacity of mortals to snatch "this merriment dangling from terror." — Lewis Cobbs, Randolph School (Alabama) Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer
In a canonical curriculum, students rarely have the chance to read non-fiction. Like most English teachers, I believe they can address life's biggest questions and issues through connections to fictional characters and situations, but for a teenager in the throes of identity construction, there is nothing quite like reading about a teenager experiencing the same thing. A real teenager. Holden Caulfield will do the trick for some, the Garcia sisters for others, a few will fall for the Bennets or Hemingway's young travelers, but when I introduced my junior American Literature students to Christopher McCandless from Into the Wild, they almost all found a way into the book. I liked reading Into the Wild after a unit on Transcendentalism, in which students considered Thoreau's call to the wild and Emerson's push for self-reliance. Chris seemed a young and modern cousin of these two interesting gentlemen, practically their P.R. person for the new generation. Students enjoyed debating the extremity of Chris's response to the literature he was reading, his responsibility towards his family, the possibilities and dangers inherent in a decision to stray off the path laid out for an independent high school student. I was glad to be using Harkness, the student-based round table discussion method, as we discussed the book. The students needed very little guidance from me to engage with Krakauer's text. One final note: despite my students avid lobbying, I refused to show the movie. If kids wanted to see it, they could do it on their own, and many did. I felt it took major liberties with the text, and though interesting, did not suit my classroom needs. —Betsy Potash, The American College of Sofia (Bulgaria) Only the Little Bone, by David Huddle
When David Huddle's collection of stories, Only the Little Bone (David R. Godine, 1986), went out of print about 10 years ago, one of my most prized teaching tools had been stolen from my quiver. I had been using it with students since the mid-1980s, not only to give them a text that would inspire conversation about the elements of fiction, but to get them excited about their own writing, their own lives. The personal narrative is at the core of the writing curriculum at my school, so when I arrived 13 years ago, I knew I had found the perfect environment for putting this elegant book to work. I've always been on the hunt for books that can convince students that their experiences are worth writing about, that show them how the fragments of perception, acute but incomplete moments of childhood, can be elevated to high, subtle art. After Only the Little Bone disappeared, I was compelled to intensify the search beyond some of the titles already on the reading list (Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist; Richard Wright's classic Black Boy; certain poems by Elizabeth Bishop), to sniff out others that could join them, including the new "Five Book" version of The Prelude by William Wordsworth; Laurie Lee's pre-World War I Cotswolds memoir, Cider with Rosie (only available from Penguin UK); So Long, See You Tomorrow, the brilliant novella by William Maxwell; and poems by Marie Howe, Donald Justice, Ellen Voigt, and others. That 10-year period of disorientation was frustrating and fruitful, but now that Huddle's "cycle" of linked stories about a childhood in rural Virginia in the 1950s is back in print with a new publisher (Harmon Blunt), I feel that I'm home again. It's that good. — Ralph Sneeden, Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire) No-No Boy, by John Okada
If you have never heard of No-No Boy, a 1957 novel by John Okada, you are not alone. I stumbled upon this gem 15 years ago and now consider it one of the best books I've ever read. No-No Boy is the only novel by the Japanese-American Okada (1923–1971), who is himself the subject of a recently released documentary, "In Search of No-No Boy." It is a wonderful book for high school students, the level at which I teach, and could possibly work at in seventh and eighth grades as well. The title refers to Japanese Americans who refused to join the United States military during World War II and were, thus, deemed "no-no boys" for answering "no" to two questions posed by the U.S. government. As a result, the "no no boys" were sent to internment camps. The novel's protagonist, Ichiro, spends two years imprisoned, and, after his release, struggles for societal, familial, and self-acceptance. As a biracial American, I can relate to Ichiro's "double consciousness" and how he has a foot in both worlds. However, even if I were a straight-up white person or black person, the book would speak to me — as it does to my students. The issues of race, class, culture, ethnicity, and identity are powerfully and beautifully presented. Furthermore, No-No Boy is a great example of a Bildungsroman, a novel dealing with one person's formative years and spiritual education, a genre popular at the all-boys school where I teach. Emily Dickinson once wrote a letter saying that her own words "so chill and burn me." Her phrase resonates with me. The ultimate compliment about a piece of art is that it chills and burns us in some way — it makes us think, it makes us cry, or it leads us to a greater understanding of humanity and ourselves. No-No Boy chills and burns me. — Malcolm Lester, St. Albans School (Washington, DC) Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie
"What's the use of stories that aren't even true?" This question comes early in Salman Rushdie's fanciful novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and it also shapes the inquiry throughout the ninth grade English curriculum at San Francisco University High School, where I teach. Haroun is an excellent ninth grade text for several reasons. First, the story and the narrative voice are simple — deceptively simple. "You'll feel as if you're reading a fairy tale," I warn my students. "The question is, are you attentive enough to see what's really going on?" This challenge hooks the more accomplished students, but no matter what preparation someone received (or didn't receive) in middle school, he or she will be able to engage with this novel and participate in our conversations about it. Haroun is simple and unintimidating, a wonderful way to begin a young person's high school English career. But I am not shining my students on when I tell them this novel holds hidden complexities. Rushdie wrote it while in hiding; it was his first book after The Satanic Verses. It is simultaneously a political allegory, a wistful love letter to his young son, a celebration of other children's literature classics, and a meditation on the nature of truth and reality. It explores themes that are particularly well suited to introducing the value and relevance of writing, reading, and interpreting fiction. Finally, the wit, grace, and depth of Rushdie's prose make this novel an ideal place to begin to teach textual analysis. Students can quickly see how the author's use of language helps him to forward his themes. For example, in one passage, we note that the first paragraph comprises six long, complex, semicoloned sentences, and the very next one has 11 choppy clauses, each with no more than a few words. When the students figure out that this dramatic shift happens at the very moment when the protagonists have stepped onto the shore of "The Land of Perpetual Silence," it is not unusual for them to exclaim, as one young man did this fall, "That is so cool!" —Kate Garrett, San Francisco University High School (California) Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro's latest book, Never Let Me Go, is a quiet stunner. Intricately crafted and profoundly unsettling, it has readily provoked a sort of "reflective astonishment" in my students. Many of them are originally intrigued by the narrative voice — a young woman remembering her days at Hailsham, a seemingly idyllic haven that may strike independent school readers as reminiscent of a certain institution they know. But sensitive readers soon detect fissures in the apparent cocoon of privilege, and intrigue gives way to captivation as the engines of mystery take over and readers attempt to piece together a very unnerving subtext. Never Let Me Go, like so much of Ishiguro's work, is a masterpiece of subtle observation, and effectively captures that elusive sense of being a foreigner in one's own skin. Questions of identity, so resonant to young readers, unfurl continually as they forge their way toward a resolution that is both evocative and emotionally haunting, earning the book every syllable of its title. It's a disturbing read in the best sense of the word, stirring the reader to wonder what it means to be fully human, and what happens when we don't grant that humanity to others. — Mike Bazzett, Blake School (Minnesota) The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, by John Mandeville, and The Travels of Ibn Battutah, by Ibn Battutah
At The Madeira School, I teach a senior seminar entitled "Getting Medieval." The course title is both perhaps a too-clever reference to the 1994 Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction and also a nod to Carolyn Dinshaw's use of the phrase in her 1999 work exploring challenges to heteronormativity in the Middle Ages. Connecting medieval studies to contemporary American cinema is but one example of opening up both how students read the Middle Ages and what they read. The body of medieval English literature, like that of the entire canon, has been challenged, amended, unsettled, de-centered, and re-centered. The medieval texts appearing in (or disappearing from) anthologies serve as a slow but reliable bellwether of ongoing work in critical theory. Applying concepts from postcolonial studies to the Middle Ages, for example, tasks us with destabilizing the European center and draws our focus to extra-canonical texts where contact — between East and West, "civilized" and "monstrous" — offers a more nuanced view of medieval beliefs, identities, and nations. Two such texts, which I have students read in tandem, are The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and The Travels of Ibn Battutah. Both books describe the far-flung journeys each man took during the 1320s and 1350s. The travelers were of equivalent age, and both texts arrive in the mid-14th century: Mandeville's in French in England and Ibn Battutah's in Arabic, the latter reportedly transcribed from a scholarly garden party near Granada, Spain. Nothing of Mandeville is known aside from what his text reveals (he says he is a knight from St. Albans), while Ibn Battutah's background is well known (a scholar and judge of North African descent living in Morocco at the time of his journeys). Mandeville's text was wildly popular, famously in da Vinci's library and used by explorers from Columbus to Frobisher, while Ibn Battutah's account was contested as fiction and primarily gained an audience as a pilgrimage guide. Each text tells of fantastic places, real or imagined, the courts of foreign kings, and each provides a wealth of critically rich ethnographic encounters. Reading them together allows students to explore perspective and appreciate the plurality of experience in the Middle Ages. Overall, the texts embody a lesson as important today as in medieval times: to learn deeply, we must always be willing to travel outside our comfort zones. — Keith Ward, The Madeira School (Virginia) Enduring Love, by Ian McEwan
Enduring Love, by British novelist Ian McEwan, has one of the most compelling openings I have come across in modern fiction. By the time my 11th graders finish the first chapter, they are generally hooked. The random nature of the tragic balloon accident that opens the action and the precisely "fated" patterns of the narrator's subsequent downfall are beautifully interwoven. More than anything, this novel is fun to read. One of the most interesting characteristics of Enduring Love, from the point of view of teaching writing, is McEwan's use of narrative perspective. Joe, the narrator, is a scientific journalist — and his world is seen through this professional lens. Thus, his descriptions rely on the imagery of geometry, photography, astronomy, and geology. I find that this appeals to those students who generally don't find their interests represented by the writer/teacher/artist narrator so commonly found in literature. McEwan also explores other perspectives: Joe's partner, Clarissa, is a literature professor, and her worldview is colored by Milton and Keats. The mysterious Parry's view, in contrast, is heavily skewed both by his religious sensibilities and his psychosis. One of the joys of reading the novel is to see the way in which these three contrasting (and, at times, clashing) points of view skew the characters' perspectives on the same events. As if this weren't sufficiently complex, there are times when Joe decides to tell events from Clarissa's perspective, or, as he puts it, "at least from that point [of view] as I later construed it." The levels of embedded narrative approach the complexity of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at such moments. Storytelling is one of the text's main themes, so it seems a natural response to have the students think about how to explore contrasting narrative perspectives in their own work. It helps them to move outside their own experience and to broaden the range of their writing possibilities. — Eimer Page, Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire) Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlottle Perkins Gilman is best known as the author of the gothic novella The Yellow Wallpaper, but her real literary masterpiece is the first American feminist socialist utopian novel, entitled Herland, first published serially in Gilman's internationally acclaimed magazine The Forerunner in 1915. Gilman is the author of hundreds of poems, short stories, essays, and over a dozen books, ranging from fiction to cultural criticism to economic analysis. During her lifetime, Gilman was a well-respected socialist thinker, lecturer, and author. Her book Women and Economics (1898) was translated into seven languages, taught regularly in colleges and schools, and earned her an international reputation. I think Herland is an important text to teach in high school (grades 10–12), as a counterpart to such dystopian masterpieces as Brave New World and 1984, because it offers an alternative, female-centered perspective to these texts, presenting a positive view of socialism as well as offering a profound critique of U.S. capitalism, materialism, and chauvinism. In this book, three male explorers discover an unknown ancient civilization of women who reproduce by parthenogenesis and who live in an idyllic socialist society of their own design. Gilman uses the three men to reveal the elements of U.S. society that she wants to critique, and there is quite a bit of humor in her stunningly creative portrait of this ideal country. Students tend to love this book, but also reliably criticize Gilman on many counts that all prove fertile ground for discussion not only of her literary merit, but her social vision. Herland is not "high literature," but it holds an important place in the canon of American literature and social thought. — Valerie Ross, Castilleja School (California) Maus and Maus II, by Art Spiegelman
Teaching any piece of literature about the Holocaust necessitates starting with the question of whether adequate language exists to capture this genocide; however, the idea of a comic book about the Holocaust raises another set of questions altogether. Several years have passed since I taught Art Spiegelman's Maus and Maus II to eighth grade boys at the Collegiate School (New York), yet the success of these books remains vivid in my memory. These were the books that the boys went home and finished the first night they were assigned; these were the books that inspired every member of the class to talk during our discussions; and these were the books that enabled discussions that were highly focused on specific details of the language and the drawings, discussions that raised rich questions about the relationship between form and content in addition to numerous other things. What I was able to accomplish in terms of strengthening the boys' close reading and seeing skills was extraordinary. It's also noteworthy how well the books engaged so many different boys, and how they linked us to an enormous range of important topics — including, of course, the atrocity of the Holocaust, but also the complexities of father-son relationships and the experience of being the child of a Holocaust survivor. We also used the books as part of our preparation for the annual eighth grade trip to Washington DC, during which we toured the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The plethora of quality materials on Holocaust studies, particularly literature provided by Facing History and Ourselves, enabled us to supplement these two books with valuable background information, to bring in Holocaust survivors to talk with the students, and to show such films as Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants (which we did in collaboration with the French teachers). — Susan Fine, Chicago This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski
In "Auschwitz, Our Home," one of the short stories in Tadeusz Borow-ski's collection, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, the narrator exclaims, "Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in this war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers." When teaching the book to juniors in a Holocaust Literature class, this passage, and indeed the entire collection, challenges the students' notions of how they have been taught about the workings of the world. Hope, of all the human emotions, has a particularly important place in the lives of adolescents. At the doorstep to adulthood, hope is often the portal for an adolescent's dreams of what can be. But what happens when we are confronted by a world where a future is not certain, where the odds are against survival? Does hope motivate us to action, or, as Borowski's narrator asserts, does it paralyze us and make us less likely to act for survival? Are there times when hope gets in our way? These large questions lay at the heart of Borowski's collection. He reveals a precariously balanced atmosphere in which our understanding of justice and vengeance and hope and despair are separated by a microscopically thin line. Students discover that perhaps the chasms between qualities that we often view as opposites are actually parts of each other, that the thin line that separates emotions can be erased, and that the ensuing moral system is an amalgamation leading to an unknown world. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen may seem like an unnecessarily intense book for school, but there is a great deal of value in such a challenge. By asking students to read and analyze such emotionally difficult literature, we are asking them to move away from a comfort zone in order to think deeply about core values. We ask them to either reaffirm their beliefs, or to rethink the foundation on which their beliefs rest. Many pieces of literature accomplish this goal, but Borowski's text is so brutally honest that it forces us to confront the world and our understanding of human nature. Ultimately, it asks us to think about how we wish to live our lives. — Eric Temple, Carey School (California) Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko
In Leslie Marmon Silko's stunningly beautiful, episodic quest, Ceremony, a traumatized Laguna Pueblo vet returns to his New Mexican village after World War II to discover that his personal guilt for killing his Japanese brethren has become embodied as a collective disaster in the form of a prolonged drought. Betonie, the village's ancient medicine man, directs Tayo on a quest to cure both by recovering a migrant herd of cattle belonging to his family. On his journey, Tayo re-enacts the archetypes of his culture, confronts the "witchery" within and without, and reaches an extraordinary apotheosis in the very uranium pits that fueled the atomic explosions over Japan. As a Native American quest story, Ceremony implicitly examines the Christian underpinnings of most Western quest literature and sets up rich comparisons with other contemporary literature in this vein; Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato are particularly fine companion pieces. Although Ceremony can be taught successfully to 10th graders, it's the kind of novel that spring semester seniors routinely say "changed their lives." For a film pairing, try Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, whose pure cinematography and iterative Philip Glass score find a perfect visual and sonic rhetoric for the themes of Silko's novel. —Bill Bullard, Academic Dean, Collegiate School (New York) What non-canonical books have you or your collleagues had success in teaching? Contribute to The Cool Books Project. (Please remember to limit write-ups to 2000-300 words.)
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