Here’s Your Assignment

Teachers often turn to the same tried and true books for high school reading assignments. So we asked a group of writers: What books would you add to the curriculum? Here are their answers.

I’d love to see Octavia E. Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower”read in more high school English classes. It’s a brilliant, endlessly rich dystopian novel that pairs well with “1984” or “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and it’s also a fascinating exploration of how crises can fuel new religious and ideological movements.

The Bible, particularly the old, beautiful translations (I personally enjoy the King James). I am no longer religious, but I regard it as a great tragedy that more people don’t study the Bible. As a work of literature the Bible has everything: poetry, philosophy, storytelling, myths, fictions, riddles, fables, parables, allegories. Its sentences both provoke and obscure, often resisting a single interpretation. They do not yield easily to our understanding. I’ve long felt that there is great value in reading a text that does not open itself up too easily, that keeps some of its secret meanings hidden. What you learn is a critical skill, the patience to read things you do not yet understand.

Instead of having students read “Animal Farm” or “1984,” the usual George Orwell fare, I would offer them Orwell’s “A Collection of Essays,” particularly “Such, Such Were the Joys,” “Charles Dickens,” “Shooting an Elephant,” “Why I Write” and “Politics and the English Language.” They’ll absorb into their intellectual bloodstreams an antidote to not just the madness of the present political regime but also, on the other end of things, the P.C. cant and “smelly little orthodoxies” of the college professors soon to be instructing them.

Two years ago, I’d have had a different answer, but now I’d ask them to read Stanley Milgram’s electrifying “Obedience to Authority.” When a startlingly docile population is succumbing to the often treacherous locutions of a so-called strongman, this study of our essential moral pliability takes on a fresh urgency. “Lord of the Flies,” which is already on many schools’ lists, narrates how easily children become savages, but “Obedience to Authority” relates how easily adults abdicate responsibility, and illuminates the horror that ensues when we placidly do as we are told.

I really wish someone would have pointed me toward the criminally neglected but astonishingly brilliant and entirely original essay collection “The Omni-Americans,” by the genuine Renaissance man, Albert Murray. In our current moment of identity politics and multicultural Balkanization, Murray offers a vision of America in all its grandeur and maddening complexity. I wish I had read him in high school because it took me entirely too long to understand so simple and irrefutable a truth: “But any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.”

I would love to see Nicola Yoon’s “The Sun Is Also a Star” added to a high school reading curriculum. This book is about immigration, isolation and family, wrapped up in the guise of a love story. As an immigrant myself, it would have meant the world to me to read about characters experiencing and surmounting the struggles that closely mirrored my own.

Students sometimes show up at college with the idea that economics is some kind of master science. Worse, some of them leave with that idea reinforced. Robert L. Heilbroner’s “The Worldly Philosophers” is an inoculation against that mistake. An accessible but serious study of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and more, it presents economics as “the science that has sent men to the barricades” to fight over how people should live together. This book is a resource for a time when young people have realized that those fights are not settled, when students are once again puzzling and struggling over political economy, from Trumpist kleptocracy to libertarianism to democratic socialism.

“A People’s History of the United States,” by Howard Zinn. The history of our country has always been taught from the perspective of the colonizers, but this book sets out to present the untold stories of the victims of colonization; it is the oppressed people’s history. Spoiler: Colonizers are not the heroes in this book.