Reading lists speak volumes in schools

Novels by Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Jose Saramago have elbowed their way onto high school reading lists in Boston's western suburbs in recent years, as teachers search for writing that will spark their students' imaginations.

Most teenagers are still introduced to Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, as well as Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But in a trend that educators say is picking up speed, contemporary authors are supplanting ''dead white male" writers.

''If we really push all classics, all the time, it gets too heavy," said Kathryn Delaney, the English curriculum coordinator at Watertown High School. ''When students bring a book home and their parents say, 'I read that when I was in school!' a lot of kids don't like it."

Arthur N. Applebee, an education professor at the University at Albany, found in a 1993 survey of public high schools that the 10 most required books were ''Romeo and Juliet," ''Macbeth," ''Huckleberry Finn," ''Julius Caesar," ''To Kill A Mockingbird," ''The Scarlet Letter," ''Of Mice and Men," ''Hamlet," ''The Great Gatsby," and ''Lord of the Flies."

He said there has been ''quite a bit of broadening" since then, noting that the new books introduced can vary widely from school to school.

What ''great literature" students should be required to read has sometimes been a subject of heated debate. It flared up in the 1990s on college campuses. Some people argued for a set body of literature, a canon that all should read.

Others argued that reading only those books ignores more recent works by women and minorities and reinforces a Western-centric view of the world. Massachusetts teachers say incorporating modern works isn't undermining the literary canon, it's supplementing it.

''The all-white-male canon has been gone quite a while," said Bonita LaBelle, who directs the English program at Shrewsbury High School.

What the newcomers are replacing varies significantly among schools and teachers, an informal survey of several high schools in the western suburbs found.

A few Shakespeare works get dropped, as do novels written by 19th-century authors such as Dickens and Hawthorne, who are increasingly viewed as too dense or remote.

Even some English class staples written in the 20th century have not been spared. Novels such as ''The Catcher in the Rye," ''A Separate Peace," and ''Slaughterhouse Five" have quietly been discarded.

But Carol Jago, a high school English teacher at Santa Monica High School in California and the author of ''With Rigor for All: Teaching the Classics to Contemporary Students," said that too many teachers are assigning books of lesser quality. ''It's walking down a blind alley to look for books that the kids will think is fun," she said. Some ''multicultural" writing, such as ''The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan and ''The Bean Trees" by Kingsolver, are not ''sturdy enough" to be taught alongside all-time classics, she said.

''It's a waste of instructional time," she said. Jago also said some of these books are not sufficiently difficult to prepare students for college-level reading.

Grace Strother, a Watertown High School junior, enjoyed reading such classics as ''Macbeth," ''The Great Gatsby," and ''Death of a Salesman," though Dickens's ''Great Expectations" was not her cup of tea. The plot didn't hold her interest, she said, and the run-on sentences and melodrama didn't help.

''It was just so hard to get through," she said.

In the end, creating a reading list that balances literary merit, personal resonance, and suitable difficulty invariably involves some bias, teachers said.

''There's always going to be a certain subjectivity," said Will Cook, chairman of the English department at Framingham High School.

Surprisingly, in an era of increased state oversight of local schools, teachers are generally free to decide what students read. The state Education Department has a broad list of authors that should be sampled, if only in excerpt form, but has no required reading list.

State guidelines suggest that schools assign classics and contemporary works ''that reflect the diversity of American life today, and works from other cultures around the world from many historical periods."

Delaney now has her Watertown students read John Irving's ''A Prayer for Owen Meany," published in 1989. The quirky, rambling book about a small boy who accidentally kills his best friend's mother with a baseball is the type of novel that until recently would not have landed on a high school reading list. But while the book eludes some students, it has become a favorite, she said.

Jim McCallum, head of the English department at Milford High School, said that type of freedom allows teachers to adjust their assignments to individual classes and keeps them from teaching the same books year after year.

''It keeps them from getting stale," he said.

While teachers strive to expose students to a range of literary styles and eras, having students read great literature of any stripe is the main goal, McCallum said. He said that more contemporary novels tend to grab students' interest.

Class and racial differences sometimes play a role, teachers said. Cook, the English chairman at Framingham High, where many students hail from Brazil, said working-class immigrants may find it difficult to relate to world-weary Holden Caulfield, the prep school protagonist of ''The Catcher in the Rye."

Dense writing and slower-moving stories often bore students, Cook said. He said he has tried teaching Joseph Conrad's ''Heart of Darkness" several times, even showing students the movie ''Apocalypse Now," which is loosely based on the book. But it just doesn't seem to translate. ''Students want action, not a psychological study," Cook said.

The increased amount of time adolescents spend watching television and movies and playing video games may be partly to blame, analysts say. David Walsh, a psychologist and the president of the National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis, said excessive exposure to electronic media curtails attention spans and the ability to think critically.

''Students come in with the expectation that everything fast is better," Walsh said. ''It's transformed cultural literacy into pop cultural literacy."

A March survey by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation of more than 3,000 third- to 12th-graders found that students spent almost four hours a day watching television and DVDs and just 43 minutes reading.

Frances Fleming, chairwoman of the English department at Needham High School, teaches ''Heart of Darkness" in tandem with ''Things Fall Apart," by Nigerian Chinua Achebe, to give students contrasting views of colonialism. Similarly, she juxtaposes Toni Morrison's ''Song of Solomon" with Bible passages.

Some ancient books have a timeless appeal. Cook said his students invariably enjoy the Oedipus trilogy by Sophocles and Shakespeare's ''Romeo and Juliet."

But Strother, the Watertown student, said modern novels strike a more personal chord. She loved ''After the First Death," a novel by Robert Cormier that is narrated by three teenagers, and ''Imani All Mine," by Connie Porter, about a 14-year-old unwed mother.

''You don't always get to read about teenagers," she said.