book lust

this post may be completely uninteresting to you unless you’re just really into education talk.

i’ve been wrestling a lot with what book i’m going to have my classes read. when making a decision on a class text, there seem to be two general schools of thought:

1) they can’t read real literature. by real, i’m referring to any kind of text that holds some level of respectability in the literary world. for example, a teacher who holds this perspective might eschew walt whitman’s leaves of grass in favor of jewel’s a night without armor.

2) they can only read real literature, whether they can handle it or not. in this school of thought, the word real is used in a slightly different way. here, real literature is narrowed to only include texts by Dead White Men. and the students’ ability to “handle” a text is contingent upon several factors. maybe the text is too hard. or maybe it’s just too boring. either way, nobody wants to read it.

obviously both sides are terrible, and most educators want texts that are interesting and (for lack of a better term) good. i felt smarter when my teachers had high expectations for me. my undergrad thesis advisor made me feel like he believed i could make a living as a professor someday, and that helped me produce my best paper, ever. i wonder if the same could work for my students.

so i’ve gone back and forth. waffling between delillo, woolf, dubois, ishiguro, lahiri, morrison, alexei, mishima, jin, baldwin, and the like. old school texts and contemporary lit.

but now, i think i’m gonna settle on lahiri’s interpreter of maladies, her  collection of short-stories. i think i’m gonna run with that one.