I recently got an interview request from Louisville Magazine to share my thoughts about books.  A thrill!  Anyone who hasn’t read E. Lockhart surely must, and I will tell them so.  Also the fine nature of Curtis Sittenfeld’s “American Wife” must be trumpeted. They also asked me, Which book do you think should be required for high school students?

You’d think, what with all my opinions and the fact that I taught middle-school for quite a while, I’d be able to name one, but I am having the hardest time with that question!  Part of the trouble is that I’ve been traveling since I got the interview request, so I haven’t been able to look at the bookshelf, but I can picture it pretty well and can’t seem to name anything perfect.

I offered The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson, since, as Queen says (although not about this book), it is “guaranteed to blow your mind” if you are in high school.  A story about Napoleon’s chicken-cook and a girl with webbed feet, set in Venice, The Passion has history, love, world-melting, and beautiful language.  But does it expose the reader to new insights about the actual world?  Does it help develop empathy?  (It may, and maybe I just can’t remember, but that doesn’t seem to be one of its salient features, and high-school students can be so grounded in their own worldview that I’d want to recommend a book that forces discussion of differences.

For that, I might recommend The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, about four sisters stuck on their parents’ mad mission trip to the Congo.  Kingsolver alternates perspectives and each girl’s voice is amazingly distinct; we learn about history and geography, we’re moved by the stories, and the problems of Colonialism would spark a meaty discussion.  But the book is pretty accessible, and if I get to make students read something, shouldn’t it be something they might not finish on their own?

Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex might strike a good balance between The Poisonwood Bible and The Passion.  A story about an intersex kid growing up in Michigan, the granddaughter of Greek immigrants, this book won a Pulitzer Prize and is both world-broadening and stylistically cool.  But is the book a little cold?  Would high-school students want to keep going with it?

Oh, maybe Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison.  Everyone in my sophomore-year English class loved this story, about four generations of African-Americans in the south, for the rich language, aforementioned world-melting nature, and the fact that it recounted an experience outside of our own.  Hmm, that is definitely seeming like the most likely contender so far, maybe because I have firsthand experience of what it felt like to read it.  It was like hiking through the woods only to come upon a glacier field–gorgeous, unique, and totally unexpected.  On the other hand, this is already on lots of lists.  I want to make a splash in my fictional curriculum!

Any thoughts, reader friends?  What do you think all high-school students should read, and why?