I read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver in high school. That one stands out in my memory, because it’s the only book I remember liking so much that I sought out a bunch of other books by the author and read those as well. So that’d be my pick for what should be read in high school.
You know, I’ve teared up reading books before, but that was the only one where I full-out wept. I finished it at 3am and just started sobbing. My husband woke up and asked me what was wrong. I said, “I just finished Maus,” and he said, "Yeah. I’m sorry.”
I read it as an adult. I agree, it’s an amazing book that I still remember well even decades after I read it.
The “mice” were depicted as the downtrodden good guys. The Poles were not depicted as good guys.
Right- Mice, not rats.
I mean the message- Nazis are bad, the Jews were mistreated- hardly is groundbreaking. Mind you, I dont hate the book, it is okay, but it was not “banned” (it was taken off a reading list for one grade, but still in the school library).. It is hardly a great work of literature. Now, the Diary of Anne Frank- that is great.
That’s not the message. That’s the context. You seem to have missed a lot of the literary nuance. Fortunately, the people who awarded it a Pullitzer prize seem to have gotten it.
Count me as one who loved/loves it.
Echoes for today, judging by some of our threads: “Who gave you orders? I’ll go after him. He’s the one to kill.”
"You’re wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told them: “Clear those people out or it’s your job.”
“Well, there’s a president of the bank. There’s a Board of Directors. I’ll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank.”
The driver said: "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were: “Make the land show profit or we’ll close you up.”
“But where does it stop? Who can we shoot?”…
“I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t man at all.”
Clearly you are not the only one since it is such a common book to be assigned to read when in high school.
Note I am not saying it should be assigned, only that I got much out of it. I also loved The Once and Future King, and wanted all my friends in high school to read it. None did; a few tried and got only a chapter or so in.
That’s one I did have to read in high school (and liked it).
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson . Cam lead to talk about Climate Change
Some that I would recommend:
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (2000). This is a book I would LOVE to have read in high school, but it had not yet been written. A demystification of the writing process, by someone who credibly knows a thing or two about it.
An Underground Education by Richard Zacks (2010). Zacks is a wiseass with the lurid stories behind what you’ve heard about in literature, history and other sacred disciplines. Dirty jokes in Shakespeare? The sordid original tale behind Sleeping Beauty? How did people empty their bowels and bladders indoors before the invention of toilets? What kind of underwear did women wear in earlier centuries? I can’t vouch for the guy’s accuracy, but at the least, you’ll never look at history quite the same way again!
Parliament of Whores by PJ O’Rourke (1991). What does the US Government do? How did it get so big? Why does it cost so freakin’ much? The questions Alexis de Tocqueville probably meant to ask 200 years ago are addressed here (early 90s) with the appropriate level of awe and reverence (not much). O’Rourke made his name as a writer and editor for National Lampoon back in its glory days and as a columnist for Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly, The Weekly Standard and others. He’s written 18 books since leaving the Lampoon, many of which are compilations of his magazine articles. Around 1995, satire took a back seat to conservative polemics, but Parliament (1991) was the peak of his humorous period.
Sin Boldly!: Dr. Dave’s Guide To Writing The College Paper By David R. Williams, 2004. Basically, The Elements of Style for college students who have to write a thesis paper. This was written by a local guy when I was teaching at Northern Virginia Community College, and the second half of it–an elderly man’s rant against Political Correctness–is eminently skippable. How do you need to phrase your thesis? What do you need to do to explain or defend it? How many pages does it need to be? All the details your professor refuses to discuss on unfathomable principle, Prof. Williams goes into just the appropriate amount of detail on. It’s a quick read, which I know is a boon to busy college students.
MAUS comes up a little short in my estimation. He undercuts the reliability of his narrator (Holocaust survivor dad and counterculture icon son, what do you expect?). He got a Pulitzer prize for it, but not in their existing categories of comic books, editorial cartoons, biography, autobiography, or history. Other Pulitzer laureates in his particular category are mostly jazz musicians, which I respect, but this does not augur well for his distinction as a Writer about the Holocaust, IMO. Every major Jewish cartoonist with comparable Holocaust creds has hated this book, but that could just be petty jealousy. Anyway, approach this one with trepidation. You might want to go with Anne Frank or Elie Weisel instead.
Maurice Sendak seems to respect it. I suppose we can No True Scotsman quibble over “major Jewish cartoonist” or significant enough “Holocaust creds”
Maurice Bernard Sendak (/ˈsɛndæk/; June 10, 1928 – May 8, 2012) was an American author and illustrator of children’s books. Born to Polish-Jewish parents, his childhood was impacted by the death of many of his family members during the Holocaust.
To mark the publication of Sendak’s We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy — about homeless children living in cardboard boxes — Sendak collaborated on a comic strip for The New Yorker with his friend Art Spiegelman, author of the graphic novel Maus. The cartoon illustrates a conversation the two men had in which Spiegelman said, *“*When parents give Maus, my book about Auschwitz, to their little kids, I think it’s child abuse. I want to protect my kids.”
Sendak’s response summed up his philosophy as a storyteller. “You can’t protect kids,” he said. “They know everything.”
I should have said “Every major Jewish cartoonist with comparable Holocaust creds THAT I’M AWARE OF, WHO WEIGHED IN ON IT” even though I’ve actually met Sendak (a couple years before Spiegelman started serializing MAUS in RAW). Harvey Pekar was particularly dismissive of it. Howard Chaykin didn’t think much of it. (I’ve also met Spiegelman, a wonderful raconteur and overall comics scholar, gentleman, and practitioner. I just thought MAUS missed the mark.)
Have you actually read Maus? And I mean actually read it in its entirety, cover to cover. Not just looked at excerpts or other people’s commentary. Have you read it? Yes or no.
Had I read Catcher In the Rye in high school, I might have related to Holden Caufield a bit more.
I read the book when I was the same age as Holden Caulfield, but 1950s New York City might as well have been another planet for a kid in 1970s Southern California. I couldn’t relate to anything in that book.
It was after 2004 for me, and I was in my early 30s. And I grew up in Southern Indiana.
For some reason this is a deeply polarizing book, and I’ve seen more nays than yays. I love it, but my love for it comes from who I was at age 13 and what I needed not just as an adolescent but as a writer. Until that point, I’d been reading the kind of lofty classics and my own writing had that kind of affected tone.
So with a background in the likes of Dickens, I read the opening line and was just floored. Oh, literature can be this. It can be messy and uncomfortable and protagonists can be flawed and there can be all this subtext…it was really a revelation for me.
I don’t think anything has influenced my writing more, not even so much in style (though that comes out in my dialogue) but the kinds of characters I like to write. Just people out there on the margins barely holding it together.
An improper use of the term “banned” it was removed from the 8th grade reading list. It was still available in the library.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/31/1076970866/maus-banned-tennessee-school-board
News of the McMinn County School Board’s unanimous vote to remove Maus from its curriculum — and replace it with something else
Books are removed from reading lists all the times for various reasons. That is not a Ban no matter what the NYT or any or media calls it.
Great book for advanced readers.
Maus is criticized by others-
““According to writer Arie Kaplan, some Holocaust survivors objected to Spiegelman making a comic book out of their tragedy.[180] Literary critics such as Hillel Halkin objected that the animal metaphor was “doubly dehumanizing”, reinforcing the Nazi belief that the atrocities were perpetrated by one species on another, when they were actually done by humans against humans….Commentators such as Peter Obst and Lawrence Weschler expressed concern over the Poles’ depiction as pigs,[188] which reviewer Marek Kohn saw as an ethnic slur[189] and The Norton Anthology of American Literature called “a calculated insult”.[190] Jewish culture views pigs and pork as non-kosher, or unclean, a point of which the Jewish Spiegelman was unlikely to be ignorant.[
And yes, it won a special type of Pulitzer, as below
Over 2000 Pulitzers have been awarded, few are part of the normal 8th grade reading list.