An Idaho lawman, introduced a bill that would require all Potato State students to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and pass a test on it to graduate from high school. I could support that if he also allowed me to introduce a bill that forced all Spudniks to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If you could compel all students in your state to read just one book, what would it be?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
The Razor’s Edge – W. Somerset Maugham
I’m going to cheat and break it down by topic (so one book per topic):
English: The Elements of Style (Strunk and White)
History: A People’s History of the United States (Zinn)
Science: A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson)
Economics: The Great Crash 1929 (Galbraith)
Nature: Silent Spring (Carson)
Math: How to Solve It (Polya)
I pick the counterweight to Atlas Shrugged….The Lord Of the Rings.
It is a good study for English, grammar and syntax, poetry, geography, History, and how it’s more than dry numbers, but people and stories, languages and writing systems (fantastical, yes, but an introduction of sorts to Anthropology and philology).
English: Allan Guranus, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
Science: William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, etc.
History: John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction: after the Civil War
Civics: Hal Crowther, Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South
Gosh, I’m keeping this list and gonna go see if a couple are available at my local lending library.
The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
or
The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan
To be able to answer the question, I reframed it as “If I were to have my daughter read one book which might help her understand our society, and only a book that I read as a teenager…” and immediately The Jungle by Upton Sinclair came to mind.
A close second for books that profoundly affected me as a teenager would be All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.
What an intriguing question…it causes more book titles to come up from the memory well…Black Like Me…and more…hmmm, maybe I will create a recommended reading list for my daughter.
Love your 2 and 3 picks. Though I wonder if they feel more antiquated than they did 20 or 30 years ago. It seems unlikely to me that they’ll last as long as the great Russian novels or Dickens.
My picks:
Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.
I’ll second Lord of the Rings.
Battle Cry of Freedom, which every American should read.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, to remind us how communities really live and why it’s important that we learn how to engage with our own again.
Oh, and of course Invisible Man: the most essential American novel of the 20th century
A la Recherche Du Temps Perdu.
(Alright, alright…of course I’m just kidding!)
you just say that because you are using it in your research.
Only if read in the original French.
I want a cookie.
Even the English translation reads better than Atlas Shrugged. Much better. But it’s every bit as boooooooooooooring as Atlas Shrugged, and just as impossible to finish. I think Sartre was faking. Simone should never have trusted him.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Well, duh. The Riverside Shakespeare. All 1902 pages.
Well, just because I myself haven’t worked through all the histories doesn’t mean I can’t compel all the students in my state to read them!
OK, I’ll settle for them memorizing, say, 10 sonnets, and reading (aloud, in a group) Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest (my fave), and King Lear. OK, Romeo and Juliet too, and a Midsummer Night’s Dream.
It’s ok to require only Hamlet imo
The Grapes of Wrath
Good choice — as would “To Kill a Mockingbird”
Play (read out loud in class): “The Merchant of Venice” or “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”
Serialized (again out loud in class): “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
Short story: “Billy Budd”
Non-fiction: any one of Malcolm Gladwell’s books or “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”
The book: “Snow in August” by Pete Hamill because it’s beautifully written, accessible to high school age children, the male characters and baseball theme will hold the attention of boys, and it will touch the hearts of girls.
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
Because it is the best answer I’ve ever read to the only question that really matters.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
A virtuostic, entertaining show of how the personal (in all its categories) is the political (in all ITS categories).
I’m enjoying the discussion here.
The Guardian’s list best books
Any of those would be excellent and necessary reading. I’d probably repeat someone else’s suggestion of “To Kill a Mockingbird” – it’s a novel that is still very relevant. Perhaps some Vonnegut should be on a reading list – “Cat’s Cradle” would make for a nice intro to his universe.
I was thinking God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, though I haven’t read that one since I was about 14. It left a mark, though…
Slaughterhouse five would top my Vonnegut reading list.
Stranger in a Strange Land
.
The Human Condition in a nutshell, showing we are indeed, smooth apes.
It has everything you need in a teaching environment. Plus, unlike so many listed here, students would actually read, and enjoy it.
.
Booker T Washington, Up From Slavery
Dune – Frank Herbert
Politics, ecology, religion, plus a mind-blowing vision of Human potential. It changed how I look at the world.
Fear is the Mind-killer
That was my first thought too.
There are lots of neat things in it, but Dune features an Arab jihad overthrowing the government and establishing a dictatorship. I wouldn’t make it the central reading of American education after the last Bush administration.
The Holy Bible /snark
Actually, read as literature, the first books of the old testament are quite beautiful and the stories and teachings form the basis for much of western thought. I can give the new testament a pass, pretty much. I would combine selected readings with something like “Who Wrote the Bible?”
Although, re the new testament, I would add that Revelations is a complete freakout acid trip.
Slaughterhouse V – Kurt Vonnegut (Fiction)
Hiroshima – John Hershey (Non-Fiction)
I’ve posted this before, but what the heck.
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein, 1959
The Heinlein is for the discussion that it arouses in class. It was fireworks, and it was beautiful.
Well as the youngest reader of your blog, here’s what I read in high school, mostly in the 11th grade English when I was 16 (2004-2005):
All Quiet on the Western Front (10th grade)
Catch-22
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Great Gatsby
1984
The Scarlett Letter
A People’s History of the United States (11th history)
Oh, and a compare/contrast essay on Patrick Henry’s speech urging the colonists to go to war, constrasted with Barack Obama’s speech against the Iraq War.
My favorite teacher by far was my 11th grade English teacher; his assignments were thought-provoking, and he knew his shit. It was harder than a lot of my college courses.
That’s a great list for raising social consciousness. I wonder, do students read Babbitt anymore? It made a big impression on me back in the day.
Seems like The Scarlett Letter has been on the HS reading list since forever. I read it in 1971, and my daughter read it in 2012.
Catch-22
“I could support that if he also allowed me to introduce a bill that forced all Spudniks to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Not The Iron Heel?
Not The USA Trilogy (or even one of the three novels that comprise it)?
Not The Grapes of Wrath?
Anyway, don’t you love it when these patriotic liberty-lovers get all fascist on us, using the schools for the most blatant political indoctrination?
The right forced courses on The Red Menace and on Americanism on high schools back in the Cold War.
I actually had a required course sponsored, if I recall correctly, by either the American Legion or the John Birch Society.
At a high school in Massachusetts!
Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain
Pretty much anything by Mark Twain.
Naked Lunch
“The March of Folly” by Barbara Tuchman.
“Collapse” by Jared Diamond
Actually, I think that the really amusing intellectual exercise associated with the Spud-brain’s Randite reading assignment, is coming up with the TEST that would be used as a graduation requirement.
For Whom The Bell Tolls
What’s The Matter With Kansas?
Joy of Cooking
The inability to feed yourself is demoralizing, demeaning and makes clear thinking very I’d fficult
My first cookbook, still used from time to time. The recipes in Mark Bittman’s compendium “How to cook Everything” work better, imo.
That’s good too, but ifind that as a total reference for when for example you forgot how to make frosting or how long to cook lobster the Joy of Cooking will have the answer for anything. Not always the best answer, but an answer.
Absolutely right. That’s usually why I still return to it from time to time.
Loved it when it was new. Now have the current edition. Always a handy resource.
Other than that I would recommend Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence. It is a usEful guide to running your life.
That was my second thought, after Dune. ZAMM is at the top of my personal list, but maybe not for everyone.
One of my favorite books, but question how valuable it is for high school students.
I guess that’s the point then. We love our books, plural. The curiosity and creativity that my mom used to say was inspired by the gift of fairy tales; is a lifetime experience of the new day in our local bookstore where what may await me is the discovery of yet again another, perfect book.
As a militant atheist I would require a thorough reading of the Bible. The only book that can truly turn believers into thinkers.
In my experience, no book by itself can do that, unfortunately. Believers have to be metaphorically kicked down the stairs a few times before they start to let go of their preconceptions.
But I absolutely agree that the bible should be read carefully and critically.
“You can lead a man to knowledge but you can’t make him think”
kicked down the stairs like Oscar Romero for example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN6LWdqcyuc
monolithic anti-religion statements, i.e. intolerance.
The Federalist Papers
NOBODY would read that if we weren’t still stuck with that abortion they produced at Philadelphia.
Of course, I have to admit that I haven’t read Atlas Shrugged, so maybe I shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss it. But then you look at its effect on the people who fall under its influence, like Paul Ryan, and how much more do you need to know?
I have and it wasn’t worth the effort, so don’t waste your time
Take your typical teen-age It’s All About Me fantasy, project it onto a gaggle of super duper Howard Hughes type entrepeneurs. Now have them all go away to their secret invisible super high-tech walled garden hide-away, where they all hold their breath and pout til the world turns blue and falls apart because, let’s face it, the rest of us just can’t live without them.
Slather that with copious amounts of pretentious pontification and you’ve got Atlas Shrugged.
You should read it. It provides a clear template to the fascist loons on the right.
Mein Kampf makes more sense.
Quotations from Chairman Mao is an easier read and makes more sense.
Song of Soloman (King’s James Version) is much better written.
Katzenjamer Kids is more philosophical.
Atlas Shrugged is BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRING.
Booooooooooooooooring and very badly written. Nobody would read it at all were it not for the politics. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Godawful.
I’m not going to hate on people who might have enjoyed the potboiler plotting and lurid propoganda about “job creators” or “makers” in Rand’s work. It’s a comic-book fantasy and it found a steady developmental state of the right wing fanboy. I can forgive that since I’ve been there.
That said, asking a diverse population of adolescents to plow through 1000+ pages (!!!) of tedious galtian declamation is really characteristic of what punishing jackasses live in right wing thought.
Taking the decision to read even one page of anything away from local school boards, administrators and even the teacher who knows the needs of the students and placing it in the legislature is stupid.
We have a winner!!
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Everyone needs to lighten up.
This book was actually quite important in my life, for that very reason
Nothing like black comedy to lighten things up.
My choice is Tao Te Ching because it pretty much forces you to think.
It wouldn’t be Huckleberry Finn, unless you could somehow legally compel every reader to understand it.
Upon reading this story last night, I had a similar urge to come up with an ‘answer’ to Ayn Rand – I was thinking in the context of ‘what book would I mandate those student have to read *next’. My first thought was “To Kill a Mockingbird”.
But my answer is Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”. What better pre-joinder could you ask for?