An interesting discussion on Twitter has blossomed into an interesting post over at Robin Wasserman’s blog about books you read for class in high school that you loved/hated.
Okay, unscientific and super-fast survey time, because now I’m curious:
Which high-school mandatory reading book did you love most? (More interestingly…) Which did you HATE?
If you’re old now (like me), have you changed your mind?
If you’re in high school now, well, no extra-special additional question, but I’ll be doubly curious to hear your answer. (And maybe if there’s something unanimously loved, I’ll risk taking another look.)
Personally, I loved most of the books I read in high school. I had AMAZING high school English teachers (Mrs. Sayers and Ms. McDuffie) who I credit quite a bit toward teaching me how to write and cultivating in me a love of literature. Because I had nothing against being “assigned” books and they taught literature in such a way that I could learn how to analyze it without losing how to appreciate it (with one glaring exception), I really feel that the books I hated in high school would be books I’d hate now, so I havent actually tried any re-reading.
Loved:
A Separate Peace
The Chosen
Pride & Prejudice
The Crucible
all the Shakespeare we read
The Odyssey
As I Lay Dying
Kaffir Boy
The Picture of Dorian Grey
The Magus
Hated:
The Red Pony
The Grapes of Wrath
All the Pretty Horses
Wuthering Heights
At the time, I hated Lord of the Flies. It was the first book we read in high school, and therefore, it was dissected and offered up on the altar of “now we’re going to teach the students how to analyze literature.” I will never forget how one day, we had to answer questions about what the color of the poop the boys were pooping symbolized. I really don’t know why this book was so utterly destroyed, because, as I said before, this teacher was fantastic. Perhaps it was just a classroom conversation that devolved by students who were really resistant to the idea of talking about symbolism or literary analysis. I can’t remember now. But I do remember it wasn’t fun anymore. Things got better after that. (Though I do remember, sophomore year, everyone in my class being so confused by what was going on in The Sun Also Rises only to be told by the students who had a different, less G-rated teacher what the main character’s big conflict was.)
Over at Robin’s blog, the votes are coming in fast and furious for A Separate Peace. Interesting.
The BookMaven responds to another one of those tiresome genre snobbery posts. I agree with a lot of it, but I’m not sure she goes as far as I would. So, I don’ have a PHD in Literature, just a lowly BA, but I’m baffled by the attitude that books are some different sort of story, that they are somehow required to only exist on a certain level which is not true for television, film, theater, etc. The BookMaven argues for her early genre snobbery by talking about how she liked to read Poe as bed time stories as a child. Um…. So Poe is thumbs up and Stephen King is thumbs down? What’s the difference, aside from a hundred years?
Poe and Dickens, and Shakespeare, and so many of the writers who are considered the luminaries of the form wrote FOR THE MASSES. In college, I studied Radcliffe and Austen and Behn and Scott and Burney and all those damned scribbling women whose novels were ridiculed by the literary elite of their time. I wrote my college thesis on LOST HORIZON, which Pocket Books likes to fashion “the first paperback.” (It’s not, but it’s a cute marketing ploy.)
Unicorns as a metaphor? For what exactly? Tooth decay? Give me a break. They are a beastie entirely without resonance.
Au contraire, mon Aussie amie! Also, fie! There are very few monsters with more allegorical resonance than the unicorn. Alchemists actually used the unicorn in their pictoral language as a symbol of purity, of femininity, and of fertility. As a phallic symbol the unicorn can’t be beat. Carl Jung, who was a big fan of the idea of symbols belonging to the collective unconsciousness, was downright obsessed with the unicorn and its place in alchemical literature. He says, “The virgin represents the passive feminine aspect while [the unicorn] is the wild, rampant masculine force.” (And really, that only scrapes the surface of what Jung said about the unicorn, but I’m sure you can imagine a lot more.)
In the early Christian church, the unicorn was represented (due to mentions in Psalms) as possessing health and strength. It is alternately aligned with Christ (whereby the image of the unicorn and virgin would be an allegory for the Pietas, or the dying unicorn/Christ in the lap of the Virgin) or, more specifically, the unicorn and virgin were a symbol of Mary having conceived by The Holy Spirit, which is a slightly more sexualized take on the matter.
The unicorn-as-Christ metaphor linked with the unicorn-as-symbol-of-Holy-Spirit belief was prevalent throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. During this time, it was believed that animals with strong symbolic connotations actually possessed certain abilities. (Think about how people even now in some parts of the world will consume parts of a rhinoceros or tiger — both which are symbols of virility — in a belief that it will increase their sexual prowess.) If a unicorn was aligned with Christ, who everyone knew could heal the sick, raise the dead, transform water into wine, etc — woudl not having a piece of a unicorn do the same thing? Unicorn horns were thought to cure disease, purify wells, neutralize poisons. Unicorns, like virgins, were symbols of purity, which was why the unicorn would be attracted to or only tamed by a virgin.
Due to this inextricable link between the unicorn and the virgin, it became commonplace for the symbol of the unicorn to appear in a portrait of a woman in order to advertise her virginity. Nowadays, on dating sites, you see a picture of a woman and underneath, her stats: age, interests, occupation. Back then, portraits were painted of woman that did the same thing in an allegorical language. You may see a picture of a woman wearing a particular color or holding a flower (symbolizing her family crest), wearing jewelry or sitting in front of a backdrop of the land she would bring into the marriage as dowry. It was popular to include a unicorn in said picture, as if to say, “And she’s a virgin, too!”
Take this picture, painted by Raphael (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER: This picture plays a big part in my book.)
This was painted as part of a betrothal contract, and sent to the groom and his family as proof of what they were getting. Pretty girl, totally untouched. See the unicorn? What other proof do you need?
UPDATE!!!
Justine has issued the following fighting words on her blog:
“Maybe in the olden days, Diana. But I don’t know if you noticed: this isn’t the olden days. No one allegories or alchemises no more. Unicorns are metaphorically as dead as the dodo.”
And again I say, not so!
Metaphors change over time. As Simon Pegg explains (and as Carrie Ryan will pontificate on to anyone who holds still for long enough), zombies were originally a Caribbean islander metaphor for slavery. More than “the walking dead” zombies were mindless slaves controlled by a voodoo master. It is only more recently, thanks to George Romero (who was strongly influenced by the vampire book, I Am Legend), that zombies became a metaphor for the spread of pandemics — the cannibalistic, brain eating, walking dead we know and love today.
The unicorn as metaphor has changed over time too. Retaining its original symbol of purity and innocence, the modern unicorn is now a symbol of childlike innocence and fantasy. this was an especially prevalent idea in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Unicorns were a common motif in psychedelic artwork, where they were a stand in for hallucinations. The horn was occasionally likened to the opening of the “third eye” in transcendentalism, and overall of the embrace of fantasy and of innocence as a powerful and positive lifestyle choice. The plot of The Last Unicorn is in large part a parable of the end of fantasy. In Legend and Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, unicorns are so aligned with goodness and purity that only the most evil of beings (Tim Curry as the Devil int eh former, and Lord Voldemort in the latter) would ever think to harm one. Unicorns are also used facetiously as a stand in for fantasy and innocence in the sense of “You’re living in a dream world.” Only yesterday, popular blogger and science fiction writer John Scalzi encouraged folks to get real about their expectations of the future president: “Barack Obama does not fart cinnamon-scented rainbows. He is not trailed by angels and unicorns.”
But perhaps you think this only further justifies the argument that unicorns have been taken out of the equation in terms of their ability to induce terror. Unciorns have been so embraced as good and innocent and pure and blahblah that they are, in fact, toothless, while zombies are still scary. I will concede that point to you. (See, I can reach across the aisle!) Which is why I attempt to reclaim unicorns in my book. Because they are big beasts and they have a spear attached to their foreheads.
Oh, and they run. FAST. Take that, you shuffling, shambling, death-symbol. Unicorns aren’t the death that creeps up on you. It’s the one that pounces and spears you right through the gut.
Remember that scene in the movie of Bridget Jones’s Diary where poor Bridget is forced to stumble her way through introducing the publisher of “Kafka’s Motorbike: The Greatest Book of Our Time” in front of Jeffrey Archer, Salman Rushdie and other literary luminaries, and — understandably — keeps apologizing. “And, Mr Rushdie, yours aren’t bad either.”
That scene never fails to crack me up, and it was in my head all afternoon. Which was a nice distraction, because between the book deadline and the huge non-writing-related thing going on in my life, I’m getting a little bit overwhelmed. It may be why Sailor Boy sat me down yesterday with a glass of wine and a DVD of Mean Girls.
What a funny film. My favorite part is where Cady recognizes that in “girl world,” Halloween means dressing up in lingerie with animal ears. It’s so true! When my best friend and I were looking for costumes for the Masquerade last New Year’s Eve, the costume shops were filled with boy costumes, and girl costumes that could all be categorized under the heading “Boy Costume Wench” and looked like your average sex shop costume with corset tops and super short flippy miniskirts. You could be a pirate wench or a medieval wench or a Tarzan wench or a Revolutionary War (complete with tri-cone hat) Wench. In the end, my friend bought a pirate wench outfit that she proceeded to wear as a vest, because that’s how skimpy it was, over a puffy shirt, a pair of black pants, and kicking boots, thereby creating a slightly more feminine equivalent of the boy costume you could buy ready made. So frustrating! It’s kind of sad when the entire social paradigm shifts toward “all girls want to dress up like streetwalkers” to the point that you actually can’t find a costume that doesn’t fit that mold.
I had a great lunch with a writer friend yesterday, and we talked about feminism and why a lot of young people refuse to refer to themselves as feminist or even people our age (Gen X) tiptoe around the phrase or think that to be feminist means “you won’t get a date” or you don’t wear dresses or makeup or whatnot. Or how things that are classified as “for women” are things that society — even supposedly enlightened, intelligent society, feels comfortable denigrating. Men will avoid it and women will avoid it as well. We’d apparently both taken classes in college that came under fire for using “women” in the title of the class. In her case, the men in the required course couldn’t stop complaining about being forced to read “girl stuff.” In mine, the class was eventually titled something else, and the applications went through the roof.
Sad.
And then in Mean Girls, Tina Fey’s character is telling the girls, “You guys have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores; it just makes it easier for men to call you that.” I used to do that all the time, both in jest and affection with my girlfriends and as a pejorative. That women choose to denigrate other women, as well as things that are considered “for women” isn’t really helping matters.
There’s a scene in SSG where Amy calls herself a slut. I threw it in for laughs, and because it seemed authentic to the voice of that character. She’s describing how she made out with one guy at a bar, then met another back at her dorm room and spent the night with him. Back when I was in college, they used to send around these things called “purity tests” and I always remember one of the big “OMG, no!” questions was “Did you ever hook up with two people in one 24 hour period?” I think that Amy, in retrospect, would be a little uncomfortable with that choice (especially given the repercussions), and “slut” is the term applied by and to girls who do things like that.
Boys? Yeah, there is no term.
However, it doesn’t seem as funny to me now. I still think it’s authentic for Amy to make that self-deprecating comment, and to use that term, but I also think it’s unfortunate. These are some of the choices you make as a writer: because your characters aren’t perfect. They aren’t always going to make the “right” choice. Even if they believe (as Amy certainly does) that her sexuality is just fine, thank you very much, it doesn’t mean she’s free from what our culture thinks girls should be. Maybe she calls herself that so no one else can do it first, to own the phrase on a level that renders it toothless. Because if she thinks she did anything wrong that night, it wasn’t hooking up with two people, it was that one of the people would view it as a betrayal. Maybe classifying herself as “slutty” is an easier thing for her to swallow (perhaps because she and her girlfriends have been tossing the term around, Mean Girls style, for seven years) than “cold-hearted.” Or “unfaithful.” Or anything else that the betrayed party would be more likely to say than “slutty.”
Yes, these are the things I think about. Especially as I bring the series to a close, and I think about where Amy is now, vs where she was at various points in the previous books. Amy is thinking about it too, much as I look back on that girl I was in college, who threw “slut” around with abandon and wonder why in the world I’d do something like that.
My contention has to do with, for instance, (as your link to the Knight Agency page explains) high concept books as “accessible” and “commercial.” A lot of my favorite novels are probably neither.
(Most people I know would NOT call George Eliot’s Middlemarch, for instance, but it’s one of my all-time favorites. And given time, I swear I could write a high concept pitch for it that would remain true to its “quiet” stature.)
So ultimately, I guess what I’m saying is that the phrase “high- concept book” seems…I don’t know…
ANY book could be a high-concept book…because it’s not a matter of what the book IS…it’s a matter of how the book is presented.
Actually, if you read the article, I do not say that any book is high concept, nor that any book that is “accessible and commercial” is necessarily so. I do say that high concept is a somewhat slippery term, as it both describes an innate characteristic of the storyline, and also the way said storyline is described.
Sadly, I haven’t read Middlemarch (I know, shocker), so I can’t whip out a high concept description for you, nor can I make any kind of argument for whether or not it’s high concept, but my understanding is that it’s an ensemble piece about social reform, is it not?
I’m not a fan of books where “very little happens” I must say. (For the modern, trendy definition of “characters don’t learn, don’t grow, and that’s somehow supposed to show the plight of humanity, etc.” — I took that short story class in college, and it was torture.) Even in a “low concept” story (let’s say On Golden Pond, since I’m not familiar with the Eliot and can’t say anything about it), you’ve got a lot “happening” — you’re really showing something about characters in conflict and in growth. But that’s difficult to describe or show the power of in a few short sentences and thus, not high concept. Not BAD, but not high concept.
However, the line is not drawn at “literary.” There are literary books that are high concept, and literary books that aren’t. Literary, as used today, is a genre unto itself, not unlike mystery, or romance, or science fiction. It denotes a certain tone, style, and often, characterization and storyline. Today, “literary” is seen as an intrinsic, objective characteristic of the text.
I don’t like that definition. I believe that what is “literary” is not decided by us. It’s decided by history. What is it about Aphra Behn’s adventures and romances that make them interesting to study today, compared to so many other populist writers of the time. Do we still read Radcliffe because she was the most popular writer of that kind of book at the time, or do we read her because she was doing something that the penny dreadful folks weren’t? And what of Dickens? And what of Dumas, who, like James Patterson, wrote by committee? Nowadays that would be seen as the height of pedestrian and commercialist, but we study Dumas in English classes all over. The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favorite novels. In fifty or a hundred years, will we be studying Along Came a Spider?
I am fascinated by the way certain books manage to, over time, worm their way into the canon and gain a modicum of respectability. I like how everyone is currently in love with Du Maurier, but her reputation seems to ebb and flow. Sometimes she’s lauded; others, derided. I am fascinated by the rise of science fiction as a highly-respected genre. (In passing, I find it interesting that when we study Orwell, it’s his science fiction, and not his “realistic” character studies or reform novels.) When I read 1001 Books To Read Before You Die, I was surprised that I’d read so few of the novels from the late 19th and early 20th century. Most of the ones I had were, in fact, science fiction. I think that is because my taste runs (and always has run) to adventure stories, which are vastly out of fashion with the literary set these days. (Of course, not solely. For instance, I adore As I Lay Dying. Ironically, the title comes from The Odyssey, the most adventurest of adventure stories!)
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. I did, after all, write my senior thesis on Lost Horizon and the social construct of Shangri-la. Hilton’s adventure novel, cribbing together as it did ideas of orientalism, the sublime, cultural reform, and eastern mythology in an unabashadly populist package, was actually the first book published by Pocket, which had been started to print light, popular fiction in mass market paperback form. And it’s also very high concept.
So I’ve been pretty good at keeping out of the newest tired, dead-horse version of “fun books, especially those by women, mark the end of Western civilization” kerfuffle. What is there to say on the detractors’ end that hasn’t been said over and over since Daniel Defoe was slamming Aphra Behn? Has civilization been steadily crumbling since then? Has the state of the novel? (Hope not,s icne it was just invented around that time!)
It’s a stalemate, folks. You know that scene in Twelve Angry Men where the racist just starts ranting away and instead of attempting to argue logically with him anymore, all the other jurors realize he’s a brick wall of idiocy and just walk away? That’s how I feel. There’s no point in trying to respond logically to people who honestly believe that the text of Hamlet is somehow tainted by being on the same shelf as the text of Shopaholic, or that there is an automatic devaluation of any book encased in a cover reflecting an unsaturated orange hue of 620 nm (i.e., “pink”).
But then I read Bookseller’s Chick’s well-reasoned defense, and I just want to say: right on, my friend! Telling an adult reader that she is incapable of making good decisions about her reading choices is tantamount to saying that if candy is available on the shelves at my local Giant, I won’t buy Brussels sprouts. Hey, guess what? I’m a grown up. I know the difference between vegetables and chocolate. I don’t need them to be on separate aisles or color coded for me to be able to tell, either. I also happen to love vegetables and I find it laughable that you assume, because you see me with a Snickers bar, that I don’t eat vegetables too. I happen to love vegetables, especially Brussels sprouts.
I was a Literature major at Yale. I can shoot my mouth off about the Western Canon enough to satisfy even the snobbiest of lit snobs. At one point, my friends and I estimated that we read between four and ten thousand pages of literature for every class. (The Russian Novel class was a particular bear, though Women and the Rise of the Novel was no slouch in terms of doorstoppers.) That means that over the course of my college career, I probably read about 200,000 pages worth of literary classics. Two. Hundred. Thousand. And that’s not including the books I read in high school, in childhood, and the classics I’ve read for fun. (Yes, I read all kinds of books for fun.)
Thanks for your concern, but I think I’m good, really.
