by Carol Jago. This is part of the Bring Back Whole Book Reading series.
Teenagers hunger for thrills to relieve the humdrum boredom of their everyday life. They also have an appetite for voyeurism, longing to peek into the lives of others and to compare these lives with their own. Books can help to satisfy this hunger.
As with any diet, the ingredients matter. Young readers are drawn to stories where the characters look familiar and are set in recognizable places. Unfortunately, as a recent survey conducted by the National Council of Teachers of English demonstrates most of the books that students are required to read in school contain few familiar faces and are set in times and places wholly unknown. The list has changed little in 35 years: Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby, The Crucible, Macbeth, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird. Please don’t get me wrong, I am a huge believer in teaching the classics and have written several books for Heinemann on this very subject. But the kind of books that kids are starved for are differently shaped.
Let’s start with a given. No one, least of all a teenager, picks up a book to improve their reading skills. We read because we thirst for what is to be found on the page: information, entertainment, insight. Readers look to books in to understand the world and the better to understand themselves. Between the lines, they muse, “Hmmm … would I have done that?” But too many students grow up in book deserts. In the same way as growing up in a food desert can determine which foods children will or won’t eat, so limited access to contemporary titles often shapes how students think about reading for pleasure.
A common criticism of young adult books is that they are monotonously formulaic. While this can be true, the formula is only recognizable to a mature adult reader, not to teenagers. Yes, adolescent literature commonly employs conversational language and simple sentence structures. The plot moves along quickly. But “simple” need not equate with “simplistic.” Although some of the books published for teenage audiences are indeed formulaic and utterly without literary merit, others are works of art. The challenge for teachers as we create reading lists and refresh classroom libraries is to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Judgments about a book’s worth, like a book’s complexity, are subjective and vary from teacher to teacher and community to community. The teenage reader, an individual who is in the process of developing from a child to an adult, is equally in flux. When making decisions about books, I often reflect upon Joseph Brodsky’s Nobel Prize for literature acceptance speech:
| In the history of our species, the book is an anthropological development, similar essentially to the invention of the wheel. Having emerged in order to give us some idea not so much of our origins as of what the Sapiens is capable of, a book constitutes a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of turning a page. |
When choosing books for classroom instruction or classroom libraries, teachers are often crippled by curricular caution. The struggle to control what students read is often driven by fear; parents are afraid that their teenagers will be unduly influenced by the books they read. But keeping young people ignorant of reality, particularly when it is harsh, won’t keep them safe. In fact, blinders can prevent children from understanding what they see in the world around them and what they feel within themselves. Carmen Maria Machado, whose novel In The Dream House appears in the PEN index of banned books explains, “Preventing children from reading my book, or any book, won’t protect them. On the contrary, it may rob them of ways to understand the world they’ll encounter, or even the lives they’re already living. You can’t recognize what you’ve never been taught to see. You can’t put language to something for which you’ve been given no language.”
The danger is silence. Classroom discussion is essential to educating today’s adolescents. And teachers, in concert with their school communities, are in the best position to make decisions regarding what to teach and how to approach controversial subjects in age-appropriate ways. In my experience, edgy readings tend to make for the most engaging classes and the most engaged students.
Think about the books that turned you into a reader. I’ll bet it wasn’t Julius Caesar. Let’s offer kids what they hunger for and then watch young readers grow.
Works Cited
Brodsky, J. (1987, December 8). Nobel lecture. NobelPrize.org. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1987/brodsky/lecture/
Chae, K., & Ginsberg, R. (2025). The state of literature use in US secondary English classrooms. National Council of Teachers of English. https://ncte.org/literature-use-in-secondary-english-classrooms
Machado, C. M. (2022). Statement on In the Dream House. In Banned in the USA: Rising school book bans threaten free expression and students’ First Amendment rights. PEN America. https://pen.org/report/banned-in-the-usa-rising-bans-threaten-1a/
Carol Jago is a long-time teacher and past president of the National Council of teachers of English. She is associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA and the author of numerous Heinemann books including The Book in Question: Why and How Reading Is in Crisis, With Rigor for All, and Classics in the Classroom.
