The Great Gatsbyis overrated.
Its a good book!
If it were, then teens wouldntcelebrate the glamourthat the book tries to deconstruct.
But its stuck in the high school literary canon, along withCatcher in the RyeandOf Mice and Men.
A lot of this comes down to taste, and it should.
What Should Go
Winnowing the current canon makes room for new and overlooked deserving works.
Is this era and its literature any less deserving of our attention than a Boomers coming of age?
Or is the canon actually a bit of an excuse to be lazy when building our curricula?
This isnt a knock against the books themselves.
IsCatcherreally a book best experienced as a teen?
Its best experienced as an adult appreciatingCatchers hindsight on the teenage mindset, the way the book was intended.
A teenager cant fully appreciate the distance between author and protagonist.
Some of the current canon could simply become voluntary reading, likealmost every book.
But some works are still really useful as a shared reference point.
Theres an excellent place for them: college, freshman year, as part of the core curriculum.
Were also not suggesting a dumbing-down.
Some YA should join the curriculum, but so should modern adult fiction.
What Should Stay
What would we keep from the current canon?
The older the book, the better the case.
Were not dropping Shakespeare, which is still essential for understanding most English literature that follows.
If Steinbeck and Fitzgerald stay, thenBelovedand Anne Frank andThe Bell Jarand Frederick Douglass and Jane Austen all stay.
The point isnt to build a new canon.
This isnt a new idea; the canon has always been fluid.
But it could stand to be less viscous.
They prove that I am right.)
High schoolers should read whatever they want on their own time, including everything in the Ditch section.
Amendments and entirely different lists are welcome, and are in fact the whole point.
