Student: "What Should I Read?" Me: "Sedaris." You?

A student reader emailed this today, asking for reading suggestions (and giving us a good, sassy testimony of how high school English can be a book-lover's curse instead of blessing). Rather than give her one answer, I hope some of you will pitch in with your own suggestions. Here's Kayla:

Dear Clay,

I have recently become incredibly frustrated with the English department at my school. There is no opportunity to get into more advanced English classes once you have entered high school (only "outstanding" - a.k.a. your parents are on the school board - middle school students are allowed to go up to the high school to take freshmen courses) as there is a required order to the English curriculum. They go by the whole 'you must do English 9 then English 10 and then if you're on the honors track you do these courses and if you're on the CP path you do these courses'. We are discouraged from taking two English classes, as the administration feels that the work load would be too much for a student to handle. We do entire semesters on one of Shakespeare's works such as Romeo and Juliet. I have written four essays and more DED's then I can count on that one play and I'm currently wondering if I am able to put a restraining order on it. It's that bad.

Are there any books that you would recommend that I read in order to escape the endless monotony?

Kayla

So....

Dear Kayla,

It's a hard question to answer, since you don't tell us your age or your interests - do you want contemporary or classic? prefer comedy, drama, fantasy, sci-fi, historical, poetry? do you want an ambitious reading list that will improve your grasp of the history of literature? on and on. Feel free to give more info in comments, or another email.

Until then, I'm shooting blind here, but I'll shoot anyway. I'm going to assume you're in maybe tenth grade, and that you just want some enjoyable reading.

Short and sweet: find an author you love, and read that author's complete works. One of my biggest beefs about the way high schools and even colleges do literature is that they almost never provide students the opportunity to get to know one author so intimately that they feel they know him or her. I had to temporarily drop out of college more than once because I wanted to read the complete works of Plato, Homer, John Keats (letters and biography included), Friedrich Nietzsche, and Oscar Wilde. Read them I did - in chronological order - and I came out of it with a deeper literary love than I'd ever had from classes.

But I'm not suggesting you tackle any of those writers. Save them for college or later.

As a high school teacher, the one author I've found my students falling in love with over and over, and recommending to their friends once they finish, is David Sedaris. Three years ago, my ninth graders borrowed and circulated my copies of his works for the entire year, and didn't return them to me until the last week of school. Start with Me Talk Pretty One Day, then read maybe Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, then find everything else he wrote. His wit is laugh-out-loud, his style is polished, his humanity wonderful. You can't go wrong with him. (Google him to learn more, and see his reading of one memoir piece on David Letterman below for a taste. You'll wonder as you watch if Sedaris is gay. The answer is yes - beautifully so.)
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I'm going to stop here, and hope others will chime in too. Feel free to ask for more. There's nothing book-lovers love more than sharing those books they love.

Clay

P.S. I wrote about teaching Sedaris in A.P. Literature here.