Books I Read in School and Didn't Like

Today's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks about books we read at school and didn't like. Long lists!

Textbooks, generally, tend to be written in a tedious committee-type voice. This is such a widespread shortcoming that the individual books seldom even come to mind. Well, one does, actually. I wasn't required to read it but it had been popular enough that homes, libraries, and classrooms used to have copies, and by the time I came along it had been challenged on several cut-and-dried historical facts the author got wrong. The Development of America by Fremont P. Wirth was readable, being mostly the work of one author, but often inaccurate. 

No, older schoolbooks were not consistently better or worse than the new ones. Some books were better than others. Several books my school used were pathetic. One that stands out in memory was apparently dragged out by Mrs. Ratfink for some sort of review. We'd finally plodded through "Jump, Janet, jump" and made it into a real reader, with sentences formatted in paragraphs and arranged in actual stories, and then Mrs. Ratfink threw us back into a tedious tale about how "Dan and Ann can wax the van." Not even "their" van. It might have been someone else's van. 

Mrs. Ratfink also used a set of dreary little paperback stories, whose big asset was that each person was reading one at a time so the school had to buy only two sets for each classroom. They were written by a committee whose initials were S.R.A.; when everyone finally plodded through those at Mrs. Ratfink's glacial pace, a song spontaneously composed by several seven- and eight-year-olds at once had the refrain "Yay, hooray, we're done with SRA!" 

Things were stranger at the schools I visited on a few of my family's last road trips. At one school in California, one of the younger reading teachers thought it was important that we learn to appreciate the fantasy genre most older teachers thought people ought to have outgrown by age six, so she used The Phantom Tollbooth instead of the regular fourth grade reader. I liked her, but not everyone did. 

At another school in California, where the children were less obnoxious but the adults in the neighborhood were much creepier, we used a Seventh-Day Adventist "health science" book that began with a unit on "Vital Force," a phrase that had fallen out of use as more specific information about things like vitamins and calories became available; Adventists still thought it was important for children to understand about Vital Force because Ellen White and Jethro Kloss, like their contemporaries, used that phrase. 

 Then there was Mr. Ed. --, who probably never taught anyone anything else but math (and hating school), but he certainly did drill that math into all thirty-five of us, bright or dull. Mr. Ed. had no problem with spending four hours on the math lesson in the book if that was how long it took people to solve a page of problems, but he liked to make up his own problems and interrupt whatever else was going on with "I'm about to fall asleep! I need to do some math! If you know the answer, shout it out." I don't think anybody liked Mr. Ed. I didn't. I don't think most of us liked math, but after a year of shouting in unison, we all knew rules like "Divide, multiply, subtract, bring down" and "Volume equals length times width times height." 

But presumably everyone already knows that textbooks are a genre so tedious as to be beneath consideration. Which of the books that were sold in ordinary bookstores, circulated in public libraries, generally available to people who were not at my school in that particular year, did I not like? There weren't many--probably because my teachers were wary about assigning specific books, other than textbooks. 

What they did was march each classroom full of students at a different time, each week, into the school library, where each child had to choose one book to read during the next week, and every six weeks or so we were supposed to write a report on one of these books. If we had a free choice from the small selection available, in theory, we wouldn't hate reading books so much. The selection included bestsellers of that time! We could read Matt Christopher or Betty Cavanna! There were, however, books that were recommended that I think shouldn't have been. 

1. The Call of the Wild by Jack London 

The story struck me as too rough for a children's book, though of course that's what some boys like about it. Jack London's life and work are nothing I'd want to recommend to children, though of course that's what some teachers liked about it--JL was a socialist and an atheist, and also an alcoholic, and generally not a person most parents would want their children to know. 

Better: Red Fox by Charles Roberts was about a real wild animal. White Fang is still Jack London and still atrocious writing, but at least the dog, which is not a natural wild animal and does not improve when allowed to live like one, is reclaimed as a domestic dog. 

2. Peter Pan by James M. Barrie 

Disney was promoting the living daylights out of their movie version with tie-ins, and they were dreadful, too. What Barrie wrote was a syrupy confection based on dream-logic; the story might have been intentionally left weak. Disney was promoting some contemporary woman's adaptation, which tried to patch the more obvious holes and excise the worst effusions of sentimentality, and which seemed weaker to me than Barrie's original version. The story wasn't done anything resembling justice--and it needed mercy!--until Dave Barry came along, in the present century, and made a real story out of it. 

Better: Peter and the Star Catchers by Dave Barry 

3. The All of a Kind Family and its endless sequels by Sydney Taylor 

Bleep ever wanted to read about people who lived in New York City, had too many children, and dressed them all alike? 

Better: Amy and Laura by Marilyn Sachs. The family are poor and live in New York City, but at least the two children can be told apart. There was a whole series about them, too, or at least people who went to their school. I don't think Amy and Laura were Jewish, which I suspect was the only attraction of the All of a Kind Family, "representation," but at least one of their friends was. Though it seemed to me that Sachs's point may have been that New Yorkers are more like other New Yorkers than like other believers in whatever faith tradition they do or don't claim. 

4. Dibs in Search of Self by Virginia Axline 

Lamest, most misguided, most sentimental study of a hopeless autistic child ever. Who wanted to read about hopeless autistic children anyway? In any case Dibs is not in search of himself. He is all tangled up in self. What he needs so badly that he doesn't even search for it is a way to communicate with other people.

Better: Anything by Temple Grandin or Donna Williams...at least until worthwhile scientific studies of what autism looks like on a brain scan are available. There may be permanent physical differences between the sort of autism that makes people seem "high-functioning" as kids, that becomes an eccentricity rather than a disability as they grow up--and the kind that disabled "Dibs."

5. Sea Wolf by Jack London 

To be fair, I don't think this was actually recommended at school. I think the boys who didn't mind Call of the Wild had noticed that The Sea Wolf is so called because the character is called Wolf Larsen, and one of them happened to be called Larsen, so they called him Wolf, too, and read the book to find other witty things to say to him. Anyway my brother brought home The Sea Wolf and neither the parents nor I could figure out who the BLEEP would have recommended that book to a fourth grade student. 

6. Are You There God It's Me Margaret by Judy Blume 

Quite possibly the worst book for middle school girls I've ever read, though it spawned a few imitations that might have been considered equally bad, or maybe worse because derivative. At some point in between ages ten and fifteen most teenagers do notice that growing up includes a few extras beyond just growing bigger and stronger. They notice, but most of them do not become obsessed with the process of puberty the way Judy Blume's characters do. 

And some of them do, in fact, develop spirituality while other parts of their brains and bodies are still growing, although I don't think I did. When C.S. Lewis had a wise elder advise a young woman, "You will have no more dreams. Have children instead," Lewis could at least point to evidence that he'd intended readers to understand that this was specific advice to a character who's met half a dozen older women who were capable of doing anything more than having children. Judy Blume basically said in this horrible novel that all teenaged girls are fit to do is stare into mirrors and think about their progress toward becoming breeding stock. 

To be fair, no teacher or textbook specifically recommended this one either. It was new, and a publisher's "book fair" representative did the recommending. But it was in the school library and it was disgusting.) 

7. To Teach to Love by Jesse Stuart 

The ickiest part of this icky, sentimental story is that I've read other novels by Jesse Stuart, and all of them were even worse. As one of Dave Barry's correspondents said about a songwriter, Stuart never figured out that he could have bored a hole in himself and let some of that sap drip out. 

Better: Christy by Catherine Marshall.

8. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand 

I don't remember whether I read this one, in grade nine, on the recommendation of a teacher or of a publisher. I know it's not a good novel for grade nine. If adults want to sit around in a book club and discuss the historical reasons why young people like Howard Roark and Dominique had to pretend that what they had was rape, when it was clearly consensual fornication, that's different. Teenagers do not need confusion on this point, however historically accurate it was. 

Better: If students want to read Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Reader condenses her wordy fiction down to Anthem and the "Who Is John Galt?" story. Those are appropriate for teenagers. If they lead teenagers to discover The Fountainhead at the public library, at least it ought to be in the adult collection, so everyone has had fair warning. 

(There are a lot of books that are on even elementary school reading lists, these days, that I don't think need to be in school libraries. They should be in the adult collection in public libraries, where teenagers who are ready to discover them can do so. That list includes The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, The Color Purple, The Bluest Eye, A Confederacy of Dunces, Woman on the Edge of Time, Stranger in a Strange Land, and many more. I think college students and adults absolutely should read these books; I think some teenagers are ready to read them; I don't think they need to be stored in places where they can confuse or disturb other teenagers.)

9. My Darling My Hamburger by Paul Zindel 

Give the poor drip points for trying to write about the way things were: A crowd of teenaged baby-boomers hang out together and discuss, among other things, the inadequacy of a lecture about sex in which a pathetic teacher told the girls to deal with the boys' demands for sex by suggesting that they go out for hamburgers. The thinking really was that teenaged boys generally are interested in hamburgers. When they are trying to crawl inside teenaged girls' clothes this generality may be less applicable. 

Anyway, the plot consists of two of these teenagers postponing the hamburgers until they've started a baby. Then they talk endlessly about why all of the alternatives now available to them are so bad. Then before the pregnancy becomes obvious the pregnant girl has an abortion, after which her remaining line is "I'm bleeding. Oh god, I'm bleeding." This kind of thing did happen, and still does, but it was not a pleasant read. 

Especially not during the years when I knew very well that (1) no normal man wanted to be seen talking to a baby-face like me, and (2) I knew to jump back if anyone--male or female--touched any part of my body, including hands, because we don't touch people in town, that was the part of my ancestral culture that got us through the tuberculosis epidemic, and (3) if in some unimaginably distant future I did get close enough to a man to conceive a baby, we were the kind of family who don't waste babies. I would have been given a bus ticket, directions to the home of relatives a good long way from my home, copies of Thank You Dr Lamaze and Let's Have Healthy Children and the La Leche League guide to breastfeeding, and possibly advice on changing my name. The ideal name for a single mother to be using at the time of birth comes from a family that is not represented in any town near hers, in which a young man died of stupidity during the months before the birth. 

Better: Why not the books about the physical, emotional, and financial costs of being a parent? I don't know of a better book about the reality of abortion for teenagers...I bless a teacher who recommended Jurgen, though. Teenagers need some hint that there are alternatives to makng babies that are equally satisfactory in the moment.

10. The serious male fiction writers of the early twentieth century: Faulkner, Hemingway, Miller, Mailer, and their admirers and imitators

Just...blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. With booze-reeking puddles. Some good writing in English was done by men in the early twentieth century, and not all of them even hung out with C.S. Lewis, but they were the ones who didn't take themselves so seriously. Some short pieces the early twentieth century's version of a literary establishment produced might be compared with some things written by Kerouac or Ogden Nash or Farley Mowat, but turn those guys loose in a full-length novel and they became disgusting. Without spirituality, the human condition is disgusting.

Better: Nash. Mowat. Tolkien. Charles Williams. Dorothy Sayers. Pearl S. Buck. Selma Lagerlof. Rose Wilder Lane. Willa Cather. Harriette Simpson Arnow. Della Thompson Lutes. Anne Morrow Lindbergh. George Bernard Shaw. Even Don Marquis would be preferable to the pompous male literary clique of this period.