Picking a novel to teach is never easy. Teachers must teach what’s board approved, what’s in the curriculum. There’s always the issue of how much money a district can spend on new books. I always enjoy dusting off books approved a long time ago, but that still sit in the far corner of the book room. Teachers at the same school and who teach the same grade level often must agree on a novel. Sometimes they have no say in the matter and must teach the selections made by a department chair or supervisor. Then there are the bigger questions about what makes a great book or novel or more generally, a great curriculum.
Every teacher wants to teach books that check off all the boxes. The book should be fun and easy to read, a page turner. But it should also be a challenge, filled with metaphors, symbolism, motifs, foreshadowing, and perhaps complex narrative techniques and structures that involve shifts in voice and time. A great book offers many opportunities for close reading, with passages that allow students to really sink their teeth into the language. More generally, the curriculum should contain diverse and contemporary writers from different time periods and should contain texts suitable for high and low performing students. A curriculum should contain stories about romance, power, internal conflict, and beauty, but also topics like oppression, racism, war, poverty, and death. Great books challenge the status quo, they make us question why things are the way they are. They force us to consider unconscious behavior. They make us laugh, cry, and think. The literature we teach should allow students to relate to the story, but also put them in the shoes of a person living an experience unlike their own. Books help students understand the full story behind a person, not just a single thing that defines them.
Most importantly, I think, the stories in our classrooms should produce amazing, deep conversations, and keep producing good conversations year after year after year. There should never be one simple interpretation of a story. Great stories feel fresh every time we teach them. The canon will always include whatever stands the test of time. And let’s not forget that students should also have some say in what they read.
Whenever I meet another English teacher, the conversation almost immediately turns to what novels we teach. So here’s my list – the first list includes titles of books I wouldn’t hesitate to teach again. The second list includes books that I taught at some point but decided to not teach again (if I had the choice). I also have some titles from summer reading assignments and then a list of books I created units on, but never taught. And let's not forget great poets.
Taught and loved:
Night, Elie Wiesel (nonfiction)
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Emma, Jane Austen
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin (nonfiction)
Maus II, Art Spiegelman (nonfiction)
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid (nonfiction)
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
The Unvanquished, William Faulkner
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
Taught, but wouldn’t teach again:
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Hard Times, Charles Dickens
A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt
Everyman, Unknown
The Oedipus Plays, Sophocles
Othello, William Shakespeare
Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard
Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
Equus, Peter Shaffer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Twelve Angry Men, Reginald Rose
The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Master Harold and the Boys, Athol Fugard
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Summer Reading:
Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol
Educated, Tara Westover
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
Let the Great World Spin, Column McCann
A Passage to India, E.M. Forrester
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
1984, George Orwell
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race edited by Jesmyn Ward (nonfiction)
Books I planned units on but never taught:
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
My favorite poets to teach:
Elizabeth Bishop
Tracy K. Smith
Walt Whitman
Robert Pinsky
Thomas Sayers Ellis
Rumi
Maya Angelou
Emily Dickinson
Amiri Baraka
William Blake
Nikki Giovanni
William Wordsworth
T.S. Eliot
Wallace Stevens
Dylan Thomas
Aja Monet
Langston Hughes
Obviously, this list comes from my experience, and is not comprehensive, so what are your top 5 favorite novels to teach?
Scott Cameron
English language arts teacher
Teacher's Workshop, professional development for secondary ELA teachers
