I second Killgallon. Also, and this might be a bit too simplistic, but what about just picking a sentence out of The Hobbit or Anne of Green Gables or one of those children's books with beautiful language and use that? Essentially, that is what Killgallon did, but with more hand-holding😁. There are also really good sentences and vocab in Black Ships Before Troy.

If you had all the space you wanted, and extra time to teach the subjects, what would you include? (Only academics, no buying of private islands allowed). For me: Spelling, typing, grammar, vocab, lots of reading, poetry, Latin, math, all the science, all the history, loads of podcasts, extra documentaries, art (not taught by me), music.

Also, I dont know where I picked up this attitude, but I have assumed for as long as I can remember, that any books that are considered "good for me", are not going to be enjoyable, somewhat like eating one's veggies. But both of those statements are false. Veggies can be delicious, and there are many "good to have read" books that are also wonderfully interesting! That is an attitude my children do not have, thankfully.

Another thing I am doing is to read the classics myself and have the kids see me reading. They can see me wrestling with books that are somewhat challenging for me to read. I go on walk-and-talks with each kid and we discuss the books we are reading. In essence, we have steeped our lives in the reading and discussing of literature. I love that books help us live another person's life for a little bit to understand them better. What is that quote, "In five years from now what will have made the most difference in our lives are the people we know and the books we have read." Or something like that. I want the books we encounter to form meaningful bonds in our lives.

To be clear, I am not really blaming my parents for this. I am more expressing surprise that the school system did not direct me to a greater variety of books, or librarians didnt, or that my parents didnt. It sort of feels like that story about Anybody, Everybody, Somebody, and Nobody. Anybody could have directed me towards better reading material. Somebody ought to have shown me anything besides what I was reading. Everybody trusted that Somebody was doing this, and in the end, Nobody did. I also dont think the alternative books are classics, in the, um, classical sense of the word. But they are well-known books that were written before my childhood that would have been fabulous suggestions for me as a kid. And I remain surprised that none of the adults in my life thought to suggest any of these (or others) to me. Note, I am not bitter at anyone, certainly not my parents. Just rather surprised, and it is because I assume that they also were unaware. I actually credit Harry Potter for starting a revolution towards writing longer and better-written series for the middle grades. Harry Potter, Brandon Mull, etc might not be Dickens, but there are complex sentences, complex vocab, complex themes, and complex story arcs that I think are great for pleasure reading. The language alone in these books is leaps and bounds better than Babysitters' Club, Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys. How I am trying to remedy this in my own kids...We do loads of read-alouds and audiobooks. And I help them pick pleasure books that I think they will enjoy and that have some literary merit. I spend a decent amount of time curating that list and my kids are really thankful for my suggestions, so it avoids the two extremes of they are left to their own devices on one end and I control everything on the other. I pick read alouds that my kids will enjoy (Homer Price, By the Great Horn Spoon, etc), but also books that stretch us (Plutarch, Our Young Folks Josephus, Caesar's COmmentaries, kids versions of Shakespeare and Homer, etc). I make it fun and I combine these books with more light ones like The Great Brain. We discuss all kinds of stuff with the books and make it a snuggly, enjoyable time. I try to expose them to a wide variety of books. This is me!!!

The recent threads on literature have me doing some contemplation about my upbringing. For background, I grew up in the 80s in middle class suburbia in a great school district. I had a stay-at-home mom, and both my parents are educated and value education. I taught myself to read the newspaper at 4yo. I had every reading advantage, with the possible exception that I am a very literal thinker with a strong STEM bend. However, I read The Baby Sitters Club, Nancy Drew, and Hardy Boys almost exclusively until the 8th grade! After that, I did very little pleasure reading until I graduated college because I had zero free time. My parents never read to us nor did they suggest books that I should read. We went to the library regularly, but I was left entirely to my own devices to choose absolute drivel. It has been only in the past year that I began playing catch-up with my literary inadequacies, in part because I didnt realize I had them! How, given that home environment, was I not more encouraged to read anything better? No Anne of Green Gables, Little House, Secret Garden, Arabian Nights, Narnia, nothing! I feel like my parents completely trusted the school system to totally provide for my education and that they were off the hook. I understand that there was no internet, but surely there were book lists containing stuff better than the Babysitters' Club??! One of my main focuses of parenting is to remedy this in my children.

Thanks for starting this! I am in this position as well. Something that I hope is helping (and I know I have shared this before, so forgive the redundancy) is I read the books he is into (Harry Potter, anything Brandon Mull, etc) and we then go on long walk-and-talks and we discuss the books. He can discuss themes, climax, characters, motives, compare and contrast between different books, etc. I am hoping that by building these skills with books he really enjoys, that it will help with the transition to reading and understanding more complex literature. Plus, I recognize my inadequacies in this area, both from my education and my natural bent, so I am going through the Center For Lit Teaching the Classics course, and that is really helping me flesh out my bare-bones knowledge.

Something I am just starting to realize is that I thought, honest-to-goodness, that after high school, the window for reading the classics had closed. If I didnt read them between the ages of 14-18, I would never read them. In my defense, it was never explained to me that classics are introduced at those ages in the hopes that it will inspire a life-long reading of great lit. After all, Mrs Galloway was hardly written with a teenage audience in mind. In my mind, I have been "too late" to read these great books. What a sad way of viewing things! Of course it isnt too late! I am literally the authors' target demographic! After all, that is what we mean when we say that we finally understand many of the themes in these books only after we have some real life experience under our belts.

I just finished the Close Reads podcast about Frankenstein. They talked a lot about the inconsistencies of Victor Frankenstein and his narration. A reader asked the question about how they could figure that out, bc the reader just took everything at face value. The commentators (mainly Josh Gibbs and Karen Swallow Prior) said something that should seem obvious, but was revelatory to me. With first person narrators, treat the narrator as you would someone coming to you in person and telling you a story. If their story seems inconsistent, start looking deeper. Did for clues about the motives, etc. I cannot believe I am admitting this, but I have never once treated narrators like that. It has never occurred to me. As to the bolded, Darcy is up in arms about Darcy after the failed proposal. That is the crux of his second proposal😂

That may be, but none of this was explained to me when I read the book in an advanced lit class. We were just set loose to flounder on very limited (and in my case, privileged) life experience, and all I took away from it that Caulfield was a miserable person. I was not taught about unreliable narrators. I feel like it was taught to me as being about an obnoxious loser.

I taught myself to read the newspaper at 4yo. I am a very literal reader, but am slowly trying to remedy that now. All that to say, I had this exact experience as you, except I read it at 15. I remember vividly both knowing that the main character was black but also thinking somehow that he was literally invisible. I also thought that the scarlet letter stood for her middle initial because I knew her name was Hester (A?) Prymm. 🙄

I need to re-read Heart of Darkness. I hated it in school because it was just so depressing. But I think I would appreciate it literarily at this stage in life. If I can read Flannery O'Conner and enjoy it, I can certainly read Heart of Darkness, right?

Ahhhhhhhh!!!!! Noooooooo!!! I remembered something else about Russian lit. I read it when I was young and green, and thought that the whole "Russians drink lots of vodka" trope was just exaggeration. And then I read The Brothers K. Good grief. I think their only sustenance for half the book was hard liquor. I wondered if a person can get drunk just reading about excessive drinking bc I was starting to feel woozy while reading. But that might also have been all the extra names:).

I adore Persuasion. But I also like Northanger Abbey (my kids call it "North and Grabby"). The only Austen I actively dislike is Mansfield Park, mainly because I like zero of the characters. I got through all of the Iliad wondering when the Trojan Horse came in. The Iliad reminded me of reading the chapters in the Old Testament that just list the "begats" of names, except the list of names was punctuated with different terrible ways to die in battle. I could understand how The Odyssey is highly thought of, but I think I need to read the Iliad again to better appreciate its specialness. I also thought the wrong person died in the Iliad. I much preferred Hector to Achilles. I liked the Aeneid much more, especially because I finally found where the Trojan Horse is mentioned. I agree with your whole first paragraph and am also an engineer by training.

I would do so much better with Russian lit if they had a translation which called each character by only ONE name. Not three names plus random nicknames. Not half of a name only mentioned once. I cannot keep each character straight and it turns me off from Russian lit. I might have to give Anna Karenina a shot. I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and The Brothers Karamazov. The latter was the worse for everyone being called by a bunch of names-I couldnt keep characters straight and thought that one character was several different people until halfway through.

This thread is like a time warp. Remember those days when we thought that 50 days of quarantine was so much?! That if we just stayed indoors and watched parodies of songs to Covid themes that it would all blow over by June?

This was me. I spent 17 years after high school reading only non-fiction science and math, with a cosy mystery sprinkled in for variety. I didnt read literature (and I really dislike modern lit) because of how much I disliked it all in high school. And I have the benefit of LOVING Jane Austen books. I just always had in my mind that the book would drag on for ages, I wouldnt understand it or see any symbolism, and I would spend the whole time feeling dumb and depressed (the depressed part bc so many of those books are depressing). I started another thread on this, but basically, I came to realize that I have an advanced vocabulary, and that most classics are under 400 pages, so it just wont take obnoxious amounts of time to read a book. Plus, because I am an adult, I can decide to stop reading a book that I truly cannot stand.

There are some books I am convinced I would have been better served by had I read the Cliffs Notes on.

I wonder if we/schools do this because there is a feeling of, "if kids dont read this now, they will never read it", which is probably true for many people, but I dont know if it is doing anyone any favors. Especially when there has been precious little lead-up to prepare students for reading these books. And then what many students encounter in class are random quizzes about stupid details to ensure the kid real the book and not the Cliff Notes. I am so thankful that I can just have lit conversations with my kids and not have to quiz them on what time was on the clock on Miss Haversham's wall (yes, I still remember this question from Great Expectations).

As a spin off from the books you hated thread, I have been reading classics that I never read before. I am so pleasantly surprised that I like so many of them! Frankenstein: I thought I didnt like books where a bunch of people die. But this book isnt sad, it is tragic, which I now know is different. Plus, it is short, so I feel like I have accomplished something smart. Hard Times by Dickens: After seeing it referenced in a few threads, I thought I should work through my school-inspired dislike of Dickens by reading this book. Very, very good and interesting. As a plus, it is his shortest book (that isnt Christmas Carol), clocking in at under 300 pages. Shakespeare. This was the biggest surprise of all! I started out with the side-by-side translations like No Fear SHakespeare for about 8 plays until I got comfortable just reading them. This is how I learned that tragedies are not really sad. I mean, people die, but I dont have a long, vested interest in them. Plus, did I mention that they are fairly short?😁 In the volume I have, Julius Caesar is 40 pages, and it is one of the longer ones. So I can read a play in about 4 hours, really start to understand it, and feel like I have accomplished something smart (notice a theme here?) Flannery O'Conner: very weird and tragic. Took me a while to understand her point. But, again, drumroll please, the short stories are short! Roughin' It by Twain: I now understand why he was called America's humorist. This book was really, really funny, especially the part on the gold/silver rush. All of P.G. Wodehouse: Now, I doubt these are classics, but they do make me feel British-y and smart, and the allusions to books I just read (mainly Shakespeare) are so rewarding! I love his stuff!

What? Did no one have to read The Good Earth? Or am I the only one to despise that book? Catcher in the Rye. Unreliable narrator, which was not explained to us. Any "dead dog" book. Some of my school book hate comes from the inane projects that we had to do in conjunction with them. We read Island of the Blue Dolphins in 6th grade and spent untold amounts of time making dioramas. A few years ago, my kids and I listened to the audio version and we all loved it! It is a really interesting book that was ruined with asinine craft projects. Some books I enjoyed, like 1984, but school ruined them because we had to do lit analysis (in advanced English classes) with obnoxious kids who didnt take anything seriously. So those of use who wanted to discuss the book were afraid to speak up for fear of being teased or snarky comments made. I learned not to speak up in AP lit classes.

I adore Jack Prelutsky. I am tempted to suggest Swamps of Sleethe, but it might be a bit much for this age range. The words are quite rich. All the acting could be done with just one person. But all the poems depict creative ways to die on various fictional planets. This sounds morbid and inappropriate, but it isnt. Honestly, Swamps of Sleethe is one of the best poetry books I have read.

The Jabberwocky!!! This is such a great poem for so many reasons (I have taught it and had young children act it out). They start out thinking the dont understand the poem at all, but I spent 10 minutes slowly going through it and asking guiding questions about how we know what some words mean even if the word is made up. Then it is fun to act out. How does a vorpal blade go "snicker snack"? What does that look like?

I also despise The Berenstein Bears for the terrible life lessons. Lets make books about junk food, call kids fat, make the dad an obnoxious prat, display terrible ideas through the whole book, and stick a moral on the last page. I refused to let those books in the house. My kids dont need any help being unkind to each other.

Wonderful!!!