Do you remember what books you had to read in high school? I thought about this a few years ago when some of my friends and I were comparing reading notes. I came up with what I think is a pretty standard high school reading list. Brave New World, Oedipus Rex, Death of a Salesman, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye. Shakespeare was represented by Romeo and Juliet and MacBeth. I don't think I enjoyed reading a single one of them. We didn't have a conversation about them in class. No, we sat there with our literary scapels and dissected them to bits leaving no likeable parts. We didn't read books in school - we killed them.

I was thinking of this after I read Nancy Schnog's Washtington Post article "We're Teaching Books That Don't Stack Up".

"Butchering." That's what one of my former students, a young man who loves creative writing but rarely gets to do any at school, called English class. He was referring to the endless picking apart of linguistic details that loses teens in a haze of "So what?" The reading quizzes that turn, say, "Hamlet" into a Q&A on facts, symbols and themes. The thesis-driven essay assignments that require students to write about a novel they can't muster any passion for ("The Scarlet Letter" is high on teens' list of most dreaded).

In Good Magazine Anne Trubek posted on the same subject with her "Why We Shouldn't Still Be Learning The Catcher in the Rye.

Sure, J.D. Salinger’s novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. But that was 50 years ago. Today, Salinger’s novel lacks the currency or shock value it once had, and has lost some of its critical cachet. But it is still ubiquitously taught even though many newer novels of adolescence are available.

I'm not an English teacher and I don't play one on television (or YouTube) but as a former high school English student I've always thought that the problem wasn't in the books themselves. No, I've always felt that it was the selection of books for certain classes and the methods used to teach those books that killed them. End of chapter quizzes and book reports; literary analysis looking for Bible references to a class of students who have barely cracked open the Bible; getting students who have never read a single book willingly in their life and shoving Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare down their throats - any of this sound familar? Any of it sound fun or even interesting?

Don't get me wrong, I do think there is value in reading and discussing what we've read. I am, afterall, a book blogger. Heck, I do that for fun. I think that's how we learn how to critically think. We learn to question things like - does the author/character have bias or more correctly what is the author's/character's bias? When was it written and what was happening historically at that time? How does their class/race/culture play a part in their writing? Is the author/character not saying something that is perhaps even more important than what they are? These are all things we ask ourselves when we read the newspaper, watch the news or decide who we're going to vote for.

I don't think that all the older novels need to be replaced with contemporary novels. As Lessons from the Tortoise points out, those "old" novels still have relevance.

The so-called canon is full of works that are thoroughly "relevant" to today's teens. Walden confronts them with a slacker environmentalist, Romeo and Juliet with love-struck teens, Catcher in the Rye with a teenager yearning for authenticity, and so on. The problem is not with the books but with how they are taught: as the article goes on to say (and here's where it's much smarter than its title), teens are turned off by "The reading quizzes that turn, say, "Hamlet" into a Q&A on facts, symbols and themes." Exactly.

There's nothing wrong with making way for new novels in the classroom either. The problem isn't getting teacher's to teach them, it's getting them in the classroom to begin with. Trubek suggested that Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak should get some class time but a book about a girl who is struggling with the psychological effects of rape probably isn't going to make it onto the curriculum list. King Dork is one of the many books that is compared to The Catcher in the Rye but as Tom gets multiple blow jobs it's unlikely make it. There's blow jobs and teenage drinking in John Green's Printz Award winning Looking for Alaska so we should take that off the list. Actually we should probaby take all the Printz Award winners off the list of contenders.

Maybe we should remind ourselves that the canon isn't so squeaky clean either. Sunny Side Up urges parents to remember that today's canon is yesterday's controversy.

Look at some of the “banned” books through history; Of Mice and Men, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye and even the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. They turned a mirror on life that made some people uncomfortable. Now we wonder what the fuss was about, but they are of the past and don’t hit close to home. Our high school children are more than well aware of the dark side of life, and it’s important that we, as adults, use every opportunity to discuss moral issues and how to handle life situations with maturity and self-respect. All I’m saying is, don’t listen to the hype when it comes to your child. If you are concerned enough to complain, be concerned enough to read it yourself first. While you’re at it, watch every music video they see, listen to the lyrics of every song they play, play every level of the video games that consume them and listen to the dialog and situations in the prime time television you watch every day. The problem is bigger than one assigned book.

There are a number of books that most students in my high school read for class that I didn't. My best friend had a different eleventh grade English teacher than I did. She had to read The Merchant of Venice and To Kill A Mockingbird in class. That year my English teacher told my class we weren't going to be doing collective required reading in class. Instead we had one class a week where we just sat and read whatever we wanted but we had to read. We got marks for reading based on word count (double points for classics), and doing a speech about a book we'd read at the end of the semester (ok, so that was nobody's favourite part). He really didn't care what we read, just as long as we were reading. That was the first time I read Oliver Twist (yes I was trying to rack up some of those bonus points) but the book I spoke about? It was It Happened To Nancy, a sort of Go Ask Alice type of book about a teenage girl that got AIDs. Something that never would have been taught in school but that a girl who hated reading borrowed from me afterwards (*ahem* she never returned it). Guys in my class who would have rathered eaten the schools entire collection of Shakespeare than read them spoke about science fiction books they loved. Everyone had a book that they liked, none were on the curriculum.

Let be honest about something, it's not the elementary teacher or high school English teacher who should be responsible for making our kids love reading. They can teach them how to read, and what a metaphor is but they can't teach them to love it. Kids love reading when you let them read what they want to read. Let them read comic books. Let them read romance novels and maybe some day they'll start a snarkalicious teen romance blog. Let them read science fiction.Just let them read.

Contributing Editor Sassymonkey read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time two years ago and loved it. She blogs at Sassymonkey and Sassymonkey Reads.