> Being unable to read Moby Dick or Les Miserables is an issue.
Even the kids with the greatest cognitive gifts, back in the 80s or 2000s or whenever you grew up and the standards were supposedly higher, and who are now or will be great parents raising great kids themselves, were not eager to read Les Miserables.
I read Les Miserables for fun in high school. I was introduced to the story through the musical (maybe originally just a song from it), I think, and became curious about its origins and elements I might've missed in other depictions.
I can't find my copy now, but it was one of the nice fancy hardcover Borders Classics editions, which afaict is a 600-something-page abridgment of Wilbour's 1862 translation. There were still some slow or awkward parts but I definitely enjoyed it overall.
Moby Dick, though, I was assigned and did not read.
If I'd been assigned Les Miserables and not Moby Dick, maybe it'd have gone the other way around.
Anyway you're wrong that this never happens. Me and my friends growing up read Hugo and Dostoevsky and Kant and Hume and Dickens and Marx for fun, alongside lots of stuff outside the 'Western' literary and philosophical canons.
And dated language is fun sometimes. It adds to a sense of place in the work, and often a lot of flavor. It can even be nostalgic, in a strange way— I recently started reading 3 different translations of Monkey King/Journey to the West. One of the translations is extremely contemporary in its language, which is great because it helps make a lot of jokes land well. But another is an audiobook recording from the 80s of a translation from the 1940s, and it's pleasantly nostalgic for me because it reminds me, just through its 'flavor', of already-outdated media for children that I encountered as a little kid— stuff like School-House Rock and claymation Christmas specials. It gives that presentation of the story a kind of soothing bedtime reading from a storybook vibe for me.
Anyway, even challenging reading can be a lot of fun for kids if you let them choose the challenge and mostly stay out of their way after that (instead of, for example, nagging them with regular quizzes or forcing them to go over each sentence in agonizing detail in a group setting).
tl;dr: all kids need/deserve both choiceful and choiceless reading, regardless of skill or talent. Parents and teachers can and should assign kids choiceless reading that usefully challenges and/or tests them. But kids also deserve activities and rituals and games that encourage and reward them for choiceful reading, where their choices are not to be questioned.
I'm not sure how to read the question. I think freedom is one of the things that helps make reading attractive, and that stepping back and giving students/kids/whomever freedom in their reading choices can sometimes make even pretty surprising books attractive enough that people pick them up and read them.
But if I'm really committed to giving someone that space and freedom of choice, when they do choose something to read, that freedom includes freedom from the constraint of validation!
There are separate questions about whether or not someone's total literary diet is sufficient for their needs and goals. Parents (with respect to their kids), teachers (with respect to their students), and individuals (with respect to themselves) will likely formulate and answer those questions in different, if overlapping, ways.
One of the things my mom did that I'm very grateful for is rewarding me for reading without respect to my reading choices. She often did this with games where reading time or book reports could earn me screen time or points I could exchange for prizes, and that was really fun. For those games, any book would do.
Another thing she did to make reading a cite of freedom was suspend all household censorship rules when it came to books. There were no age-appropriateness checks for books like there were for TV and movies. And (sometimes?) if a movie I wanted to see was forbidden but it had a novelization, I could even get that restriction lifted by reading the novelization! (I used that to watch Godzilla. :D)
But incentives don't to be direct, external rewards like that, either. It could be quality time or an organized activity like 'choose any book, and we'll both read it and talk about our favorite parts', a informal little two-person book club.
Rewards can be weaved into a reading-adjaceng activity, too: I used to go to bookstores with my dad and we'd just sit in the book's coffee shop together. He'd get an Americano and I'd get one of whatever I wanted, and so trips to the bookstore meant a free coffee-themed milkshake at least. ;
Books can also be made into their own treats! On those bookstore trips soth my dad, when it was time to go, he'd offer me a deal: I'll buy you any one magazine. When I picked an expensive, imported Linux magazine, I felt like a winner— I was gaming the system. And since he'd only buy one, if I finished a magazine while sitting with him, that meant I got to take home one that was brand new to me instead of one I already started. That's practically a twofer!
When I was really lucky, he'd offer to buy a book instead. When the item I chose was expensive and his offer had been unconstrained, he'd always make a show of griping and balking, but he stuck to his word. And so he let me feel like I was getting away with something when my 'one book' was a fancy hardcover classic with golden-edged pages— even if the translation was from 1862 and I'd have to do some work to get through it. My dad's griping about prices kinda turned his offer into a game and the book itself into a treasured prize. :)
When I was little, my parents would also take me to the library often, and when they did, I was never restricted once I got there. Sometimes they took me to a specific event or activity. But afterwards and otherwise, I was on my own! I could play games on the library computers or just nap in a bean bag chair thw whole time, and that was fine. I could come home with books but I didn't have to. All of that helped to make the library a relaxing and fun place.
My examples so far were all outside of school, but allowing reading choices in school is necessary, too. One year in high school, my English class was presented with a pile of books, and told to each choose one to read and write about. One of my besties chose The Brothers Karamozov, and he loved it. He talked about it with me and all his other friends, sometimes making playful allusions to it by comparing classmates to characters or referring to them by the names of characters. That got some of us interested in it that book and its author, too. I ended up picking a Dostoevsky book, too (The Idiot, a blessedly thinner volume).
Assigning that same book to the whole class would probably have been a disaster. It definitely wouldn't have clicked with some of us, and it's long as fuck. I might've bitched about it myself! But in a context of freedom? The book was evidently perfectly choosable, rewarding for the student who chose it, and intriguing to at least some of his classmates. The freedom to choose is powerful.
That kind of freedom is something all learners deserve. And it's not surprising that in the absence of such freedom, students (of all skill levels) often shirk, cheat, or refuse to read what they're assigned. But that behavior doesn't necessarily indicate a general unwillingness or inability to read comparable books.
To try to kind of answer your question: not every book a kid reads will be their choice, and that's okay. Parents and teachers will want kids to read books that challenge them. They'll also want them to read books that help adults assess the kid's reading skills. For those purposes, there are probably some times that gifted and enthusiastic readers don't need any particular books prescribed to them at all. And for those purposes, there will be times when students (gifted or not) will be asked to do reading that feels like work to them. Maybe reading that feels like work will be more frequent for readers who are less advanced or less talented.
But both inside school and outside school, kids should be given opportunities to choose what they read, too. Sometimes that can be from s selection of prescribed options but imo sometimes their freedom of choice should be absolute. Whether they have a choice or not should always be clear (no take-backsies!). And when they do have a choice, their choices are sacred and not to be judged, regardless of how skilled or enthusiastic a reader they are. The only feedback they should get about their reading choices (if any) is some kind of sincere encouragement or congratulation.
I appreciate the detailed response. Gifted kids in my opinion waste a lot of their life on performative enthusiasm about stuff they don't care very much about.
> Parents and teachers will want kids to read books that challenge them.
You say "challenge" them but you really mean "belong to the tribe." Classical Russian Literature is a tribe. "Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote" are also a tribe, I will not make up a name for that tribe, but it is one. Playing in the orchestra is a tribe. LISP is Paul Graham's tribe. Fencing and crew are tribes. This is why people are so passionate about this: it's all about tribes.
The mistake the HN commenters are making here is they think their tribe means "the smart kids tribe." I don't know what their tribe means, but I can tell you now, no one group of people owns "the smart kids."
> You say "challenge" them but you really mean "belong to the tribe."
What I had in mind was more like books that are require some reasonable level of effort or ask something new of the reader, which will depend on them and what they're used to/practiced with. Here are some things I had in mind as useful challenges a book might present to a reader:
- including words they haven't seen before or using words they know in new ways
- hopefully this also means they are at least sometimes looking those words up
- describing precise logical forms in natural language
- a book that relies on this might push a student who doesn't normally feel the need to take notes to draw a diagram or create a glossary or table or taxonomy
- including sentences with complex syntactic structure
- may not be good writing, may not be enjoyable. Potentially valuable for the same kinds of reasons as the previous example, plus helping develop some appreciation for the relative ease of consisw language
- involving unfamiliar literary forms
- using language in narrow technical ways
- can help readers develop an intuition for quickly whether a term is being used conventionally or as a term of art
- presenting an opportunity (or demand) to empathize with a strange person or a strange situation
- being translated in a different way (more literal, denser with annotations, more liberal) than the reader is used to
- comparisons would probably be productive.
You get the idea. Considerations like this are already worked into school curricula. But what I meant was that generally people recognize an interest in reading that advances the learner's skills in some way. And that could look really different kinds of things for students with different talents, backgrounds, and interests.
It's also distinct from membership in any purported literary canon. I'm sure some kids could be productively challenged for an entire school year by works drawn entirely from some obscure fanfic community I've never heard of.
You're totally right that general notions of what texts are 'worthy' (sophisticated, substantive, difficult, beautiful, subtle, poweful, whatever) are culturally bound, and that choosing which books to praise or recommend or mandate goes deep beyond nationality or ethnicity into much finer ingroup signaling, too.
But that's not what I had in mind. I meant 'usefully challenging for some specific student at some specific time', not some metaphysically dubious concept of inherent sophistication.
I meant it more in the sense of making sure a student is coasting nor stumped— that at least some of their reading is really helping them grow. And I mean growth not just intellectually but also in a broader developmental sense. Emotional stuff, too. Even just figuring out how to connect with new settings or genres or why other people the like things they like. Trying to advance any of those would be a good reason to recommend a book for a student. (One genre I wish I'd figured out how to read and evaluate much earlier is math textbooks, for instance. But fiction genre-swap exercises between friends could be valuable, too. Say I don't like sci-fi, and you've not read much romance. We agree together to parallel missions to find each other a book in their disfavored genre that they actually connect with. Both the searching and establishing of such a new connection counts as one kind of useful challenge in this context, for me.)
Anyway I agree about why these conversations get so heated and unproductive. Many people either get too caught up in the cultural/affiliative dimension of the judgments involved or completely trip over them without acknowledging their existence.
Even the kids with the greatest cognitive gifts, back in the 80s or 2000s or whenever you grew up and the standards were supposedly higher, and who are now or will be great parents raising great kids themselves, were not eager to read Les Miserables.