There is a guy named Guy I think about sometimes when I see what language arts has traded. We were eighth grade students at Hally Middle School in Detroit, deep in the throes of a school-wide reading contest. We had outrun every other student, and the contest was down to the two of us, who read and recorded books weekly, neck and neck until the bitter end. Across the school, our teachers had a combination of both deep optimism and high expectations of all students, as evidenced by the ongoing opportunities to read critically, think deeply, and conquer texts on grade level. This contest was no different. Guy had become my greatest challenger, and I beat him—101 books to 99. My victory felt no smaller than the Greeks defeating the Trojans.
That public win came on the winds of a private one. In seventh grade, I wanted to read the biggest book I could find, which, at the time, was Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I didn’t know the content, but it had heft and I wanted to read a “big” book. The weight of the book in my 12-year-old hands was the point. With dogged determination, I plowed through the story of Scarlett and Rhett, both deeply enthralled in a love story that ended in tragedy and confused beyond all comprehension of the southern blockade. I didn’t understand all of it. But I built just enough knowledge from a fictional text to anchor American history and economics when I got to high school.
Both of those experiences were pivotal in their own right, but what bonded them together was a deep regard for the humble novel and wanting, deeply, to best it, often and with great aplomb. I’ve been thinking about that instinct lately—the desire not just to read, but to conquer a novel. To walk onto the battlefield of words and emerge victorious, and to take that victory to science, to social studies, to economics, to biology, to sociology, to psychology, to anthropology—the battlefield of the novel is where knowledge is built, ideas are forged, and lives change.
It seems we’ve selectively bred out of students the drive to conquer a complex novel.
Somewhere between my 1990s middle school and now, the novel has lost its place at the center of the language arts classroom. As the novel waits patiently in the school book room, gathering dust, in its stead we’ve centered passages, excerpts, and summaries. We’ve replaced 200 pages with two—carefully leveled, devoid of context, and perfectly optimized for a standardized test that is the Final Boss of every instructional unit. While we ask central idea questions about 750 words, the 100,000 words bound by two covers wait quietly for us to remember them.
This is a civilizational loss.
The case for bringing back the novel to the classroom is not just a sentimental one, though sentiment does have value. My middle school language arts teachers were novel teachers. We were assigned and read The Pearl by John Steinbeck (bored), The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (really bored), Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor (loved), and The Giver by Lois Lowry (really loved). Regardless of my personal reactions to the novel, it’s undeniable that I grew intellectually with each one. The Pearl taught us how to read a complex fable and consider the corrupting influence of wealth. The Old Man and the Sea introduced us to existentialism, endurance, and agony over defeat. Roll of Thunder transported us 1990s Detroiters to 1930s Mississippi, where we wrestled with unflinching racism that built and maintained systemic poverty. The Giver posed dark moral dilemmas and raised questions about the ethicality of individuality versus sameness. These layers of thematic complexity carried us from the language arts classroom into the lunchroom and on walks home, where we often argued about the characters and why they did what they did.
That was my school-related experience. Outside of school, I ripped through book after book. I graduated from the Babysitters Club to Sweet Valley High, I devoured Stephen King’s Firestarter and It and I got so bold that I plodded, quite unsuccessfully, through Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I read The Bluest Eye alone in the summer between eighth and ninth grade on the recommendation of a classmate—not a teacher, a classmate—plodding through it like a mouse wading through molasses and exiting it mired in confusion. This is an argument for, not against, the novel. The novel worked exactly as intended. It made me think. And when I read it again with my class in tenth grade, I had just enough prior knowledge for it to make sense and for the disjointed thoughts in my head to fuse into coherence.
This reveals the deeper argument: cognitive development. Reading novels is not the same as reading passages or even short stories. Passages train students for processing in bursts—to identify, extract, and move on. Novels train students for mental endurance, the sustained effortful act of holding a world in your head across days and weeks. Plot threads. Subtle, slow character development. Tone shifts. Meaning that builds steadily, surely, and slowly, whose accumulation bucks summarization in margin notes.
Consider what it takes to deeply understand Hamlet’s paralysis (in a play, not a novel, in this case). You can understand, from a synopsis, that his uncle killed his father. But it is only across the full arc of acts II through V, from his cruelty toward Ophelia, his philosophical dizziness in the graveyard, that you begin to comprehend, to know, the depth of his grief. Understanding is not knowledge. The novel is where students learn the difference.
There is also the important matter of the language itself. One of my favorite language lessons emerged from Night by Elie Wiesel (a memoir). When I taught the text, I noticed that he uses a colon in a grammatically interesting way, something my tenth grade students had glossed over. Wiesel deploys the colon constantly, linking two independent clauses into a single load-bearing sentence. My students had never considered that a colon could do anything more than indicate time or begin a list. But because Night is a book with space for a pattern to emerge and repeat, the colon became an object of instruction. We studied examples across chapters. We discussed the effect. We returned to earlier sentences and reexamined them. We played with the colon as a stylistic device, writing our own sentences in Wiesel’s style, in earnest attempts to achieve the same linguist keenness, write sentences that had their own weight.
That lesson came entirely from sustained exposure. A two-page excerpt may have had the pattern, but it would not have revealed its heft. Passages struggle to provide repeated, varied, contextualized language encounters that shift how a student reads and provides clear models for how to write. Vocabulary encountered once in a passage is vocabulary that turns to grayscale. Vocabulary encountered a dozen times, across chapters, in a story with an emotional investment, remains vibrant in the mind.
And let us not ignore the question of investment. My own tenth-grade class read Richard Wright’s Native Son. We were, all of us, gripped by Bigger Thomas in a way that was compelling and uncomfortable. We argued about Bigger. We discussed the personal and social morality of the world that Bigger inhabited. We were invested. When Ms. Odham assigned Black Boy (a memoir) later that semester, we did not groan. The momentum of the first novel propelled us into the second. That kind of magical book physics—the way the momentum of one book forces the reader into the next—is invisible in data, unmeasurable by assessment, yet entirely real.
And perhaps most importantly for civic life, the novel is an entree into empathy, especially in the storm of moral ambiguity. Complex, well-written novels ask readers to inhabit the lives of others for extended periods of time, not just three paragraphs but three hundred pages. Communities require us to navigate complexity, tolerate ambiguity, and be open to ideas that are different from the ones we woke up with. The novel allows practice for the real world in a contained, low-stakes environment. Want to address bullying? Stop lecturing and start studying The 57 Bus by Daska Slater (nonfiction), Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, and The Skin I’m In by Sharon Flake.
The practical objections to assigning novels are real, however, and I won’t wave them away. I (shamefully) admit that I contributed to the system that slowly peeled them away from instruction.
There is no definite list that every student should read. Full stop. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a bridge to Brooklyn. I believe students benefit from a balanced diet of classic and contemporary texts, authors whose backgrounds span the full range of the human experience and illuminate human possibility. The classics have endured for important reasons: Their themes buck obsolescence, their syntax requires close reading, their vocabulary introduces students to words they won’t encounter in everyday speech. Contemporary texts do something different but equally necessary: They affirm students’ current experiences, they use familiar language for accessibility, and they become current cultural touchstones.[1] Choosing what novels assign is therefore difficult.
Teaching them is also hard work. It requires the teacher to understand not just the plot but the architecture of the text—how the theme develops, when and why the tone shifts, what the structure does to meaning. The teacher must first consume the book as a reader, then return to it as a teacher. You have to know the novel so deeply that you can anticipate students’ questions in advance and have the discipline to resist letting discussions drift about for weeks on end. Some students will refuse to read the text at first, and will some never start. But many will acquiesce, especially with the right hook, the right book, and the right teacher. And those who do will carry those characters, sentences, words, and worlds beyond the classroom and into their adult lives, where they’ll quietly and unexpectedly surface over dinner, at the bar, or in an Uber after a night out.
That is what the novel does. It carries us from before into the beyond. We should let it.
[1] One note of caution. I once taught The Hunger Games in eighth grade because all my students were already reading it. In retrospect, I had it backwards. They were going to read The Hunger Games anyway. They were reading it anyway. Instead of using precious instructional time on a book that they were already reading, I should have used it as a springboard from what they loved to a thematically similar novel they never would have found on their own. Teach the novel they aren’t reading, not the one they are.
