Classic Books: A Few of These Students’ Favorite Things

Christine Baron, teacher of English at Fountain Valley High School, is much buoyed up by the results of a quiz she gave her students on their favorite books.

Baron did not restrict them to classics or to books they had been assigned to read. They were simply asked to name the 12 books they had enjoyed the most or the 12 books that had influenced them the most.

“I’ve got to tell you,” she writes, “I was not prepared for the results. OK, admittedly, these kids are all college-bound and bound for fairly good schools--but they’re still 17 years old and among them one will find varsity football players, cheerleaders, song leaders, one rock drummer, four skateboarders, varsity basketball players (male and female), surfers, long-distance runners, actors, singers, marching band members, the homecoming queen and a heavy metal enthusiast.”

Their favorite books, in order of those most-often mentioned, were these:

1. “The Great Gatsby.” 2. “All Quiet on the Western Front.” 3. “To Kill a Mockingbird.” 4. “Hamlet.” 5. “Grapes of Wrath.” 6. “Animal Farm.” 7. “Of Mice and Men.” 8. “Huckleberry Finn.” 9. “Death of a Salesman.” 10. “Gone With the Wind.” 11. “The Scarlet Letter.” 12. “1984.”

Baron could have been no more surprised and delighted than I was by that list.

Incredibly, all but one of the 12 (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) was published before 1950. All but two of them (“To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Gone with the Wind”) I read in my youth. And if I were asked to make a list of the 12 books that were most important to me, at least half of them would be on it.

I am amazed that books written in the 1930s and 1940s are still being read by high school students. I am especially amazed that Erich Remarque’s “All Quiet” is still being read by the young--or by anyone.

I read it when I was in high school and it meant to me that war was so unthinkable, for both sides, that there could never be another one.

We were too civilized. I really believed that if our leaders only read that book, and they did, they could never again lead us into war. Of course, even as I read it Hitler was moving the world toward the history’s worst war, and the democracies were letting him do it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” taught me to admire Fitzgerald’s scintillating but uncluttered prose. Surely, he was the most graceful of our novelists.

In “Of Mice and Men,” John Steinbeck also displayed a simplicity of style that is rarely found among today’s novelists, except a couple of first-rate detective story writers.

It is very encouraging to find two of George Orwell’s prescient political satires--”1984” and “Animal Farm”--on the list. Back in 1984, I remember, several critics pounced on Orwell’s implied prediction that by that time, Western civilization would be under the control of tyrannical governments and the language would be newspeak. It hadn’t happened, they argued.

It hadn’t happened in the Western democracies yet, but a third of the world was under the heel of fascist dictators and still is. And newspeak (doublespeak) is the common language everywhere.

If I’m not mistaken, “The Scarlet Letter” was assigned reading when I was in Whittier High School, though I can hardly believe that a teacher would have dared to assign a book about sexual transgressions to a class in that Quaker town. (They didn’t even have any bars when I lived there.)

Perhaps I read it later when I was in Belmont High School, in Los Angeles, which was even then regarded as a wicked city.

I am a little puzzled by the absence of Ernest Hemingway. I would have thought that a group who read Fitzgerald and Steinbeck would also have read their contemporary, Hemingway.

Hemingway’s blunt, clear style, as in “The Sun Also Rises” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” probably influenced subsequent prose more than any other writer’s.

I am also surprised by the absence of “Catcher in the Rye.” Only a few years ago that seemed to be the teen-agers’ Bible. Has J. D. Salinger fallen from grace?

“I guess my overall feeling,” Baron says, “was one of profound hope. It would seem, amidst TV, movies and rock music, literature is still alive and well. When I saw these results, I immediately thought of three people who would appreciate this information: my parents and Jack Smith. I’m sure it will make you as happy as it did me.”

Indeed, I am especially happy because the students’ list makes me feel that, even though I am not entirely comfortable in a time when our definitive cultural phenomenon is hard rock music, my literary tastes are not that much different from those of our young.

Those, that is, who read.