another request for cultural assistance

My sister Jenny, who's a high-school history teacher, sent me an email this week. Her school is revising their English curriculum, and she wanted some suggestions for 20th-century female authors who are "good, readable, and interesting."

Now, as someone who used to be a high-school English teacher, and is currently a professional student of literature, you might expect me to have some opinions on this matter. Probably I would have, back when I was a high-school English teacher. But if you've asked me for book recommendations in recent years, you'll already have heard that studying literature has more or less killed off my ability to read literature like a normal person (if normal persons even read literature anymore? all the literati say they don't, the literati not considering themselves normal, because they're snobs. But I listen to their podcasts anyway.). I read a lot during the day, so when I get home I want to cook, or knit, or watch TV. Or I read a magazine, which isn't the same. Lately I've even been doing crossword puzzles!

So when people ask me "have you read any good books lately?" I get all embarrassed and muttery, and this email gave me kind of the same feeling. And after I went though a cranky round of "What kind of authors? For what group of readers? What part of the 20th century? Why specifically women? Are they supposed to address women's issues? What genre? You probably want novels, don't you? Why don't you say novels if you want novels?" and so on, I got to thinking, "Why on earth do we teach novels in school anyway?"

Then I was shocked at myself.

My high-school teacher self had some answers on hand: novels inculcate a love of reading, which is useful. And novels contain lots of good lessons that they can get across in more complex and effective ways than other forms (same argument for poetry).

But I'm currently studying novels in the 18th century, when they were considered frivolous entertainment, would never, ever have been taught in schools, and were both kind of scandalous and wildly popular. Even though they were long and boring!

I've had the experience of trying to teach a great, fun, non-boring novel with relevance to the students' lives and yada yada--and watching it become a total slog. It's a problem: just assigning something as work is enough to make it feel like work. So why ruin fiction by making kids read it (at an annoying group pace, with a quiz coming) and claiming that it's good for them? Why not allow them to read novels, as a treat? It would be easy enough to fill out the curriculum with other literary forms.

So the answer I wanted to give was, just get a lot of books and let kids pick the ones they want to read. (I had a lot of success doing this. People like the things they pick out for themselves, even when they're books.) But obviously that's not going to happen. And, you know, I'm glad I was made to read The Brothers Karamazov in high school. Besides, I'm not ready to commit to my ban-novels-from-the-curriculum position, because it seems kind of reactionary, even to me. So I did come up with a pretty standard list of books for my sister (most of those books are quite good, when they're not being taught in high schools). And then I thought, maybe I should throw this question out to people who actually read! And aren't curmudgeons.

So that's my request: books for the high-school curriculum! And you can go beyond 20th-c women writers if you want, because I'm curious. Plus, you never know, I might be back in the HS classroom one of these days. And if I am I want to have the very coolest list of books to slog through.