Good morning, class. Raise your hand if you actually read your summer assignments, Great Expectations and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yes, raise your hand if you did read those books. Did read, yes. What's that you say? An extension, you say? Too hot outside to focus? Well. I don't know if I ― OK. But just this once.
Now that school's back in sesh, and the oppressive gloom of the heat dome is giving way to crisp, snuggle-inducing air, we think it's time for students and former students alike to push the boundaries of the usual syllabi and curl up with something new. Not that classics aren't classics for a reason ― although some, if we're to take students' words for it, are a little outmoded in their language and themes.
But the Western canon is largely made up of a monolithic scheme of writers (read: white, male), so adding in variety would not only expand readers' understanding of American life, it would better represent American readership.
We've rounded up a few books ― some of them new, some of them newish ― that we think should be required reading. Some directly confront women's issues like infertility; others are lyrical explorations of black life in America. Have a look, and read on.
Whitehead pulls no punches in this deftly structured, brilliantly written novel, which takes on slavery, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, a white supremacist state similar to Nazi Germany, and the United States' full history of white brutality against black people. The Underground Railroad is a necessary antidote to sanitized histories of America's racial divide, as well as a stunning example of both historical and speculative fiction at their most powerful. ― Claire Fallon, Books and Culture Writer
