Been Assigned Any Modern Classics Lately?

I am an avid reader. I've just finished Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich and currently finishing up The Prince by Machiavelli. I usually have two or three books going at one time; I've been that way ever since I started reading.

Last night while at dinner with a friend of mine, the topic of what books to read came up. One that I plan to read in the near future (after I'm done my already large stack of "to read") is Uncle Tom's Cabin. I was never required to read this book in any of my schooling, possibly because the majority of my education was in Canada. The book has always intrigued me, and I hope it lives up to the hype I have created for it.

In the course of the conversation I got to thinking that as students we're forced to read certain great works of literature from the likes of Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Dickens, Hugo, Melville, Fitzgerald, etc. Most of us have been there, half-heartedly paging through these tomes praying we'll learn enough to pass the final. But the question that struck me was since I've been out of the educational loop, what book written within the last 20 years would be considered "required reading" for students? More recent books like Catch-22 (1961) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) cut it close time-wise, but even these titles are more than thirty years old.

Books that win prestigious awards aren't guaranteed places in school curriculum, are they? I've had the privilege of reading books like Blindness by Jose Saramago (Nobel Prize for Literature, 1998), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (Pulitzer Prize, 2000), and Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Man Booker Prize, 2002), all of which I consider great works of modern literature. Are these titles on teacher's lists? Will they be in the future?

Alright then, what about just great sellers? At the time I wrote this, The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown has been on the Best Selling (Fiction) chart for 116 weeks, a fantastic feat. Are teachers going to be teaching about the exploits of Robert Langdon anytime soon? Would a book like The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren even be discussed on a broad educational scale for its impact on the American spiritual landscape? If kids weren't reading the Harry Potter series on their own, would the book be able to be taught on its own merits?

My main questions are these: what makes a book "required reading" for today's students? How long does it take? In this age of different media formats like movies, television, and the internet, can a book stand out enough to become one? How revolutionary, controversial, or just plain good will a book have to be (a silly question for the mere fact that we can't quantify a book's revolutionary, controversy creating ability, or quality quotient) or is it really just a matter of time? Maybe it is just that simple.

I've asked these questions of some fairly qualified people I know. I'll report back how they respond.

On a side note, my personal favorite "forced reading" of my educational career came from the last college course I would have thought: marketing. The book was Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, which taught me how easy it is to conform to societies' norms, even when you know better. A great read (even if it was published in 1922).