Thinking Out Loud

Lately I've been devising these courses just so that I can teach books I like (can that be my area of specialization?). Last January, I taught a 3-week course called Literary Prizes and Recent Prizewinners, just because it was the best way I could think of to group together three novels I was pretty interested in teaching. This coming fall, it's Great American Novels of the Twentieth Century--a course that at some schools would sound way too conventional to fly, but that here ended up with a pretty long waitlist (ah, how flattering . . . ).

Anyway, here is my list of books:

Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

I don't know that I would say they are definitively the best six books written during the century, but they're five that I love that teach well, plus one that I haven't yet read but am eager to (by Maya Angelou). And since I have a feeling the fall will involve a lot of new juggling, I want to teach some books that I know will succeed and engage students on their own, without too much of the cheerleading on my part that requires extra emotional energy.

I thought of trying to get Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones on there somehow because I really want to teach that book some time soon, but these six cluster around a theme of American identity fairly well, and that one would be more of a stretch. Not that I'm so averse to stretching, but also, with such a short list of books, I figured maybe I owed them an all-classic list.

Maybe I'll do a January 2009 course and just call it Recent Popular Fiction and throw The Lovely Bones and whatever else I've been reading onto it. After all, these courses could theoretically make good gateways for teaching basic literary analysis. Why not?

This is one thing I love about my job--compelling others to read what I like. ;)