"Boy" books vs "girl" books
On Twitter there is a whole discussion happening about a lot of boys felt like they were forced to read really boring, girl-centered books all through high school.
While I would agree that most of my English curriculum was comprised of books I would not have personally chosen (I could barely get through Huck Finn) I personally felt like there was a pretty even split between books that were clearly meant to appeal to boys and books meant to appeal to girls. A lot of books back in the 90s and 00s were pretty neutral.
Off the top of my head I read:
- My Side of the Mountain
- Sign of the Beaver
- Red Badge of Courage
- Lord of the Flies
- Of Mice and Men
- The Grapes of Wrath
- East of Eden
- The Great Gatsby
- Ender's Game
- A Tale of Two Cities
- Great Expectations
- The Awakening (this one was really stupid and I hated it)
- Sula
- Their Eyes were Watching God
- Things Fall Apart
- The Things They Carried
- The Crucible
- Death of a Salesman
- Othello
- Romeo and Juliet
- The Crossing
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Number the Stars
- Night
- Silas Marner
I'm sure I'm missing some but I personally felt like this was a reasonably good range of novels even though I had to drag myself through a lot of them.
If I were a worse reader, I suppose I would have hated English class. But I never felt that my English teacher's job was to keep me entertained 100% of the time, just like how I never felt put out when my Math teacher was going over a topic I didn't particularly enjoy.
Edited: For some reason this got formatted super weirdly