The Books We Read in High School

And the books we should be reading instead

Photo by Jeffrey Hamilton on Unsplash

I never read The Catcher in the Rye when I was supposed to.

The progressive high school I went to didn’t assign it. We read Brave New World while the rest of the country’s tenth graders read To Kill a Mockingbird. My Honors English class unpacked Les Miserables (yes, really — all seven-hundred pages of it) when…