Classic Literature- Too old to be any good?

A friend posted a link to the The Today Show's 10 Books You Really Should Have Read in High School.  I read it, because I am a bibliophile, and I know for a fact that my High School Literature career falls far short of what it should have in the sense of "classic" novels.

With that said, I’ve only read four of the titles from the Today Show list, and two of which I read in Junior High School (both in 7th grade).  I was in a gifted education program in Junior High School, and a Humanities track in High School.  The Humanities track consisted of a program that included five years of English, five years of History, and five years of Foreign Language, including two years of Latin.


I took the standard English classes that were required of all students.  9th grade’s English classes were related directly to our History courses... whatever region we studied in 9th grade (The Middle East, China, Japan, South America), we read literature from those countries. Two English classes with novels we weren’t interested in, with the same teacher for both semesters was pure torture.

10th grade was no better.  We read- blech- the classics .  Boring, Boring, BORING with a capital B.  I distinctly remember “reading” Great Expectations by Dickens, and Cry, the Beloved Country.  Reading during sophomore year of High School consisted of Spark Notes.  Needless to say, I was bored.  Though we did read parts of the The Canterbury Tales with our former mentally insane (I’m not kidding) English teacher and I enjoyed the Tales immensely. I re-read the Canterbury Tales in their original language in College and loved it even more. (PS- All the links are to wikipedia, in case you want a taste of what the book is about).

11th grade was an upshot in the dark- a whole, long, glorious year of creative writing.  I loved every, single minute of it (just as I enjoyed every, single minute of the year of creative writing I took in College).  But then again, this was writing, not reading literature.  BIG difference.
 

12th grade was the year I doubled up.  I took AP English, which was DIFFICULT, even for me.  Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Sound and the Fury, the Bible, Cold Mountain, The Poisonwood Bible, Heart of Darkness, Crime and Punishment, The Great Gatsby... we barreled through books, pulling them apart and putting them back together, while my teacher droned “Where are the words? What do they mean? How are they used?” (his personal battle cry).  If anything AP English really did prepare me for college English classes. 

I also took electives- Literature and the American Musical (!! fun!!!) and 80s and 90s Lit.  Both were fantastic and I really did enjoy the books.  We read Ragtime and Wicked, wrote our own musicals, and dove into The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Nobody’s Fool, The House of the Spirits, and Like Water for Chocolate (the four preceeding books being my absolute favorites in every sense of the word). 

But going back to the Today Show List-- in case you don’t want to click on their link, here are the titles:

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
• Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (1922)
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)

I’ve included the first publication date for each novel, in parentheses after the author’s name.  The most recently published book in this list is 51 years old.  The earliest published book on the list is a mere 198 years old.  Average year of publication = 1903.

Umm... seriously?