Some Light Summer Reading for Our Students

Some Light Summer Reading for Our Students

By Senior Correspondent Devon Maloney 
Boy soldiers, violent civil wars, crushing poverty, absent mothers, alcoholic fathers, galloping consumption, destroyed childhoods and young hardened killers are not what many consider ideal summer reading subjects for most teens laying on the beach.
Angela’s Ashes, the memoirs of Frank McCourt, set the mood for the rest of the book about his darkly dysfunctional family and his “miserable” upbringing with the opening lines, “[w]hen I look back at my childhood I wonder how I survived at all.”
Similarly heart wrenching was A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, the memoir of a boy soldier fighting in the bloody civil war of Sierra Lèon in the late 90s. A Long Way Gone becomes a frightening look into the teen years of Ishmael who turns from a simple, happy rural school boy into a numb killer with the help of constant drugs that erased all of his ethics and human morals.

What do both of these sad stories have in common? They were mandatory summer reading assignments this year for rising freshman and sophomores in Fairfax County Public Schools.
However, this theme of ‘not-so-happily-ever-afters’ doesn’t just apply to what is assigned for summer reading by English teachers. During my recently completed freshman year we read the tragic Shakespeare drama of Romeo and Juliet, John Steinbeck’s un-uplifting novel Of Mice and Men, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s Night.
What are our teachers trying to tell us? Are they saying life is “nasty, brutish, and short” as misanthropic philosopher Thomas Hobbes once said on the human condition?
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the position teachers might be taking in trying to tell their students that life isn’t all Northern Virginian bliss with strip malls and full refrigerators if they can, but is it impossible to have good, insightful, deep piece of literature that gives one a happy view of the world?
While I enjoyed and learned a lot from the book’s I’ve been assigned over the years in school, is it too naïve of me to ask for a lighter piece of literature? I’m hardly asking for teen novels about undead heart throbs or, worse yet, a Chicken Soup for the Teen Soul equivalent.
For example, Three Cups of Tea is a real life story that gives one an insight into modern day issues like the crisis in the Middle East and still leaving the reading with the feeling that there is good in the world while raising insightful questions, representing literary elements, and presenting easily discussable topics for a class room.
“The happy childhood is hardly worth your while,” McCourt said. Please teachers, don’t leave us to believe that unhappy books are the only literature that is worth our while.