Readicide

I've been an avid reader all my life, of both literary fiction and genre fiction. That being said, since I love reading, I've never had too many problems with reading literary fiction in class, even if it wouldn't be my first choice of books to read. To me, reading literary fiction just comes with the territory of taking English classes in high school, and I can just read genre fiction on my own time outside of that class. However, I also know that many of my peers in my classes over the years, disagree with this opinion and don't bother to read at all, because the only books that they have been exposed to in school, are the 'boring classics with no relevance to me' books that they don't care about. That makes me sad, because there is such whole world of great books, in both the literary and genre fiction categories, that they are missing because of what they have experienced in schools.

To fix this problem and to start encouraging more students to develop an interest in reading, I think that schools do have to start changing their curriculum some to include more genre fiction books that will interest modern day students more. While I certainly don't agree with removing classic and great books and plays like Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby and others that I have read over the years, I think that there is a way to balance those with more recent books that students are interested in. For example, in Mason we have two trimesters per year in which that we are required to take English. Most of these years, we read about 2-4 books, depending on the course and the teacher. I think that it would be a good idea to keep two of the literary fiction novels in the class curriculum and then select a newer modern book in the genre fiction section of books for students to read to help them see what else is out there and hopefully inspire them to read more. These books don't necessarily have to be huge books of the moment, for instance right now it wouldn't have to be Hunger Games, but it could be a popular book from the past 5 to 10 years, that is well known and popular, but not necessarily an award winning book. One last thing that I would recommend, is that for the genre fiction novel that students would read, don't make students analyze it as much as they have to for the literary fiction books. While I understand that teachers do have to make tests and papers about the books to check that students are actually reading and comprehending the books they've been assigned, the constant annotating and deep analysis can sometimes detract from the enjoyment of reading, which is what you would be trying to cultivate by having them read a more modern genre fiction book.