The Joy of Reading Books in High School

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Why should a teenager bother to read a book, when there are so many other demands on their time? In this episode of Radio Atlantic: a dispatch from a teenager’s future. We hear from Atlantic staffers about the books they read in high school that stuck with them. In an era when fewer young people are reading books, we state what might be obvious to the already converted: Books you read in high school are your oldest friends, made during a moment in life when so many versions of you seem possible, and overidentifying with an author or character is a safe way to try one out. Later in life, they can be a place you return—to be embarrassed by your younger, more pretentious self or to be nostalgic for your naive, adventurous self or just to marvel at what you used to think was cool.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. Last week, we talked about how college students struggle to read whole books these days. One issue, it turned out, was that they weren’t reading whole books in high school.

So this week, we continue to make the case for why reading books in high school is great for your life outside of school.

You’ll hear from more of our Atlantic colleagues—and from listeners who sent in their contributions.

All of them recall the books they read in high school that stuck with them the longest, and how those books changed for them over the years as they got older and understood them differently.

Mostly, this is an episode about happy memories. Enjoy, and happy holidays.

Spencer Kornhaber: The book that probably most impacted me in high school was William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I think I read it junior or senior year in AP Literature. And I remember being blown away by how weird it was, how tangled the sentences were, how kind of inscrutable the characters were. I think Faulkner’s kind of run-on sentences and tangling rhythms and sort of weird use of words—that all kind of excited me and got in my head and, you know, inspired me to try to double major in English and journalism in college, where I took a Faulkner seminar my freshman year and then got totally overwhelmed and dropped my English major.

What stuck with me about the book, beyond the writing, is just this window into another part of America, another time in America that I really have and had no connection to: the 1930 South, poor South. It’s about a poor family transporting their dead mother in a coffin, and she’s rotting in the coffin, and they’re carrying her across rivers and, you know, getting taken advantage of in all these different ways.

And you learn about the family dynamics, and it almost makes the South seem like a supernatural place—you know, that idea of Southern Gothic, where there’s always a story beneath the story. That was very alluring. And it’s still—I just remember reading it for the first time and feeling transported to this version of America that was very far away from suburban Southern California in the early 2000s.

The rhythms of the way Faulkner wrote got into my head, and, you know, I hope that they sort of still shape what I do, even though what I do is very far away from writing Southern Gothic novels. But, you know, people are always saying that my Taylor Swift reviews are deeply Faulknerian. No—I’m kidding. But there are times when you just want to write a really long and strange sentence and hope the reader goes along with you, and I think that Faulkner is one of the writers who kind of inspired me to think about writing that way, early on.

My name is Spencer Kornhaber, and I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and I write about culture.

Jessica Salamanca: The book that I read in high school that stuck with me the most is A Separate Peace—more specifically, the character Gene Forrester, who is an extremely flawed person. He’s a teenager at this prep school in New England, and he admires and hates his best friend, Finny, so much that he sabotages him so that Finny can’t compete in these great games—I think it was the Olympics.

And it resonated with me so much because in high school, I was such a loser, and all my friends were so much prettier, smarter, more popular than me. And I just wanted to be them so bad that, inside, I thought, What if I sabotaged them? Would it make me better? And, obviously, it doesn’t make him any better.

Sabotaging his friend doesn’t do anything to help his social standing. And I think it’s something that a lot of people deal with as they grow up and, especially, as they go through college or their 20s, where success is seen as a zero-sum game. And Gene kind of realizes that these things are not zero-sum games.

Happiness is not a zero-sum game. Just because one person is happy and successful doesn’t mean that you can’t be happy and successful. And that’s something that I have to keep within myself as we get older, and there’s, you know, people that compare themselves to others, especially with social media and the constant barrage of people putting their highlight reels of their life on display.

I think it’s a really great book. It was a short book, but I think it was a really powerful book for me.

Helen Lewis: I’m going to pick Terry Pratchett’s Mort, which is the fourth book in his Discworld series, but it happened to be the one that I read first. And it is a story, basically, about a young guy who becomes the apprentice to Death, who starts off as this very austere skeleton but, over the course of the books, essentially falls in love with humanity. He begins to kind of, you know, respect them and understand what they’re doing, even though he’s always outside them.

The books started off as pretty straightforward fantasy, what used to be called the kind of “swords and sandals.” And they had these very cartoony covers, but over the course of—yeah, there’s dozens of them—they develop into this really rich humanistic philosophy, which is basically that everybody is kind of flawed, but you know, some people try and surpass that. Some people try and overcome their flaws.

Even now, when I’m trying to stop myself from doomscrolling, I often permit myself to read either, you know, a detective novel or something like the Peter Wimsey series, by Dorothy L. Sayers, or I go back and reread Terry Pratchett’s books.

Because whatever you do when you read fiction is commit a small act of empathy. You know, you think about situations that are not like your own. You think about people whose lives are not like your own. And that, I think, is an incredibly useful exercise. It’s a useful exercise for journalists, particularly, but for anybody, really, who wants to be a person in the world.

And Terry Pratchett’s books are very, very funny, and the situations in them are comic. But the underlying themes are things like: Who gets treated as the other, you know? How do you have a multicultural city? How do wars start? And how do they end? He deals with these incredibly big political and philosophical subjects. And because he puts in, you know, some dirty jokes and some silly ideas, that all kind of just goes down like a spoonful of sugar.

I’m Helen Lewis, and I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic.

David Getz: The book that changed my life in high school was Chips Off the Old Benchley, by Robert Benchley. What the book did is it introduced me to literary humor, something that was not at all made available to us in high school. Everything that we read was dour and serious and had a reputation of being something we had to know, as opposed to something that we would actually enjoy.

The book led me to reading other literary humorists—Woody Allen, especially, but Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut. It led me to writing my own humor column in high school and then, again, in college and, eventually, to become a writer for children as an adult. What Benchley did is: He introduced to me the opportunity to create my own identity as a funny person in words. And I maintain that to this day.

Shan Wang: It was very, very much impacted by Moby-Dick, which I have not read since high school, actually. I read it in ninth grade, and I remember my English teacher had turned it into a sort of big, anticipated event that we would be reading this book, and we would all finish. Finishing was the goal, and I remember almost every chapter to this day because of the way we read it.

It kind of taught me that some parts of a book could be boring or slow or as buildup for other parts of a book. So I remember a whole chapter about ambergris, which I think is just whale poop, and I remember a chapter about cetology, a chapter about harpoons. And all of that taught me that if you read slowly, and if you sort of savor, if you don’t rush, the later chapters can be more of a reward.

It’s also that I used to feel that if something was boring to me, that two options were possible: The book was boring, or I was bad at reading. And I think this book unlocked for me other possibilities of reading and relating to books.

My name is Shan Wang, and I’m a programming director at The Atlantic.

Sophia Kanaouti: Hello. I am Sophia Kanaouti, and in high school I read Ypsikaminos, which is Greek for “blast furnace,” and it is a collection of poems by Andreas Embirikos, a Greek poet. And this magical, heavenly, and hellish world that he was creating was amazing to see because it was free. It was sexual. It was absolutely beyond the norm of a stagnant society.

And it freed my thought, my life—and, most importantly, it freed my language, which meant, actually, that I could create more life. It was amazing, and I’m eternally grateful.

Ann Hulbert: I remember a novella by Henry James called The Pupil, which I read in a sort of summer program for bookish high schoolers.

It sort of changed the way I read, in that I was always sort of looking for the secrets that this omniscient narrator, who seemed to be just telling you a story, was actually slipping in about a particular character, that that character didn’t necessarily know himself or herself, and that, as a reader, I really had to pay very, very close attention to figure out myself. And it just sort of added a whole new dimension to reading and kind of made it a quest in a way that I think it hadn’t so much been before.

It’s about an anxious, young tutor and an ailing, precocious boy, and they’re both trapped in this American family that is debt-ridden, self-deluding, sort of exploitative. And what you read at first as a kind of social satire, in a wonderfully Jamesian way, actually turns out to be this really heartbreaking story of a relationship between them at its core—all in, you know, 18,000 words.

It does all sort of point to not just this insight into narrative technique, but kind of into a whole realm of curious dynamics between children and adults, and who really knows more—the children or the adults—that I’ve been interested in ever since.

I just spent a lot of time in worlds that I found in books, and I feel very nostalgic for that, even now, and I’m sure I romanticized the degree to which it was sort of easy to do that.

That’s my memory, is that I just had a phase in which I just wanted to read all the fattest books in the library. And so I ended up just reading a jumble of things that I was really glad to have encountered. And I can’t imagine having lived through adolescence without that as part of my life. I can’t imagine life without having had these different worlds in which I could lose myself and feel like I was learning all about how human beings work, how society works, and what’s possible to do with words—which, in the end, proved really important to me.

I am Ann Hulbert, and I’m the literary editor at The Atlantic.

Rosin: After the break, more good memories.

Shane Harris: The book that really hit me as a high-school student was Franny and Zooey, by J. D. Salinger, which I read the summer of my junior year. I was at this kind of, like, nerd camp, where you go and live on a college campus for six weeks and take classes, because that was something that overachievers thought was a fun thing to do with their summer. And it was in a course on postmodernism, and we read Franny and Zooey.

It did sort of open my eyes to a whole different way of thinking about spirituality that was not—at least, it seemed to me when I read it, was not—rooted in the kind of faith traditions that I grew up in, like church. And, you know, especially growing up in the South, that really I did not take to. That felt kind of almost alien to me, even though the communities that I lived in, people practice those religions.

There was something almost like it was saying, This is a doorway onto something that people might call spirituality without it having to be religion. And I think I was really interested in that as a proposition when I was that age. And the story kind of launched my inquiry into that.

I was very intrigued by the ideas of Eastern philosophy and, particularly, Zen Buddhism that come through in that story and, also, the character of Franny as this person who is sort of, like, on the verge of and going through a breakdown. It was something that seemed kind of, like, literarily romantic about that and compelling as a character.

But it was more the themes about Eastern philosophy and religion, but not in the context of faith—more in the context of sort of practice. Like, there’s a scene—it was, like, kind of the dominant scene in Franny, because Franny and Zooey is really two stories—where she’s reciting this prayer, and it’s almost in the way of a mantra that she keeps reciting it over and over and over again. And I’d never been exposed to anything like that.

Being a teenager, it’s an especially great time to read books but also to sort of discover them on their own. I mean, Salinger is kind of this perfect example of, you know: Generations of high schoolers read The Catcher in the Rye.

And I actually came to The Catcher in the Rye later in my reading through Salinger. I started with Franny and Zooey, then went to Nine Stories. By the time I got to The Catcher in the Rye, it actually felt a little juvenile compared to some of the other stories, which are about people who are, you know, older than Holden Caulfield. But it’s the perfect teenager book, right?I mean, it’s, like, everybody’s classic experience of reading a book when they’re teenagers that really turned them on to reading. It’s kind of like The Catcher in the Rye is one of those books. And being 14 to 17, 18 is the perfect time to be. You’re impressionable. You know, you’re just starting to play around with ideas that you might want to try to apply to your life, right? Your curiosity has gone from things that are merely novel to things that are more meaningful.

I’m Shane Harris. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic. I write about intelligence and national security.

Katherine Abraham: Hello, everyone. My name is Katherine Abraham, and I’m a legal journalist from India. My late father presented me with a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s lesser-known work Sand and Foam. Gibran writes, “We shall never understand one another until we reduce the language to seven words.”

In another space, he writes, “Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.” The simplicity, purity, and depth of his thoughts was manifested beautifully in those brief quotes, which still continue to hold a special place in my life. I highly recommend it because Gibran’s work is second to none. Thank you.

Eleanor Barkhorn: In sophomore year, we read The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton, in English class.

I grew up in New York. It’s set in New York, and it’s very interested in the different, you know, social levels and social expectations of life in New York. And it was striking to me and, I remember, to my classmates, too, that you could see a lot of similarities in the world that she was describing and the world that we were living in, even though those worlds were, you know, over a hundred years apart from each other.

The central tension in the book is this love triangle between Newland Archer, who is a sort of upstanding member of New York society, and May Welland, the woman that he’s engaged to be married to—also a member of upstanding New York society—and then Ellen Olenska, who is part of this world, but she has gone off and married a man in Europe and has come back to New York seeking a divorce.

And the question is: Will Newland stay with his wife, do what is expected of him—even though he feels not quite as passionately about his wife as he does for Ellen—or will he turn away from his family and his community and, obviously, his marriage to go off and be with Ellen?

As teenagers, we were really rooting for Newland and Ellen and the whole idea that you should pursue your passion and pursue what feels right to you as an individual. And I think as I’ve gotten older, I have come to maybe root a little bit more for Newland and May, and the idea that happiness and contentedness in life is not just about pursuing your individual interests but also thinking about, you know, How do I stay connected with my family? How do I stay connected with the society that I was born into?

And I wonder if Newland did follow his passions, would he be happy? Or would he be happier staying in the world that he knows and living out the life that’s expected of him there?

The dilemma that Newland is presented with is pretty universal. I think we all have situations where we have to weigh, you know: Do we want to do something entirely motivated by our own desires and our own goals and hopes and ambitions? Or do we want to consider how our actions would impact a broader set of people?

I really love the way the book takes that dilemma seriously, doesn’t think that it’s frivolous, but that, you know, a man’s decision—Is he going to stay with his wife? Is he going to go off with another woman?—takes that decision seriously and unpacks all the different factors that went into it.

My name is Eleanor Barkhorn, and I’m a senior editor.

Robert Seidler: In junior high school, my parents gave me the Encyclopedia Britannica to shut me up, and it led me to my first real read in high school, which was On the Origin of Species, by Mr. Darwin. Mr. Darwin changed everything in my head to a scientific-discovery kind of theme, which never, ever, ever stopped. Thank you, Charles. And thank you, guys.

Rosin: Thank you to my colleagues who shared their books from high school, and to the listeners who sent theirs in. Those listeners were Jessica Salamanca, David Getz, Sophia Kanaouti, Katherine Abraham, and Robert Seidler.

This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Will Gordon fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening. I hope you’ve had a lovely holiday, and see you in the new year.

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