What do 15 year olds want to read? Non-native english speakers edition.

February 27, 2019 3:51 AM

At the teacher-parent evening last week my son's english teacher brought up this dilemma. She picked a book for the class to read that a little more than half thought was dumb. So she wants to find a book a greater majority will like. I asked if I could offer her some titles and she said 'absolutely' and then got home and realized I, uh, don't quite know which way to jump. I'm seeing her again on Friday but could offer suggestions after that as well.

To refine the search:
She mentioned that a couple students suggested reading The Great Gatsby, but she felt it would be beyond too many in the class. Animal Farm was mentioned then, and she said she would look into it.

She is also open to doing a play, maybe a short, funny play. This put me in mind of Kenneth Koch but (and this happened a bunch of times) on reading them again they are maybe too sophisticated/intricate in meaning. These are kids are 'good' in english, but many are shaky.

I looked through my shelves and my memory and have so far only gotten as far as "The Importance of Being Earnest" as it's clear, uncomplicated and fairly basic language (and very very funny.)

So, the ask: a good book, simple language, not too almighty serious if possible. It doesn't have to be cool if it's good, but it does have to be good if it's not cool (15 year olds, sheesh).

Thanks!

posted by From Bklyn to Education (32 answers total)

For better calibration, what was the book that lots of students thought was "dumb"? And did they dislike the themes or plot of the book, or did they think that the language was too basic for them (or both)?
posted by eviemath at 4:22 AM on February 27, 2019 [6 favorites]

It’s definitely more on the serious side and might be a bit too simple but my 13 year old was recently captivated by Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:24 AM on February 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

There is such a rich, modern trove of great YA literature that it seems a real shame to stick to books these children's parents and even grandparents might have read.

Thinking about it just from an accessible language perspective, the first thought that popped into my head was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Thinking about it from a "Hey, what about a novel that isn't centered around white males?" I wondered if The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo would be accessible enough, or The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan, which explores the vultures of both America and Taiwan. (Note: these last two are long books.)

I'm an adult without any teens who reads YA for enjoyment, though, so perhaps others with teen readers will have more useful suggestions.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:24 AM on February 27, 2019 [7 favorites]

Is Harry Potter too simple? The first few books are aimed slightly younger but were still popular with older teens and adults when they came out (to the point where the UK publisher actually made adult book covers for people embarrassed to be reading a "kid's book" on the train).

Similarly, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman? Again, Lyra is slightly younger, but the themes are epic and the writing is excellent. I read it in college and it didn't feel YA. They might get caught up on the word-switches, like anbaric for electric (from amber, you see), but a lot of it can be figured out by context, and I think my copy had a glossary at the end.
posted by basalganglia at 4:46 AM on February 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Pretty much anything by Penguin Readers for adults. These books are popular and classic fiction that has simplified vocabulary for English learners. They come in different levels.
posted by pangolin party at 4:52 AM on February 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

Oh, I also echo Darling Bri. I got the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime for a teenage ESL student (high intermediate/advanced) and he loved it, as well as 1984 (Penguin version). It's dark, but The Road (regular version) is also largely accessible in terms of vocabulary. (McCarthy does use some odd words, but most of it is simple.)
posted by pangolin party at 4:56 AM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

This is what librarians live for, isn't it?
posted by amtho at 5:11 AM on February 27, 2019 [7 favorites]

The Hate U Give is super popular these days. All the high schoolers I know who have read it love it. Might be a neat pairing with To Kill A Mockingbird if they haven't read that one yet.
posted by lilac girl at 6:07 AM on February 27, 2019 [11 favorites]

Came to suggest The Hate U Give or The Come Up, both by Angie Thomas.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:42 AM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

Seconding that knowing what book the students thought was 'dumb' would be good.

There are so many amazing YA books by diverse authors that it seems a shame to stick them with dead white guys, even though I love Wilde.

Apologies for the lack of links, as I'm on mobile, but here are some suggestions off the top of my head: American Panda by Gloria Chao, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, Simon Vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda or Leah On The Offbeat by Becky Albertelli, Speak by Laurie Hale Anderson, or Amal Unbound by Aisha Saeed.
posted by Tamanna at 6:59 AM on February 27, 2019 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: The boring book is/was a translated-from-the-German fiction text (The Network by D. Eberhard) you've never read it unless you're teaching english to German 9th graders. My son thought it was boring because it was poorly written, uninteresting and you didn't care about the characters. He really, really had contempt for it.

Importantly, it was at the right reading level but a crap book. The teacher thinks Gatsby would be too difficult (which I found surprising because I think of it as an easy, quick read) so that's a metric. 1984 she also thought would be too difficult and reading the first page, it's clear it would be.

I really appreciate the suggestions. I, stupidly, never thought of YA books because I never read them (there weren't really any back then) and don't read them now. Which was why I thought of 'classics' some are good, clean, simple (and not too culturally repugnant/racist/sexist). But YA might be the right avenue - they read the German version of The Fault in our Stars and it went down ok - are the other book(s) by John Greene also good?
posted by From Bklyn at 7:52 AM on February 27, 2019

Try Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, 86 simply-written pages about the fall of a modern African chieftain, and truly one of the greatest books ever written. The most difficult part is the four-line quote from Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" that serves as an epigraph and gives the book its title, but it can be initially skipped and then returned to later for greater depth.
posted by ubiquity at 8:16 AM on February 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

I remember Ender's Game being popular at my high school. It has its issues, but could make for good discussion and it's definitely a page-turner.

Animal Farm should be pretty accessible. The accessibility of The Importance of Being Ernest might have a lot to do with how used these kids are to reading literature from that time period in general.
posted by trig at 8:18 AM on February 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

Good suggestions above but I'll nthing the YA novels. There's so many good ones with a variety of themes that you can't go wrong. This is an older series from Canada but it is aimed at that age range - the Liz & Tom Austen Canadian mystery series. Language is straightforward, protagonists are in the age range, super Canadian (with some First Nations themed stories that might interest Germans), I haven't read them all but they all move at pretty good pace and are all relatively short.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:45 AM on February 27, 2019

My older son is 13, and here is the list of books he's had to read for English the past two years:

Tangerine
Shakespeare unit - Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew
The Hate U Give
Things Fall Apart
The Starbeast
The Martian Chronicles
Farenheit 451
Everything, Everything
Life of Pi
The Book Thief

some thoughts:
they had a science fiction unit - which was all "harder" science fiction. the kids struggled with it, esp. Farenheit 451, thought it was slow and plodding. My son enjoyed The Martian Chronicles much more. his favorite to read last year was Life of Pi
posted by alathia at 9:34 AM on February 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

Best answer: This is what librarians live for, isn't it?

Yes! The static answer here is The Hate U Give. But there are a lot of tgreat novels and yes most of John Greene's books are appreciated. Kids tend to dislike reading plays. Kids tend to really like graphic novels and will often tackle material/topics that are a little bit of a stretch if they're presented in this format.

YALSA is the group within the library profession that does top lists for YA novels and here is their website along with their Best Fiction for Young Adults lists which includes their great graphic novels list. )I don't know how you could make this lists more unappealing tbh, they're librarians not web designers) They also have a Teen Book Finder app that lets you search using criteria which might be useful, and there's a website that does the same thing. I recently read and liked All Rights Reserved which is a new take on dystopian stories where once you hit adulthood you have to pay for all the words you use. Sounds a little weird but it's a really solid storyline (review).
posted by jessamyn at 9:45 AM on February 27, 2019 [9 favorites]

The last two years my local library system had teens in local schools vote for a book they would like to discuss and have the author speak to them (majority of the students are first generation Americans or new immigrants). They picked Shadowshaper and Burn Baby Burn.
posted by Become A Silhouette at 10:10 AM on February 27, 2019 [2 favorites]

Try Matthew Quick also. My understanding is that he taught middle school/high school english so he knows his audience!
posted by CMcG at 10:12 AM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

Seconding The Hate U Give (and YA in general). As for classics, I'd recommend The Outsiders.
posted by emd3737 at 10:37 AM on February 27, 2019

Came to suggest The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Also, if 1984 is a bit much, maybe Brave New World? I remember reading Catcher in the Rye around that age, too. I didn’t like it, but a lot of people do.
posted by Weeping_angel at 11:38 AM on February 27, 2019

Actually, come to think of it, I don’t like Catcher in the Rye now. At the time, I really did and found it to be a fairly compelling read.
posted by Weeping_angel at 11:39 AM on February 27, 2019

(I love this question and I swear I’ll stop commenting in a second...)

Upon reading more of the replies, seconding Ender’s Game.

If they’re a fairly advanced group of 15 year olds, The Handmaid’s Tale is really good. I was 15 or 16 when we read it in an AP English class.
posted by Weeping_angel at 11:45 AM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

I don't think Gatsby would be difficult at all; it is more if they would be interested enough in the subject matter to try and work through the words they don't know. I read it at 13, though as an English speaker.

Depending on whether the students favor off-beat dystopian satire, I might recommend Jennifer Government.
posted by Armed Only With Hubris at 11:50 AM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

Across the Barricades by Joan Lingard might be of interest. It's a YA novel set in early 1970s about a romance between a girl from the Protestant community, and a boy from the Catholic community. We studied it before looking at Romeo and Juliet.
posted by plonkee at 12:13 PM on February 27, 2019

I think "The Phantom Tollbooth" might be interesting. It can be read by young children, but older readers will get more out of the wordplay and it might spark some interesting discussions.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 3:21 PM on February 27, 2019

I would just like to be the lonely voice in the woods cautioning against The Hate U Give for several reasons. First, there is a film, and the film is quite faithful to the book. Unless the teacher in question is looking to do immersive English media with both the book and the film, there may be less actual reading going on than she is aiming for.

Second -- and again, I say this as a grown-ass 46 year old -- the book is upsetting, and I don't know if that's okay for an ESL class as opposed to a literature class where one would expect to be challenged. It's not as distressing as The Bluest Eye but it comprehensively covers police violence, death, domestic violence, and obviously racial hatred. It is an astonishing and brilliant novel, but even with my American ass parked in Europe for the last 20 years, I have no idea how alien or resonant a novel emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement would be in the classroom in question, or anything about the makeup of that classroom.

And yes, I am aware of the privilege of being a middle aged white lady who can distance herself from the distress of racial violence by putting down a book.

Third of all, I don't think the language is accessible. Unless your teacher is excited to explain bougie, the Nae-Nae, and layed and slayed hair in the space of a single page, this just seems like a large ask. I dunno.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:51 PM on February 27, 2019 [3 favorites]

John Green's Turtles All The Way Down will likely be a big hit. It came out last year to much fanfare and the teenagers at my school really enjoyed it. In particular it deals very forthrightly with mental illness (OCD and anxiety in particular), which Gen Z teens are very passionate about. Many of the junior-level AP English students at my school chose to read the nonfiction book No One Cares About Crazy People and it has been a wild hit -- though it is quite dark (both the author's children died by suicide). Those two could pair well.

John Green's first book Looking For Alaska is quite popular in literature classes as well, though I think it's not as polished as Turtles All The Way Down.

Just Mercy is another nonfiction book that I've seen students respond well to. It's a very US-centric book, though, as it's all about the flaws of the American justice system. Some other juniors in my school are really enjoying Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell as well, if you'd like the nonfiction route.

Things Fall Apart is an excellent suggestion that definitely deserves some careful consideration.

The pre-AP freshmen at my school adore The Little Prince. There's the potential for a lot of depth and complexity in a unit with it, and it's a book that really stays with many students. It's a good book for the age where students look for life philosophies, of which the book has plenty.
posted by lilac girl at 9:34 PM on February 27, 2019 [1 favorite]

We read The Great Gatsby in eighth grade (so ages 13/14) gifted language arts (overwhelmingly native English speakers and uniformly people who had gone to school in English) and almost uniformly hated it. It was hard to follow what was going on, we didn't care about what was going on, etc. It's on the AP English syllabus (which at my school was taught to 17/18 year olds) and those who had to do it again seemed to appreciate it more the second time around. The rest of us had factored the thought of having to read it again into our decision to not take AP English.

That same group of kids successfully read Brave New World and Animal Farm in either seventh or eighth grade.

I tried reading it again this year. Understanding was no longer an issue, but I still deeply did not care and gave up.
posted by hoyland at 4:25 AM on February 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions!

YA novels, being for that specific audience in the first place, will definitely be the place to look. And I'll find a copy of Things Fall Apart, if only for myself as I last read it 30+ years ago.

(It's hard to appreciate but more than half of the class, probably 7/8ths hear English only for the two hours a week that they have class. Open a copy of Gatsby at any page and it becomes clearer what their level of comprehension is. Any of these books they could read and enjoy in German, but English is as foreign to them as German (I assume) is to most of you/us; which changes the criteria.)
posted by From Bklyn at 6:02 AM on February 28, 2019

Here's an excerpt from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night to help you judge the accessibility of the language. The narrator is autistic and his use of language is very literal and straight-forward. This has the added benefit for your ESL class of him dissecting English idioms, to much hilarity.
posted by DarlingBri at 12:32 PM on February 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Coming from a family of ESL teachers, I'd vote against "graded readers". They condense and simplify great books into something resembling Wikipedia summaries, without the language, emotions or other factors that made the original books so good. Yes, ESL students can read them and understand what's going on, but the experience is far from enjoyable.

I'd recommend lighter YA novels, although I've been reading Tolkien's Lord of the Rings at that age as an ESL student. You can have them choose from a shortlist so they feel more personally invested in the titles.

PS. Nthing The Curious Incident of the Dog!

PPS. Graphic novels are also great for this audience, especially if the reading level of 7/8ths of the class is not very good...
posted by gakiko at 1:46 AM on March 1, 2019

Response by poster: Quick update: the class will read The Hate You Give next year, Curious Incident of the Dog seems promising.
posted by From Bklyn at 11:35 PM on March 2, 2019 [1 favorite]