I have a radical proposition: let’s stop assigning books in school.
I’m not saying that the children will want to kill themselves and say bad words if they read Catcher in the Rye or anything like that, or that we should stop reading and just do STEM. I deeply love reading, and believe that reading the right book at the right time in one’s adolescence can alter one’s life, or at least make it a lot better (for example, reading The Thorn Birds under a desk in tenth grade). But the “assigned book” label can make the best of books feel like, well, homework.
When I came across my husband’s copy of The Stranger, by Albert Camus, translated by Matthew Ward, I morphed into a moody teenager. “I don’t wanna, and you can’t make me,” I said to the book, one of the only ones in our house at that time that I hadn’t read, the pandemic ruining our bookstore/library habit.
As you can see from my reading list, I spend more than half of my reading life on mysteries and detective novels, even super old ones, like The Moonstone, and super cozy ones, like Murder in Chianti, but I hadn’t read The Stranger since high school, when I read it begrudgingly because I was probably reading The Thorn Birds again and couldn’t be disturbed. But what do you know, The Stranger isn’t high-falutin’ philosophy with a plot that only gets assigned because it was short and moody? In this translation, in which the language is more James Cain than fancy British, it’s a thriller! It’s about a misanthropic French guy who is so bored that it seemed interesting to go shoot someone because it was too hot and sunny on the beach. And then, when he is sent to prison, he realizes that, hey, maybe life isn’t so bad after all, and it would really be better not to be guillotined.
I finished it in an afternoon, when I was supposed to be doing other things, like taking care of my child, because Camus’ rendering of that character, that man staring out between the bars of his cell and deciding that he’d finally like to live stuck in my brain like a chunk of apple skin between my molars.
New proposition: Re-read all the assigned books again. Read The Stranger again. Read The Great Gatsby and As I Lay Dying. If it makes you feel better, sneak it under your desk and pretend that you’re reading Marie Kondo.
Publisher: Vintage (1946), translated by Matthew Ward (1989)
September 25, 2020