Literary Blog Hop-Required Reading

This week's topic for the Literary Blog Hop, hosted by The Blue Bookcase, is one that is near and dear to the hearts of every person ever to take a literature class.  Near and dear, that is, if you like to talk about books that you hated.  Here's the question:

Discuss a work of literary merit that you hated when you were made to read it in school or university.  Why did you dislike it?

Anyone who reads this blog even semi-regularly already knows of my hatred of all things Joyce (I'm looking at you, Portrait of the Artist!), so I will skip my usual diatribe against narcissistic stream-of-consciousness.  However, that means I can't really think of a book I had to read for one of my classes that I disliked enough to qualify for this question.  So, let's discuss a different but related question near and dear to my heart-why are certain works chosen over others to teach in high school and basic college classes?

This question occurred to me while thinking about books that I could write about for this post because in going through the ones I remember in my head, I realized that almost all of them have male protagonists or were written by men or both.  Now, granted, I was in high school and college in the 80s, but you'd think somewhere along the line I would have read a few women.  Let's examine the list of titles I can remember:

• To Kill a Mockingbird
• A Separate Peace
• Lord of the Flies
• Julius Caeser, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet
• A Tale of Two Cities
• The Iliad
• 1984
• Jane Eyre
• Heart of Darkness
• Death of a Salesman
• J.B. (Archibald MacLeish)
• L'Etranger (The Stranger)
• La Peste (The Plague)

From that list, which spans mostly high school, there are only two female authors, and two female protagonsists-Jane Eyre and Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird-though Lee certainly goes out of her way to make sure we know that Scout is a tomboy, not one of those prissy girls.  Even the books I read in my French classes were male-centered.  While I enjoyed and appreciated most of these books well-enough, some diversity would have been nice.  After all, I enjoy vanilla ice cream too, but if all I ever ate was vanilla ice cream I'd never get to know flavors like rocky road or triple chocolate fudge ripple.

I thought that maybe this lack of female voices in my high school English classes was just a function of my age, so I decided to check out the books being taught the most today.  While my research is in no way scientific or exhaustive, by looking at the most popular SparkNotes I can say that students are looking for information on the following books more often than others.  And they are:

• To Kill a Mockingbird
• The Great Gatsby
• The Adventures of Huck Finn
• Lord of the Flies
• The Scarlet Letter
• Of Mice and Men
• The Crucible
• Catcher in the Rye
• Frankenstein
• The Odyssey

Seems like American high school students are still be treated to vanilla ice cream an awful lot of the time.

Now I can hear some of you saying, "Those are just the high school books.  You can read so many more diverse books in college."  Which is true-if you go to college.  And if you are in a major that requires more than basic English classes, where some of the above titles are actually repeated in more depth. So, why has so little changed in the 22 years since I graduated from college?  With the wide range of excellent literature out there, why are American high schools still stuck in a dead-white-guy rut?  Anyone have suggestions for title we could add to these old standbys?