The Books Briefing: Reassessing the Back-to-School Reading List

Whether you’re a parent or a child, a student or a teacher (and even if you don’t currently identify with any of those categories), the dog days of summer can often bring to mind that back-to-school feeling—including the urgency of trying to cram in a stack of summer reading before classes resume.

Over the years, exactly which books belong in that stack has been a fraught topic, as seemingly everyone holds a different view on what should be considered part of the high-school canon. Debates about the inclusion in school curricula of modern LGBTQ novels such; radical, diverse stories by 18th and 19th-century women authors such as Catharine Sedgwick; and formerly “banned” books such as and the series continue to rage, with very little consensus on what is and is not “appropriate” for young readers.