Some Favorite Books to Teach
For the first of my Back to School themed posts, I want to mention a few of my favorite books I’ve taught. What I mean by this is that not only are they books I love but also that they were particularly enjoyable experiences to share in the classroom. Not everything I love has worked on a syllabus, and sometimes I’ve taught things that I am neutral on (or even dislike) because of syllabus requirements, and sometimes those books have worked better than I expected. But this list is a selection of those that were both.
War For the Oaks – Emma Bull. Taught in The Fantastic as Place. One of the founding books of Urban Fantasy, back before that term meant Paranormal Romance. (Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter, they’re just different.) I adore this book. It’s basically, what if the Fae showed up in the Twin Cities and had a fight about it, and it made that idea so compelling that I thought, huh, maybe law school in Minneapolis might be okay? (It was not, but that’s not the book’s fault.) If I were teaching this course today, I’d definitely also try Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January.
Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel. Taught in Intro to Genre Fiction. Sometimes you are teaching a book about a pandemic when an actual pandemic happens. That was kind of surreal, but probably anything would have been, at that moment. My students absolutely rose to the occasion, and I was so proud of them. I don’t know if this book helped them, but I do know it helped me.
Twelfth Night – William Shakespeare. Taught in Intro to Shakespeare. Single author classes can be weird, usually because for it to be a single author class, the author has to be a BFD, a thing that can work both for and against you when it comes to digging into the work. And I remember being surprised the first time I taught this course at what worked and what didn’t. (Othello? Crashed and burned. Lear? Went great.) But Twelfth Night was a sheer delight, not least because I had a class full of BFA in Acting students, who went after their scenes with relish.
The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson. Taught in Intro to Genre Fiction. I was nervous about teaching this one, because it’s horror, which is such an emotion-based genre, and I was teaching virtually, which for me, makes it more difficult to take the emotional temperature of the classroom. But Jackson’s writing is so precise that it made it easy to focus on the how of what she was doing, and oh, she does it well. (For those of you who like biographies, Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life is terrific.)
I’m cheating a bit with this last one, as I never formally taught it, but “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by John Keats rounds out the list. Whenever I taught around Halloween, I’d read this to the class. It works extremely well read out loud, and was always a joy to share.
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