Why should a teenager bother to read a book, when there are so many other demands on their time? We hear from Atlantic staffers about the books they read in high school that have stuck with them. Books you read in high school are your oldest friends, made during a moment in life when so many versions of yourself seem possible, and overidentifying with an author or character is a safe way to try one out. Later in life, they are a place you return—to be embarrassed by your younger, more pretentious self or to be nostalgic for your naive, adventurous self or just to marvel at what you used to think was cool. Books mentioned: Spencer Kornhaber: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Jessica Salamanca: A Separate Peace by John Knowles Helen Lewis: Mort by Terry Pratchett David Getz: Chips Off the Old Benchley by Robert Benchley Shan Wang: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville Sophia Kanaouti: Ypsikaminos by Andreas Embirikos Ann Hulbert: The Pupil by Henry James Shane Harris: Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger Katherine Abraham: Sand and Foam by Kahlil Gibran Eleanor Barkhorn: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton Robert Seidler: On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Share understanding this holiday season. For less than $2 a week, give a year-long Atlantic subscription to someone special. They’ll get unlimited access to Atlantic journalism, including magazine issues, narrated articles, puzzles, and more. Give today at TheAtlantic.com/podgift. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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I'm Karla Lally Music, cookbook author and snack enthusiast. Do you have a sweet tooth? Tune in to Sweets Unwrapped, a new podcast from Ferrero and Atlantic Rethink, the Atlantic's creative marketing studio, where I dive into the stories behind America's favorite treats.
This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hannah Rosen. Last week, we talked about how college students struggle to read whole books these days. One issue, it turned out, was that they weren't reading whole books in high school. So this week, we continue to make the case for why reading books in high school is great for your life outside of school.
You'll hear more from our Atlantic colleagues and from listeners who sent in their contributions. All of them recall the books they read in high school that stuck with them the longest and how those books changed for them over the years as they got older and understood them differently. Mostly, this is an episode about happy memories. Enjoy and happy holidays.
The book that probably most impacted me in high school was William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. I think I read it junior or senior year in AP Literature. I remember being blown away by how weird it was, how tangled the sentences were, how inscrutable the characters were.
I think Faulkner's run on sentences and tangling rhythms and weird use of words that all excited me and got in my head and inspired me to try to double major in English and journalism in college where I took a Faulkner seminar my freshman year and then got totally overwhelmed and dropped my English major.
What stuck with me about the book, beyond the writing, is just this window into another part of America, another time in America that I really have and had no connection to, the 1930s South, poor South. It's about a poor...
family um transporting their dead mother in a coffin and she's rotting in the coffin and they're carrying her across rivers and you know getting taken advantage of in all these different ways and you learn about the family dynamics and uh it just it almost makes the south seem like a supernatural place you know that idea of southern gothic where everything is um there's always a story beneath the story uh that was very
alluring. And it's still, I just remember reading it for the first time and feeling transported to this version of America that was very far away from suburban Southern California in the early 2000s. The rhythms of the way Faulkner wrote got into my head. And, you know, I hope that they sort of still shape what I do, even though what I do is very far away from writing Southern Gothic novels.
But, you know, people are always saying that my Taylor Swift reviews are deeply Faulknerian. No, I'm kidding. But There are times when you just want to write a really long and strange sentence and hope the reader goes along with you. And I think that Faulkner is one of the writers who kind of inspired me to think about writing that way early on.
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