This Teacher’s Fav Books — To Teach!

by Tom Shafer

January 20, 2020

So recently, a reader sent an inquiry about my favorite books.  I have to admit that that question has been a long time in coming.  My blog is more than a couple of years old now, and the aging language arts teacher in me guessed that someone would have asked that question before now.  But in your collective defense, I suppose that I have not discussed many books, if any at all. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I love to read and spend a large chunk of time doing it.  I support a number of magazine publications (everything from Reader’s Digest to National Geographic’s History to the Sierra Clubs’ Sierra) and possess a Kindle currently maintaining well over a hundred different selections.  And, that doesn’t even take into account actual copies of books populating shelves and counters and end tables scattered throughout our home.  Oh, and I read the e-Dayton Daily News almost daily – and lots of other writings occupying space in the ether of the internet. 

And creating a list of my favorites is a fairly easy endeavor.  As a teacher I was probed about this by many students over the years, and even today I can produce the titles pretty quickly (and these are in no particular order, save one):  The Stranger by Albert Camus; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; On the Road by Jack Kerouac; The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway; The Moviegoer by Walker Percy; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (autobiography); The Lord of the Rings trilogy (okay, and The Hobbit) by J.R.R. Tolkien; Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer; Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith (my guilty pleasure novel!).

Okay, so this is perhaps a larger list than you may have expected, but winnowing all of the books I have ever read into just two or three is an impossibility.  For many years I did report a clear favorite, Camus’ The Stranger, and it’s still in my top three.  I know some of you are expecting explanations for these selections – and perhaps I will address those at a later date.  But the reader’s question was more pointed than I let on.  She really wanted to know what books were my favorites to teach, which is a far more interesting tale to tell.  Oh, and she is a teacher herself – and a newer one at that. 

And I actually have two favorites (both staples in our American Literature curriculum), one of which is at the top of my list, namely F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  The other is essentially a novella, Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger.  Okay, so I heard a few eye rolls there (yeah, that’s a thing I can do – it’s the teacher in me!) with the Gatsby selection, but don’t let your high school reading (or non reading) of it color it for you.  We writers tend to measure ourselves by what we read (which is not necessarily healthy) and can recognize genius when we see it, and Gatsby is a nearly perfect novel in so many ways.  In fact, when I first read it in high school, I decided then and there that I could never be a writer because I could never ever string words together like that.  And, I still feel that way today. 

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For the uninitiated, here is a brief synopsis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (stolen from my “Scariest Thing in the World” offering):

• Prior to WWI, Gatsby and Daisy are an item.  Gatsby is poor, Daisy comes from wealth.
• Gatsby goes to war but doesn’t return right away; Daisy marries hunky, wealthy Tom because . . . well, that. 
• Gatsby doesn’t believe he can win and keep Daisy until he himself is wealthy, so he becomes wealthy – sort of through illegal means (he’s a bootlegger . . . and probably some other stuff).
• He returns to New York, buys a large mansion close to Daisy, and throws big, lavish parties to begin the process of winning her back. 
• She starts to fall for him again, though she still retains some feeling (maybe one) for her husband Tom.
• After Gatsby forces the issue of his love at a very uncomfortable party in New York (with Tom in attendance), Daisy inadvertently runs over Tom’s mistress (Myrtle, yet unknown to Daisy) with her husband’s fancy car (and Gatsby in the passenger seat).  Oh, and they don’t stop after hitting – and killing – her.
• Though upset, Daisy returns to her home while Gatsby returns to his, now completely convinced that he has won her back. 
• George, Myrtle’s husband, seeks out Tom for revenge (it was his car, according to witnesses), but Tom points George in Gatsby’s direction (he likely doesn’t know Daisy was driving, but would it matter?).
• Anyway, while Gatsby is daydreaming (probably about Daisy) alone in his swimming pool, George appears, kills Gatsby with a revolver, then turns the gun on himself.
• Tom and Daisy retreat from New York, while Gatsby is buried by three attendees: his father (whom we were told by Gatsby was dead), an odd partygoer (“Owl Eyes”), and Gatsby’s next-door neighbor Nick (who is the greatest narrator in literary history – without question, I might add!).
• Nick, who has tried to remain impartial throughout, waxes philosophical at the end, proclaiming how great Gatsby is.
• The end (makes you want to read it now, doesn’t it?).

So, you ask, what makes the novel so great?  Of course, the question itself is fraught with subjectivity, and the answers subsequently fall on one side or the other.  But I will start with the obvious, that Gatsby is the ultimate rags-to-riches, Horatio Alger “go west, young man” story, that if you work hard enough, you can realize the elusive American dream of self-made success.  Gatsby achieves just that (though likely through then-illegal bootlegging during prohibition – a brilliant choice of avocation by Fitzgerald), and his motives are unquestioningly pure, to get his woman (Daisy) back.  And this is the second reason for greatness, the extreme measures people will abide for love.  Winning back your woman (or man) is a ubiquitous plot line throughout literary (and for that matter, oral) history, and Gatsby doesn’t disappoint here.

Another justification for greatest is the first person narration utilizing character Nick Carraway (cousin of Daisy and neighbor to Gatsby – though likely not by coincidence).  Because of this first person narration, we readers are not privy to the workings of Gatsby’s brain, and Nick is at times an imperfect observer (he explains at the beginning that a couple of years went by before he began putting the story to paper).  And, because Nick is a private person (and complicated in his own right), he does not probe the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy, leaving readers with so many questions that are left to their own deliberations and interpretations – for all of time!

And, this dovetails perfectly with another reason why this is my number one: ALL of the characters are complicated, just like in real life.  I have always loved the following quote because it is so true – including for the characters in Gatsby (even Tom): “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” (attributed to Rev. Dr. John Watson under his pen name, Ian Maclaren).  Daisy, though living in opulence, is treated as a second-class citizen (like all women of the time).  Nick, like many WWI survivors, is now struggling to make relevance of his life.  Tom, with all of his flaws, truly believes that the American way of life (including his own) is being threatened by immigration and civil rights for the less-than-privileged.  Gatsby himself is trying to win back the woman of his dreams, against long odds.  Though a backdrop to the novel is the excess of the Roaring Twenties, it still cannot diminish the idea that the wealthy are immune to complications of being human beings – because no one is immune to that.

My last point about the greatness of Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s use of the language.  Truly extraordinary writings possess one common distinguisher or trait: little to no wasted verbiage.  Gatsby contains no superfluous sentences, no unproductive words.  Every sentence is a labor, perhaps not of love, but of an intense desire to unveil a story with poetic concision.  And the finish to the novel is just one of a multitude of examples of this:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further . . . And one fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” 

I get goosebumps every time I read those words.

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I would venture to word process that most of you are none too familiar with one of Twain’s very last works (and quite controversial at that), The Mysterious Stranger.  This novella was definitely a work in progress for Twain, and technically he never completed it.  For over ten years, he labored at it intermittently and ultimately created three different versions.  After his death, Twain biographer Albert Paine cobbled together what he claimed was the intended final product, and that edition is the one that still stands today.  But literary scholars discovered, through a thorough examination of Twain’s manuscripts and letters, that Paine reworked many of the original documents, actually creating a new character and rewriting the ending.  In spite of varied intellectual concerns, most critics agree that Twain’s purpose for the work was not diminished by what some called literary fraud.

Here is a brief synopsis of Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger (and a creepy claymation if you dare to follow the link!):

• Three young boys, Theodor, Seppi, and Nikolaus, living in a sleepy Austrian village, are visited by a handsome teenager named Satan – who claims to be the nephew of the biblical Satan. 
• He performs many magical feats for the kids and they are truly intoxicated.  Satan seems to take particular interest in Theodor, our narrator, and takes him on mystical “trips” to see the world, many of which reveal its hypocrisy and brutality. 
• Later, Satan professes that he can foresee the future, and informs the boys that tragedy will strike many of their friends and family.  The boys are skeptical, but after one of his predictions comes true, the boys want Satan to save all of them. 
• Because Satan “can only do good,” he does help, but his typical assistance involves ending their lives prematurely or making them crazy to spare them from life’s hardships.  Satan even “helps” Nikolaus by killing him, sparing him from a lingering death due to illness. 
• Ultimately, the village’s beloved priest is tried for theft and Theodor wants Satan’s help, but fears it for obvious reasons.  Satan intervenes in the trial and frees the priest of guilt, but in doing so renders him mad.  
• Theodor is disappointed, but Satan explains “that no sane man can be happy,” that only the mad can be. 
• Satan goes away for a while then returns briefly to say goodbye, and when Theodor asks if they will meet again in another life, he replies, “There is no other,” that “Life itself is only a vision, a dream.”  Satan then explains:
• “Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! . . .”
• With that, Satan vanishes, and Theodor realizes “. . . that all he had said was true.” 
• The end. Wasn’t that fun?!

Twain offers so much for a teacher to play with here.  He discusses man’s Moral Sense (the ability to distinguish right from wrong); introduces us to man’s “suffering-machine and happiness-machine combined” (we are about equally divided between the two, though suffering always wins out); points out the paradox that humans act brutally and brutes (animals) behave humanely; notes how we mark our collective human histories by wars and negative events; then finishes the novella off with that indignant rant against organized religion.  The discussions I conducted while teaching this novella were always meaningful and powerful for my students. 

One offering from the work was more provocative than any other, what I called Twain’s domino theory, which Satan explains:

“Among you boys you have a game: you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push a brick, it knocks its neighbor over, the neighbor knocks over the next brick—and so on till all the row is prostrate. That is human life. A child’s first act knocks over the initial brick, and the rest will follow inexorably. If you could see into the future, as I can, you would see everything that was going to happen to that creature; for nothing can change the order of its life after the first event has determined it. That is, nothing will change it, because each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another, and so on to the end, and the seer can look forward down the line and see just when each act is to have birth, from cradle to grave.”

I would always read this passage out loud, then ask, “Where have we read this before?”  Typically, my students would recognize it pretty quickly, and thus blurt out “Predestination, the Puritans!”  And, during that unit earlier in the year (the Puritans and William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation), we had discussed the idea of predestination, that our lives are mapped out for us by God and that we are merely living out his will.  Most of my students rejected this supposition, instead embracing the much more modern belief in free will – and I always agreed with them. 

Of course, I knew then that predestination would pop up again with The Mysterious Stranger, and that I would have a little fun with it.  So, I would now ask, “Okay, is Satan right here – this domino theory of his?”  My students would debate it briefly then reject the theory outright.  So, I would dig in a little.  “Has anyone here ever been in a car accident?”  Of course, numerous hands would go up, their experiences ranging from accidents as passengers with parents to their own as new drivers.  I would follow that with this rhetorical question: “Do you realize how extraordinary a car accident is, that two individuals acting independently could come together like that and collide so incidentally?”  After a brief pause, I would then probe: “Did you ever think about the things that happened before the accident, like how you had forgotten your wallet and had run back into the house to retrieve it, that if you hadn’t done that the accident would never have happened?”  Heads would now be nodding throughout the room, my students murmuring examples to their classmates.  “So now what do you think about Twain’s theory?  And predestination?  Anyone confused?”  A momentary explosion of chaos typically followed those last queries as my students began wondering about their own free will – or not!

Okay, so I’m no predestinationist (love making new words!), but the domino theory has some substance to it.  And, the more you let it rattle around in your brain, the more you realize how significant EACH AND EVERY life event is – from the mundane (like picking a pencil off of the floor) to the momentous (like uniting with a life partner).  You may never realize an event’s importance – until it directly affects a subsequent event.  Picking that pencil off the floor might land you in the hospital with a broken hip or have you accidently bumping heads with a future significant other who was doing the same! 

BTW, thanks for the question.  I loved teaching, and your question took me right back to the classroom.  I always loved helping my fellow teachers, and am still willing to do so.  If you teachers out there have other queries about pedagogy, bring ‘em on!  I feel my relevance coming back – or maybe it’s just a little indigestion!

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