As we near the end of the school year, the freshman class is on the brink of completing the last of seven books we read this year. While many were painful to read in the moment, looking back, most of them were at least tolerable. There were highs, lows, and lots of strong opinions, some of which are shared in this article: a review and ranking of all seven books, created through a poll and many student interviews. I ended up with fifty-two responses to the poll, so here’s what the ninth grade thinks.
1. 1984 - George Orwell
One of the two books the freshman class read over the summer, 1984 took a contested first place for 37% of the freshmen. It was an unpopular start to the year, but in comparison to the other books we read this year, students slowly gained a more favorable outlook on it. “Let me be clear,” states a freshman who would like to remain anonymous. “I didn’t like any of these books. I just didn’t like 1984 the least. It’s the best of the worst.”
Selecting 1984 as your top choice because it was the least of seven evils was a common sentiment, and one I personally share. I found the premise of the novel occasionally mildly interesting, but never intriguing, captivating, fascinating, or even just fun. “It was a cool concept,” said Alexa Tracey, “but I felt like I would have enjoyed it more if I didn’t read it for school.”
2. The Tempest - William Shakespeare
A 9th-grade classic, yet not as ‘classic’ as plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, or Othello, The Tempest was a more universal second pick, which came as a surprise. The language was often confusing, and on each copy of the edition of the book we used, there was a sidebar that had definitions of the words and comparisons that readers wouldn’t normally understand. Azh Hamilton rationalizes, “I thought the language was entertaining and different; it was refreshing in comparison to other things we’ve been reading. But I also found it confusing at times, when things just didn’t translate."
An additional hurdle of our unit on The Tempest was having to handwrite several iterations of an essay, presumably to help with the ‘flow of ideas’ and the value of not erasing or deleting anything. It was genuinely painful and tested my resolve in more ways than one. “I don’t understand how The Tempest is #2 on this list. Having to hand write multiple essays was incredibly painful,” commented Stella Morasch.
3. Fences - August Wilson
One of the final books we read this year was Fences by August Wilson. A Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatic play set in the Hill District of 1950s Pittsburgh, it was a large shift in genre from the books we’d read this year and an example of what modern plays look like. Similar to The Tempest, I found that lots of subtlety and emotion isn’t communicated well when reading it, unless there are stage directions that explicitly state a character’s tone. However, many students enjoyed Fences more than other books we read this year in spite of issues with tone. Sabina Lowe commented, “I actually thought Fences was okay. I like that it's in normal English, and the characters are easier to relate to than Prospero and Caliban because they’re actually supposed to resemble real people.”
His writing style felt less like a play in the traditional sense and more like a movie in its lack of exposition. As Sabina said, it followed normal people. However, some found the characters lacking. “It wasn’t a very fun read,” said Finn Copeland, “Troy was the worst main character and person ever. He killed someone, cheated on his wife, emotionally abused his son, exploited his brother for his disability check, and never apologized about anything.” I happen to agree; everything Troy did kept moving him further away from the label of ‘protagonist’ and more towards ‘antagonist.’
4. Choice Play - August Wilson
A wide selection of August Wilson plays from throughout the decades was available for this unit. They were all pretty similar: like Fences, they were set in Pittsburgh across the decades. I read Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a play about Black blues musicians in the 1920s. “I liked Fences more because it had fewer characters [than Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom],” says Kunga Kabsang. “It was hard to keep track of everyone, and they just bickered the whole time.” Tyson Brown read a different play, Two Trains Running, about the civil rights movement set in 1960s Pittsburgh. “I don’t really know, it was boring but it was fine,” he said with a shrug. “The first page made me so hungry because it had a menu on it. There was a guy that died. Whatever.” The “whatever” attitude was common in people’s thoughts on their choice plays, and its place at #4 reflects that.
The assignment that went along with the choice play was a research project on historical allusions in your choice play. In my experience, due to characters in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom “[bickering] the whole time,” historical allusions and thus research project topics were few and far between. “Getting a research question was hard,” said Severin Gerhardt. “I had to really search the book to find anything, and the research was even harder because the question I came up with was kind of vague.”
5. Choice Poetry Book - Multiple Authors
A distaste for poetry also seems to be a trend among the freshmen, with the two poetry books this year making up the majority of the second-to-last and third-to-last categories. Isabel Himoff read Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and disagreed with the traditional perceptions about poetry. “I haven't really read poetry before, so it was a little difficult to understand the meaning behind the poetry, in the beginning,” she said. “But, as you get more used to it, you find thematic elements that make it significant and meaningful.”
Some students struggled with analyzing the poetry due to its subjectivity. “You’ll never be able fully know what everything means if you’re not the poet,” elaborated Isabel when asked about what she thought of the analysis process for poetry. This was a difficulty for me, as well. So much is open to interpretation, and every metaphor could have a different meaning to every reader.
6. Native Guard - Natasha Trethewey
Native Guard stole the second-to-last spot on the list, just narrowly beating out Fences by a meager four percentage points. This book was painful for many students, as our first final was a comparative essay on it and our choice poetry book. There were some mixed feelings on the book as a whole, but some poems were more popular than others. “It had a lot of different types of poems, which was interesting,” commented Wyatt Williams. When asked why he thought Native Guard was where it was on the list, he said, “Native Guard came in second to last because it’s poetry. Poetry will never win with a group of teenagers. Most of the time it kind of sucks.”
On the contrary, many students thought the final itself was reasonable, even though it was on the most dreaded subject: poetry. “We got a month to work on our essays, which worked out okay in the end,” Wyatt continued. “It was just difficult because it was our first final, so there was a lot of pressure on it.” Even still, with the help of the writing center, the writing process went smoothly for most students.
7. The Sextants of Beijing - Joanna Waley-Cohen
As our second summer reading book and the only book for a class other than English, this book was a near-universal last place, sweeping the charts with over 70% choosing The Sextants of Beijing as their least favorite book this year. One key reason was that it was nonfiction and written more like a textbook or some other tertiary source you might encounter to give you a background into a topic. “This was the most boring book I’ve ever had to read for summer reading,” said Wyatt Williams. “It was even worse than Bruiser [by Neal Shusterman]. I was practically asleep the whole time.” Despite this, it was still valuable to get a taste of the reading we have to look forward to in future history classes.
These seven books varied widely in format, genre, narrative, and popular opinion. Other than The Sextants of Beijing, each book had to fight for its place on the list, but overall, they were a good introduction to the variety we will inevitably encounter later in our academic careers.