The Seattle Times website features an interesting report on a continuing trend in some high school reading lists. Interspersing arduous classical texts with contemporary works by women and ethnic minorities seems to have led to a decreasing proportion of books written by dead white men and an increase in books by the likes of Yann Martel, Toni Morrison, and Maxine Hong Kingston. This replicates a trend seen in the 1960s and ’70s, in which books like Go Ask Alice and The Catcher in the Rye were making appearances on required reading lists. And though, in recent years, works like Julius Caesar have occasionally been dropped from school curriculums due to lack of interest from students, it is uncertain as to just what percentage of books on current high school English curriculums are by contemporary writers. But one statistic may be telling: a survey conducted in 1993 found that the ’60s and ’70s trend had not caused any of the 10 most-required books to be supplanted. You’ll know what they were, but we’ll provide them again: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Julius Caesar, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, and Lord of the Flies.

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Click here for the story from the Seattle Times