The Case for Whole Books

We are English professors who stumbled into a debate about high school pedagogy. We wrote a book to help college instructors teach close reading, the fundamental skill of literary studies. And then, well before it was published, we started hearing from education scholars training high school teachers, and high school teachers themselves, who had caught wind of the book through advance essays and word of mouth. They were interested in how we describe close reading, the tools we provide for teaching it, and the claim we make for its importance. They pulled us into their own conversations: the debate over testing, skills, content, and, burbling up into mainstream discourse right now, whether to teach whole books, whether it’s too much to assign entire novels, all of a nonfiction book, or a play from beginning to end. Students, it appears, increasingly struggle to read long texts, and teachers are increasingly discouraged from requiring them. We think students should read whole books, we think they can, and, it turns out, we wrote a book about a way to teach them to do that, whether they’re in college or still in high school.