Ohio Trail

Last week a librarian friend shared an article that included a Minnesota 7th/8th grade reading list from 1908. In it were authors I’d known and loved when I was in those grades: Longfellow, Hawthorne, Poe, Dickens, and Kipling. James Fenimore Cooper was there, as were Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Joel Chandler Harris. (Not familiar with Harris? You are if you remember Song of the South.) Curious, I looked up the suggested Common Core reading list for those grades and found some pleasant surprises. Little Women is in there, and so is Tom Sawyer. Lawrence Yep’s Dragonwings was suggested reading, too. (I found that a bit odd. It’s the fifth in a series of ten books with little to recommend itself on its own.) But the two that caught my eye were Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. I’d have given my right arm to read those “for credit” in middle school!