The writer Anna Quindlen agreed: "Among other things," she wrote,  "it poisons the mind against 'Middlemarch.'"

Other volumes less than dear to (some of) your hearts include "Moby-Dick," Edith Hamilton's "Mythology," "The Scarlet Letter," "Jane Eyre," "Invisible Man," "The Catcher in the Rye," "Paradise Lost," "Heart of Darkness," "Little Women," "Gone with the Wind," "Portrait of a Lady," "Crime and Punishment" ("It took 10 years and a degree in computer science before I'd exorcised my demons and picked up anything deeper than a Robert Ludlum novel," one of you wrote) and "Great Expectations." And suffice it to say that, were he still alive, John Steinbeck would be unlikely to find himself in your collective debt.

Why did you find these books so annoying? Complaints about length ("'Crime and Punishment' might possibly have made for a great 12-page short story"), inscrutable vocabulary ("Brave New World") and age-inappropriate plot points were numerous. But many also made the argument that it wasn't always a book itself (however challenging) that was the problem; in many cases, it was the quality -- or lack -- of accompanying instruction.

Where strength of teaching was concerned, a lot seemed to come down to a teacher's efforts to provide historical context. Is it useful to assign "Animal Farm" to students who have yet to deal with the relevant Soviet backstory? Why try "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" if you're not going to give it the explanation it deserves? (Wrote one reader, "Thomas Hardy may have meant ["Tess"] to be a story about 19th-century double standards, but since it is impossible to have a discussion about female sexuality in a high school English class that would put the book in context for the student readers, it came off as an unpalatable cross between a bodice ripper and a cautionary tale. Until our society evolves to the point where the instructors can teach the book properly, I wish they'd stop teaching it at all!") Just "study some history," one commenter concluded, "and Melville, Dickens and Steinbeck come alive."

Of course, the Bard had a corner of the debate all to himself. "Shakespeare should be read aloud," or seen in performance, instead of -- or at least in addition to -- being read in print: this was a common refrain. "Why, why, why do educators insist on using 'Romeo and Juliet' as the introductory play?" one reader asked plaintively. "I think they'd have better luck with one of the comedies" -- perhaps "The Comedy of Errors." And though some bemoaned the difficulty of Shakespeare's English, suggesting it might not be worthwhile for classes to slave over outdated Elizabethan jibes, at least one of you wouldn't stand for that line of thinking, hitting back: "If you don't appreciate Shakespeare, then you are dull, tone-deaf, rhythmically challenged and know nothing about the English language or human life."

Rather unsurprisingly, no one stepped up to defend the required reading of "Finnegans Wake," which one of you was inexplicably forced to endure as a student. Perhaps jared2 will take comfort in the words of a contemporary reviewer of the tome, who wrote: "The work is not written in English, or in any other language, as language is commonly known. ... [James Joyce] alone could explain his book and, I suppose, he alone review it."

Lastly, some of those who weighed in were not only former English students, but also current English teachers; their points added a stimulating dose of the practical. Morning's Minion noted that any tale disturbing enough to merit inclusion in a reader's list of ban-able books had clearly "registered on a pretty profound level" -- and argued that books whose rewards are not immediately apparent should not necessarily be written off:

I have long been of the opinion that the only real crime in teaching is diluting the curriculum and lowering expectations for what students can achieve. I've written about this before on teaching threads, but when you set the bar high, students reach for it; not all touch it, but their hands are high, and energy, effort, and passion go into the endeavor. When you set it low, they know it, trip over it, and resent you like hell for underestimating them.

Another teacher, Lisa Rathert, added:

My rule of thumb is to choose literature that I love and am excited about when I can, and attempt to teach required texts thematically, or in context. My personal preference would be to develop blended courses that combine literature, history, government, and philosophy. "The Scarlet Letter" becomes much more interesting when students examine it in the context of America's original and ongoing "culture wars;" "Lord of the Flies" could be very revealing when compared to rosier versions of childhood "innocence," or discussed in the context of competing theories of human nature.

Besides, no matter what we choose to teach in English class, someone's going to complain. So, if all else fails, teach the controversy. No matter what their reading [comprehension] scores, I've never met a student who didn't have strong opinions, and who didn't appreciate having a chance to express them.

 

And so we ask: Where were these censors when we really needed them -- that is, when our 10th-grade teachers assigned "Beowulf" or "The Pearl"? As deplorable as real-life book banning may be, there's some required reading that those of us at Salon would love to see retired from the nation's syllabuses simply because we were tortured by it as kids.

"What is the educative value of making nerdy kids (or anyone, I suppose) read 'Lord of the Flies'?" asks film critic Andrew O'Hehir. "Is it pure sadism? To rub their faces in the gravity of their predicament, and the likely fact that they will sooner or later be sacrificed to a nonexistent God by their classmates? Now, I recognize the book's literary value, no question, and the point that it's an allegory about human society and not strictly about children or for children. But that's not how you read it when you're 11, for the love of sweet suffering Jesus. Really hated that experience."

For my part, while I was a voracious independent reader of children's fiction from the second grade on, "Lord of the Flies" -- and another novel I was ordered to read at age 10, "Animal Farm" -- convinced me that "grown-up" books were unrelentingly bleak and politically didactic; this kept me from venturing beyond the kids' section of the library for a few years. (Also: with "Lord of the Flies," I felt that the italicized allusions to "a stick sharpened at both ends" were so overwrought they must refer to atrocities even worse than putting someone's head on a pike. This caused me to imagine things no 10-year-old should be imagining.)

Even the most omnivorous reader has at least one middle-grade anathema, an assigned book that was nothing but one long, brutal slog. Sometimes we're simply too young for it; a man I know still shudders at the very mention of "A Tale of Two Cities" even though as an adult he came to love Dickens. Why make kids read a novel set during a historical period most will find difficult to grasp, especially as they wrestle with Victorian prose? I'm told "A Tale of Two Cities" gets put on curricula because it's the shortest Dickens novel, but "Oliver Twist" is only a little longer and its mistreated-orphans premise seems vastly more child-friendly. Could it be that "Tale" has a message ("Revolutions are nasty!") that adults find more congenial than the notions a kid might pick up from "Oliver Twist" ("Why not join a gang of pickpocketing urchins?").

Then there are the books that seemed pretty good at the time, but when revisited later leave you doubting the wisdom and taste of our nation's educators. Salon's editor in chief, Kerry Lauerman, got choked up over John Knowles' "A Separate Peace" as a high-school sophomore, but nowadays he'd prefer to see it jump from a high tree into a fast river. "I tried to read it again," he writes, "and I instantly recognized the easy life lessons and broadly drawn characters of a reality show or Lifetime movie."

But surely the most egregious tale of recklessly required reading comes from Life section editor Sarah Hepola, who at the age of 14 was assigned "Ivanhoe" by Sir Walter Scott, a novelist regarded as unreadable by most adults. "It was my freshman honors English class," Sarah recalled, "and it was the first book we read that year. English had always been my favorite class, a refuge for a kid who felt out of place and loved words, and that pretty much put an end to all that."

Readers, it's your turn: What book did you have to read in elementary or middle school that you wouldn't mind seeing vanish from the reading lists of children everywhere?

Further reading

The American Library Association's official Banned Books Week 2011 site

A Google Map showing places in the U.S. where books were challenged between 2009 and 2011, indicating titles, reasons for the challenge and ultimate results

1. Superheroes: True, some die-hard fans will never tire of this motif, but for the rest of us the Burden of Specialness is like gum with all the flavor chewed out.

2. Scene after scene of characters in their mid-20s sitting around in cafes kvetching about their love lives.

3. Three dozen identical panels in which the schlubby protagonist stares off into the middle distance, followed by one nearly identical one in which he sighs.

4. Darkness, oh such very dark darkness. This quality is probably a lot more appealing if you live with one of those chirpy moms who's always urging you to think positive.

Some of these books are sheer eye candy. Others are simply drawn yet emotionally and intellectually complex. (Nevertheless, it's astonishing how much a gifted artist can convey with what at first may seem like a childish scrawl.) It's an intriguingly international bunch, too, by artists hailing from Japan, Brazil, France and Canada, as well as the U.S., who have chosen subjects that are even wider-ranging. Physics, prostitution, arctic exploration, war, slavery, fate and the unfathomable mystery of ordinary city streets are only a few of the themes they tackle. Prepare to be dazzled.

Beaton, a native of Nova Scotia who recently relocated to Brooklyn, N.Y., began writing comics about historical figures and characters from literature for her college newspaper; her first strip offered tips for surviving a Viking invasion of campus. "The response was way bigger than I ever imagined," she said recently over lunch. "I knew that I had something."

That something became a popular website and now a book, also titled "Hark! A Vagrant" (a line from an old comic), just published by Drawn and Quarterly. I sat down with Beaton to ask her about the art of being funny about history and books.

You were a history and anthropology major in college. Do you have a favorite historical period?

I gravitated toward the 18th and 19th centuries. It was a time of real change, especially for the lower classes and for women. The seeds of all of these movements were happening: workers revolting, unions starting, people breaking off from monarchies. It was action-packed, the birth of our modern society. Before that, it was, "If you're poor, you're poor. If you're a woman -- Sorry!"

What about favorite authors?

I love Shakespeare, and I love Dickens. He is one of my favorites.

I don't recall you doing many comics about Dickens, though.

It's hard because his novels are funny anyway. How do you take a character like Mr. Micawber [from "David Copperfield"] and stretch him out into a joke? He's already a joke. Even the evil guys are so evil, how do you exaggerate that? You can see his influence in my work, if you look for it. There's that wish for a charming presentation.

What do you mean by that?

I want to make something that will make people feel good. If you write a comic about somebody that makes fun of them, you can't just tear them to pieces. You have to celebrate the things that make them memorable. I do a fair service to the people I'm making fun of, even if I'm making fun of them. If I choose a historical figure or a book, it's going to be somebody's favorite. And they'll be the ones who like it the most. If you make in-jokes about Chopin, then people who love Chopin will think it's just the best thing.

Are certain types of books or historical figures better candidates for the kind of satire you do than others?

Definitely the ones that more people have read. When I do historical figures, I feel better going to obscure territory. You can Wikipedia a historical figure and get the gist of things. But you don't want to ruin a book for somebody. So I tend more toward books people read in high school, which a lot of 16-year-olds are forced to read to begin with.

Then, stuff that takes itself very seriously. That's the easiest to lampoon, for sure. People have been doing this for ages. After [Samuel Richardson's novel] "Pamela" came out [in 1740], Henry Fielding wrote a book called "Shamela." Pamela was so virtuous, so perfect, that she made this lecherous, awful man who was chasing her turn into a virtuous person. That was totally unrealistic, and everyone said, "What?!" It's fun to take down things that are not that self-aware. When you make a joke about Jane Eyre, it might be about how Mr. Rochester comes across as a weird, sketchy dude. If someone just gave you the facts about Rochester, you'd think, "This guy is not on the level."

Is there anything in particular that you do to prepare when you want to write a comic about a book?

I'll read essays on it, and people's opinions. That gives you an overview of the world around the book, beyond just the book itself. That's where you really want to draw the jokes from: people's relationship with the book. What they think of when they read it. What was popular to think about it. If the comic was just me making jokes about the book, it would be kind of bland.

The comic you wrote about the three Brontë sisters seems to have really struck a nerve.

That comic got a huge response. It's in the window of a bookstore now.

Finally Anne gets a little credit for commonsense!

Anne's books are totally different from Emily's and Charlotte's. Anne's characters are horrified by what they see, while Jane Eyre is more like, "Well, I'll get used to this guy with his weird, wife-in-the-attic shenanigans. I love him!" People say that "Wuthering Heights" is a romance. It's not. It's a book about horrible people. It's more of a horror story than anything else.

It seems like messing around with historical characters might be trickier, and with your background in history I would imagine it might make you nervous.

You do sacrifice some facts for the sake of a joke. I find myself trying to circumvent any objections. One comic I did recently was about Danton and Robespierre. I drew Robespierre at Danton's trial -- which he was not. He was sick, so he wasn't there. But the comic was about their relationship, and he was responsible, so I drew him in there. I had to put at the top, "He wasn't there, I know, but anyway ..." Otherwise, inevitably, an email titled "Actually" will appear in my inbox.

You also did a series of comics based on cover illustrations that Edward Gorey did for several novels, imagining what the stories might be solely on the basis of these strange images. But I think I like your Nancy Drew series even more, possibly because the cover art for those books was so terrible and you can really go to town on it.

The progression of Nancy Drew cover art is really fascinating. In the 1930s, when they first came out, the covers showed her getting in there, into the middle of the action. She was a really strong character. Then, when they redid the covers in the '60s, Nancy becomes scared-looking, peeking around the corner with her hands on her face. She becomes much more demure and much less adventurous. It's really interesting. And then it becomes abstract, with a big Nancy head and some objects around it, fading in and out, maybe a skull.

Nancy is not a real solid character. She has a boyfriend; she likes to solve mysteries. Nancy, you can take her, stretch her and squish her, and she's still kind of the same thing. She's just a big psychopath in my comics.

Depictions of women does seem to be a theme that attracts you.

I became more aware of that because I'm a lady in the comics industry, and whether you like it or not, your name will pop-up in a lot of articles about women in comics. You kind of get this education constantly anyway, about depictions of women and women writers. You become more aware of characters who suffered badly.

Lois Lane is one of them. She's a lot like Nancy in a way. The early Lois was very elbows-out, knocking people out of the way to get the story. Then editors came in, and said, "Make Lois prettier. Lois isn't hot enough. Make sure she's the type of lady that Superman would really want to save, you know what I mean?" So, after that Lois starts to suck. She starts to be boring and whiny, saying, "Superman, why don't you marry me?" And he says [deep, exasperated voice], "I'm busy, Lois!"

But I don't have an agenda with any of the comics I do, really. I just go for being funny. When I did one about strong female characters, it was because we're all so used to these tropes of women: "She's so tough!" But she's in her underwear while shooting guns. And people say [huffily], "Well, what's wrong with being sexy?" Well, what's wrong with wearing clothes? Or proper protective gear? All these attitudes are fun to make fun of because everybody really knows better. Even the people who are defending it are secretly saying "... yeah."

"Death in the City of Light" recounts the infamous case of Marcel Petiot, a physician believed to have killed over 60 people in Paris between 1942 and 1944, under the Nazi occupation of the city. King presents the story as a procedural, beginning with the day in March 1944 when residents in the chic 16th arrondissement complained of a foul smoke billowing out of a neighboring townhouse. When attempts to rouse the house's inhabitants proved fruitless, the fire department was called. In the basement, they found a coal stove with the "charred remains of a human hand" sticking out of it. Body parts and bones littered the floor. Further police investigations discovered a pit in which numerous corpses in various stages of decay had been covered with quicklime. In total, over 11 pounds of human hair would be gathered from the remains.

If King's book has a protagonist, it's police detective Victor Massu (an inspiration for Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret), who picked up the case at the beginning. Determining, capturing and convicting the culprit, however, would prove supremely challenging in a city whose civil institutions were hopelessly compromised under Nazi rule. It was difficult for anyone to sort out wrong from right. For example, the patrolmen initially dispatched to the scene allowed a man claiming to be the brother of the owner to enter the building and take away some undetermined piece of evidence. Why? Because he assured them that the house was a Resistance outpost and that the bodies inside it were the remains of "Germans and traitors to our country." Later, they learned that the man was in fact Petiot, the house's owner and the prime suspect.

People were disappearing from Nazi-occupied Paris in droves. Some escaped to Spain and beyond via clandestine networks. Others vanished into the prisons of the Gestapo; you could be arrested for something as simple as wearing red, white and blue on Bastille Day. Above all, the city's Jewish population was subject to raids and deportations, plucked from their homes or off the streets and loaded into trains destined for death camps, never to be seen again. This made identifying the dismembered and mutilated remains in Petiot's charnel house extremely difficult, especially given that the parts of the bodies most useful to this process were missing.

King sketches this background in brisk, workmanly prose. At first it seems a bit too workmanly, but as the case evolves into a bizarre farrago of false identities, paranoia, wild goose chases, rumors, secret agendas and outright delusion -- all liberally sprinkled with Gallic histrionics -- the choice makes perfect sense. Authorial flourishes would be superfluous in a story already replete with penny-dreadful details: a mysterious femme fatale, a coffin stuffed with treasure just before it was interred, a crime boss who "obsessively collected" rare dahlias and orchids and entertained socialites in his lavish townhouse while members of the Resistance were tortured in the cellars beneath, and so on.

The authorities finally caught Petiot after a seven-month search. By then, Paris had been liberated -- an event described with crisp brio by King -- and Massu had been charged with collaboration, losing his job. (He was later fully exonerated.) The doctor was deliberately goaded into revealing himself by a newspaper that ran the wild testimony of a witness (who later disappeared), alleging that Petiot was a cocaine smuggler who hired prostitutes to have sex with other men while he watched and who wore German uniforms to hunt down Resistance fighters. Outraged, Petiot sent the paper a long, handwritten note filled with clues that led to his apprehension. He was working under a false identity as a captain in the counterespionage service, where he participated in the investigation of his own crimes.

Petiot's trial gave him further occasion to display his almost superhuman brazenness. He was accused of operating a false "escape agency," promising to spirit people out of France, then killing them and stealing their valuables. Petiot maintained that he had worked for a Resistance operation, called "Fly-Tox," that "liquidated" collaborators and informants. He painted his victims -- including several Jews fleeing Nazi persecution -- as Gestapo agents. He admitted to killing scores of people, just not the ones found in the townhouse. Those corpses, he insisted, had been planted there by the Gestapo in order to frame him.

The trial quickly became a three-ring circus -- a situation exacerbated by the French judicial process, which allows civil attorneys hired by victims' families as well as prosecutors to question witnesses and permits the participants (including the defendant) to interrupt testimony and statements. The quick-witted Petiot lambasted his enemies with barbed jokes and accusations of collaboration, capitalizing on the uneasiness everyone felt in the aftermath of the war. He nearly came to blows with one attorney while on the stand.

Petiot was not the only one to misbehave. Incredibly, the presiding magistrate was quoted describing the accused as "an unbelievable demon" and "an appalling murderer" in the press while the trial was in process and yet no mistrial was declared. The public fought over spots in the overflowing courtroom, then camped out, munching on sausages and sandwiches and shouting remarks like spectators at a sporting match. It was the best show in town. The writer Colette turned up to report on the trial, and such luminaries as Prince Rainier of Monaco and the duke of Windsor requested seats.

King has unearthed new evidence (a first-person account of the early days of the investigation written by Massu not long after the trial) to counter the widespread assumption that Petiot killed his victims via lethal injections. He also suspects that Petiot had powerful protectors in the Occupation regime and presents a convincing case for those suspicions. But the most startling impression left by "Death in the City of Light," is of Paris itself, confronting the bestiality lurking behind its supremely civilized facade, and of the handful of Parisiennes who tried to serve justice in spite of it.

If you think Epicureanism means extravagant self-indulgence, think again. Lucretius was a follower of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who did indeed argue that pleasure is a sign of the good. But Epicurus also wrote, "we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality." Another of his followers, Philodemus, explained that it is impossible to live in true pleasure, "without living prudently and honorably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends and without being philanthropic."

Moreover, the Epicureans were materialists who believed that the human soul does not survive the death of the body and that no gods preside over our existence, doling out rewards and punishments. They understood the universe to be infinite and to be composed of tiny particles called atoms. In "On the Nature of Things," Lucretius argues that everything around us is the result of (in Greenblatt's words) "an unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter," causing atoms to clump together or break apart, forming all the recognizable objects of the world. Living things themselves emerged in this way, and are in a process of continuous change as a result of untold numbers of chance "swerves."

These views are remarkably close to those of contemporary secular humanists, right down to an approximation of Darwin's theory of evolution via random genetic mutation (although, of course, the ancients did not know about genes or mutation). "Swerve" illustrates that this way of seeing the universe preceded the scientific revolution that ultimately confirmed it, which may or may not give today's secularists a boost. (Confirmation bias, anyone?) Above all, Epicurus and his followers conceived of an ethos that required no supernatural enforcer threatening to condemn the wicked to eternal torment. The Epicurean good life is a good life in both respects -- enjoyable because it is moral, prudent and honorable. It is also a life devoted to celebrating this world, not the next.

It's fascinating to watch Greenblatt trace the dissemination of these ideas through 15th-century Europe and beyond, thanks in good part to Bracciolini's recovery of Lucretius' poem. Because it was written in the most exquisite Latin (and because the author was a pagan who didn't know any better), "On the Nature of Things" found a place in many respectable libraries despite containing ideas that got the likes of Giordano Bruno burned at the stake. Lucretius probably had the most marked influence on Montaigne, but Greenblatt claims to see traces of "On the Nature of Things" in everything from the paintings of Botticelli to the plays of Shakespeare.

At times, all this seems a bit of a stretch, and that's where the second narrative in "Swerve" comes in. Perhaps it's due to a publishing industry imperative dictating that you can't write a book about a historical subject without claiming that it "changed the world." That revolutionary model certainly jibes with a hoary narrative familiar from my elementary-school social studies courses, an orgy of Renaissance worship whipped up by Kenneth Clarke's "Civilization" (the TV series and the book), in which the Middle Ages was invariably depicted as an inert cultural wasteland presided over by a philistine church.

This view of European history is by no means shared by all or even most historians, as Greenblatt himself surely knows. At times "Swerve" feels downright distorted, bending the facts to fit this Clarkean scenario. That takes some elbow grease, especially when you consider that the introduction of Lucretius' poem "reinvigorated" and made more creative a medieval Italian literature that had already produced Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. The post-Lucretius lineup is a lot less impressive, which may be why Greenblatt emphasizes the painters of the Renaissance instead. How a rediscovered poem could revolutionize a region's visual arts without much improving its written ones remains a puzzle.

Greenblatt is no stranger to finessing the historical record; his last popular history, "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare," spun the handful of facts known about the playwright into a highly speculative but supremely charming meditation on his life. "Swerve" is just as beguiling, even if Poggio Bracciolini makes for a less compelling protagonist (but then, who wouldn't?). I can't help wishing that Greenblatt were as forthright about the liberties that he's taken in this book as he was about the speculation in "Will in the World," but a better acquaintance with Lucretius, Epicurus and Bracciolini more than compensates for that minor vexation. I see more evolution than swerve in the journey of European culture, but the trip is pretty darn scenic either way.

Further reading:

Salon's review of Stephen Greenblatt's "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare"