They need to put Adam's voice through a booming Voice of God filter

“How’s that for a slide of friced guild?” will now be my new go-to phrase, Thanks BranDan!

As a 10th grade ELA instructor I agree with both of you. I wish my district would agree with you. I have advocated for modern titles in my classroom and am told "no" every time. The goal is to instill a love of reading because that is the key to further education and forcing them to read stories with which they don't connect is creating a barrier in their minds to the idea that reading is fun and productive. I did go off-map with our novel this month and took them to the library and let them choose their own novels. I am documenting the difference in their attitudes when it is time to get out their books and the amount of engagement in discussions, so I can have some data behind me the next time I argue for more modern titles to read. The best summative scores I have gotten in recent years for the novel unit was when I was given permission to teach "The Hobbit" as our novel. Even students who didn't like to read wanted to know what was going to happen next each day.

20:35- Thank you so much for this little segment. I am a highschooler who’s been homeschooled for all of my life, and I’ve always have had doubts with my education because it was very loose and informal. Although I love the way I’ve learned it’s hard not to have thoughts of maybe I’m less educated than those in the usual school system, or whether I’ll be less prepared for life compared to my peers. But I’ve always acknowledged that homeschooling is why I love reading so much, and the biggest thing I’ve learned through it it is how to be responsible for myself and my education. I really appreciated hearing your thoughts on this subject, and it reaffirmed my belief that I’ve had a wonderful opportunity in how I’ve learned. Thank you ♡

I'm a millennial born in 1983. We had to read stuff like Holes, The Giver, etc., which were fun little lessons that I enjoyed. English class was a lot of poetry that I hated outside of Edgar Allan Poe. It wasn't until I checked out Ender's Game from the high school library that I really fell in love with reading. I'll remember how I felt when I read the twist until the day I die.

If Wax and Wayne don't solve a food heist in book 4 I'm never reading another Brandon book again...

Glad to hear we're on a redemption arc for B Money. The heel turn stream was pretty shocking.

It was my Grade 7-8 and Grades 11-12 years for me that was really important for shaping my reading later. We read 'Hatchet', 'The Giver', 'A Midsomer Night's Dream', 'Anne Frank', 'The Hobbit', 'The outsiders', 'Alive', 'Dracula', 'Night', and 'Harrison Bergeron'. I had some good English teachers those years.

What I found is that reading the classics is that it helped me recognize references in other more modern books and movies.

I have a great memory of my 9th grade teacher diving across the room with a manila folder trying to block the topless scene in Romeo & Juliet, but totally missing. Great stuff.

Literature should be taught in reverse chronological order; start with the most recent classics and work your way backwards towards Canterbury Tales. Not only is it more accesible to modern readers, it pushes students to investigate where their favorite literature comes from.

The ultimate intentionally blank heist will be when a group of thieves tunnel through Brandon's wall to steal his food and magic cards. They'll then talk about it on the podcast

As a high school teacher, a lot of modern educational theory surrounds the idea of choice in the classroom and giving students a small of responsibility in their own learning. A lot of good English teachers will create their units around a theme and then giving the students a reading list that relates to the theme. This vastly reduces the amount of classics popping up in the modern classroom

So, one of the big reasons that doesn't get mentioned is that literature is a part of the standard curriculum because it's a cultural touchstone I.e., we can *all* refer to Romeo and Juliet and we all know what we're talking about. Part of what makes you American is that you grew up in an American school that taught literature from the same general pool of books. It's very easy to forget how much of education is intended for indoctrination and workforce preparation rather than self-actualization. That said, literature criticism is the easiest vehicle by which we can teach critical thinking, especially to kids who haven't had the life experience to start building that from scratch: fiction is incredibly valuable specifically because it exposes people to lots of different situations and provides methods to judge what the best solution to those situations might be. (E.g., you find yourself between an opportunity to make lots of money by betraying your friend, how does the story react to the choice made by the character?) Part of the point of reading Death of a Salesman, for instance, isn't about appreciating plays or anything, but appreciating the challenge faced by the protagonist and giving people the opportunity to anticipate such a situation before they're in it.

I feel like there are a lot of classic books that are assigned in high schools in America that are amazing. Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, anything Steinbeck, all great stuff. But then I also had a teacher who never assigned a single book and just let us read whatever we want and then do reports on it. She was great.

In high school, I just had to read short stories. In college I had to read multiple novels that just… weren’t interesting. And the teacher insisted we’d like it if we kept reading, which to me showed a gross disregard for the concept of personal taste.

I’m a homeschool mom and I have an assigned reading list for my kids every year. I always assign books from all genres that are appropriate for their age. They have read Fantasy, western, comics, classics, historical fiction, mysteries, suspense, memoirs, manga and a bunch more. I don’t want them to get stuck in a rut feeling like they can only read one type of book. Eventually they will filter out what they like and what they don’t until they have their own reading style.

Predictive text comment: It’s so funny that you are going back to earth to look at the sun and see how much it makes you feel like it too much to help you feel good and you don’t want to be a child anymore so you know what I want you to understand and feel like that you are still doing something wrong and I don’t want you to be able to help.

Something I think Mr. Dan should know: A big name Hollywood actress just arrested for stealing a metric ton of cheese… It was Brie Larceny.

I have come to love Wednesdays because of this podcast. It always makes my day. Thank you both! ❤

Leveraged Pokemon card trading makes me feel like we never left the elementary school playground, we just got older.

I had to read Death of a Salesman in my AP Literature class. Really liked it because the teacher made us act out the parts. Was a fun time and one of my more fond memories of high school.

I was assigned Brave New World in school, and loved it. And yes, Harrison Bergeron too!

I hated English class, but loved reading and writing. My highschool English classes were more focused on reading and writing essays than anything else. For my final project for my junior year, it was entirely based on how many essays we had kept. I titled mine as "The Death of Creativity", and my teacher, who hated me, gave me my first 100% in her class. It was so nice when my senior English teacher went back to letting us read books.

Wow! Dan is setting the lowest of bars for High School - "addition & love reading."

I spent an entire semester on Catcher in the Rye. I can't even eat rye bread anymore because I hate the book so much.

In high school we read 1 Shakespeare play per year, and I suppose I'm going to give that credit for why I love Shakespeare as an adult. I took a Shakespeare class in college just for fun, and I don't know how I got so lucky with the students and professor, but we were all super into it! We got so into the projects and assignments, I think it was really lightning in the bottle.

15:14 you accepted a librarian's gift?? oh god what a hushlander.

In Venezuela, I was assigned two books total…one I had to reread because the test was months after it was first assigned. Thank goodness for movies based on books that got me to like to read

I'm in my mid 30's, and I live in (and was educated in) Sweden, and I was assigned Pratchett in school. Thanks, Larbrant, for that!

I've heard of kids getting Harry Potter as required reading, I dunno if it's true, but man that's way better than most of the crap I had to read.

Senior year of HS I had to memorize and recite the prologue The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. I am now 40yo and still remember most of it.

Everyone I know that hated The Catcher in the Rye had to read it in high school. I read it in my early 20s and I loved it. I feel like for that one teenagers don't really want to read about an annoying teenager, so you need to be a bit removed from that to enjoy the book and understand Holden a little bit more.

Never Let Me Go was the text we read in our final year which is pretty contemporary. We read Animal Farm, Private Peaceful and Of Mice and Men earlier on though, so I guess that it was a bit of a mixture.

I think one of the most important things you can learn in an high school english class is how to determine the validity of a source for a research paper. It's annoying in class to not be able to use wikipedia as a source, but damn I wish some people on Facebook paid better attention to how "good and strong" their sources are.

My high school English teachers were great at teasing symbolism out of literature, but one of them did finally admit, to defuse a classroom argument, "Sometimes the moon doesn't represent romance or impending doom or anything else. Sometimes the moon is just the moon." I believe the book was Jane Eyre.

None of my English teachers got me to that Dan moment, for me it happened in music class. Our teacher had us each pick a song and break down the verses and explain what the song was really about, and we had to pick a song that wasn't too inappropriate. Several of us submitted songs, and they were denied because they were about, say, a prostitute (an example of one I had denied) and I didn't realize it. It made me actually listen to music and pay more attention to the books I was reading.

Brando Sando Making wrasslin' references is what I'm here for.

I really liked this episode. I liked that they discussed that kids should graduate from high school with a love of reading. What I found interesting was that Brandon said you just need to know basic math up to the the little bits of algebra that you need to do. Why not go for getting kids to love math as well. Teach them the reason behind the math and all the great things that you can learn about the world from it? When I got into calculus and did the story problems and saw what I could now do for myself, it blew my mind. I was so glad that I was pushed through the boring math to get to the good stuff while in high school. Oviously I love reading, or I wouldn't be listening to two authors chat about tangent topics, but I argue that a love for math and science should at least have equal ground as reading.

I also have that Kurt Vonnegut doll!! My husband and I used him as our tree topper for Christmas this year. He's the best! He sits on my writing desk for inspiration. :)

Still in High School here (17), and I've had to read multiple books in class, and my main issue with all of them is that they're all incredibly *dry*. At least so much when compared to the type of books I like to read for my own entertainment. In a sense, I just hate having school-assigned books invade my desire to read books which I want to read.

First time I've watched rather than just listened. I keep thinking Dan has headphones on from the outline of the sculpture behind his head. 😂

These guys are always so entertaining.

Ive loved to read for as long as i can remember. I remember being given a goosebumps book in kindergarten and in first grade competing with other kids in accelerated reader points. Competition was a high motivator for me to read beyond what was probably appropriate for my age

That's an impressive Magic collection! I knew he was a big fan of Magic the Gathering for a long time and obviously has the funds to go crazy, so I shouldn't be surprised. But still... Wow

Reading Wuthering Heights as a kid was an exercise in torture and it took me a decade to read it as an adult where I could enjoy it outside of the context of school. Mythology was the best elective I ever took and we did just as much critical analysis of Lord of the Rings and the Matrix trilogy as I did in my lit classes and it was more engaging.

I’m a spotify listener so I’m late but here is my experience as a recent college graduate who is still somewhat fresh out of high school. I HATED most of the classics in high school, I remember reading things like the Scarlet Letter and weathering heights and which withered my enthusiasm for reading, in 11th grade I took a class that completely turned me around. The teacher allowed us to choose from a list of books. We read scifi, Shakespeare and fantasy, as well as a lot of short stories. I loved reading things like the Odyssey, a Clockwork Orange, and Hamlet. That teacher made me love reading today, so from what I see it seems as tho I was kindof in the middle where I had to read the old stuff but got to read some more interesting things. Sorry for the long comment XD

I am astounded that you two have such good recollection of what and WHEN you read in middle and high school! Either you have amazing memories or you're very good at faking it! I remember reading quite a few of the books referenced in this discussion, but I couldn't possibly tell you when or which teacher was responsible.

I loved reading when I was little and reading time was "choose whatever book as long as you are reading." I devoured sci-fi like Animorphs, especially over the summer I would have my mom pick up a few new requests from the library every week. Then came the required reading for classes, and I absolutely hated everything we had to read. I am not sure I ever actually finished most of my assigned reading books for school, because it was torture to get my ADHD brain to comprehend the words on the page when I did not care at all what they said. I thought I just stopped liking reading, and didn't read much as a young teen. Then in 10th grade my Chemistry teacher assigned us a book to read, which the kids in class thought was not fair since this was a science class, but he insisted and said our English classes almost NEVER have you read sci-fi, and its a very important genre. The first book was Ender's Game, and I for the first time in my LIFE was ahead of the chapter we were supposed to be on, because I couldn't stop! It was also my first experience with a surprise ending, and it was awesome! I had that same teacher for Physics, AP Chemistry, and AP Physics, and he had us read a few books each year for each class and made me fall in love with reading again. One of the books he made us listen as an audiobook, to see what that was like, and my ADHD brain LOVEEEEDDD that! I can experience the story while also doing stuff with my hands, YES PLEASE! Now anytime someone, especially a kid, tells me they don't like reading, I tell them they just have not found the right books yet. My 8yr old daughter will walk right past dragons and magic and go for stories about cats. It baffles me, but thats her style, and as long as she is happy reading, thats the important part.

I can remember a time when you can make fun of stuff without worrying about it

There’s also much value to be had in analysis of more contemporary literary, narrative, or storytelling art forms, like movies, tv, video games, or graphic novels.

Confession time: I didn't think much of The Red Badge of Courage or Great Gatsby - but I enjoyed My Antonia, Anthem, and Death of a Salesman. This was all 20+ years ago though.

In Highschool I had to read To Kill A Mockingbird 3 times. Partially because I went to public school for 2 years and my parents finished Highschool with me as a homeschooler. I had 3 different teachers who all did to kill a mockingbird. By the third time I had a good handle on the book. I actually love the book to this day. Even though I was forced to read it 3 times.

I have to say I'm super sad for the owners of the game store that had the Pokémon card heist. This was a local business "mom and pop" type store in my home state. Sure, insurance money can recoup some losses, but that money cannot really replace the lost inventory of out of print materials.

Things like The Odyssey and Romeo and Juliet are especially frustrating when you're young because if you know anything about them via pop culture osmosis, you know there's all these classic scenes in them but it feels like it takes SO MUCH WORK to extract them when you're reading. "What is all this filler material!" you wonder, and often the teacher doesn't do much to actually give context to the scenes other than the core ones. I was always on top of mystery stories. Read both 12 Angry Men and And Then There Were None in high school, and despite the teachers being really discouraging I loved both of those. Mysteries just happen to be one of those things that can hook and maintain my attention through prose I'd other wise grate against. (There's also comedy, as Catch-22 was one of the best novels I ever read)

I love this because it reminds me of Jasnah's discussion with Shallan about the nature of scholarship

I read a lot more “contemporary” books in high school. A lot of WW2 and aboriginal stories. And while they were fine, I wish we had read more classics, simply because now I’m an adult trying to figure them out. I value immensely doing higher literature and studied Frankenstein and Hamlet very intensely and I grew so much from that experience.

Now I know why [said multivariably-intelligent character to avoid spoilers] felt familiar. That was a genius writing move, quite honestly.

I graduated many celestial rotations ago so things probably changed but we had to read Jane Eyre, Night, To Kill A Mockingbird, and a lot of Shakespeare. The teacher I had senior year let us read and report on whatever we wanted that was in the Library and I chose the first four books in the Vampire Chronicles.

Slice of Fried Gold is an Irish slang for something amazingly great

We need teachers to assign Mistborn for summer reading.

Another problem is introducing children to literature when they are too young to understand it. When my class had to read animal farm, they just didn't get it "it's just about talking animals, what's so interesting?" I don't think my teacher got it either because they ended up assigning us an essay about character development in the book.

Harrison bergeron is easily my favorite short story

I just saw a meme on this last week "Why are the curtains blue" Teacher: due to the authors.... From the writer: "Because the curtains were blue"

the intro bit was fun, never worry about being boring

I didn’t like reading assigned books but I’m glad we had classics so now that I’m choosing to read on my own I want to go back and actually read the things I was assigned

In my sophomore or junior year in high school, I flunked the second 9 week grading period in my English literature course. Mainly because I sat next to one of my best friends and we cared more about discussing the latest Simpsons or Married with Children episodes. The teacher thought I was a good student so she pulled me aside just before she had to turn in our grades and said I had a choice. I’d get the solid “F” I earned or I’d get D, passing if barely, if I promised to get an A+ on the next marking period. She showed me the book lined up for the next 9weeks, “The Count of Monte Cristo”. I’d never heard about it but she gave a short synopsis-prison break/revenge/swashbuckler. Facing the immediate “F” versus, a 9week stay of execution, I opted for the extension. She warned me, if I’d earn anything less, the “D” would revert back to an “F”... Still sounded like better odds to me. I did love the book. She was a great teacher, now that I had reason to pay attention in class. Made sure all the odd, old school words were in our notes before we needed them. I nailed every quiz or test. I had issues with not reading more then was assigned. And just as amusing, I pissed off my friend, for not just, all but ignoring him, but also for blasting him away grade wise.

Thanks Dan for covering the Important News my neck of the woods. I want to clarify that the heist happened in Forest Lake, which is like one of the nicest po-dunk exurbs of the twin cities. I have a friend who worked EMS for that county, and basically theres nothing much else to do in FL.

Teaching basic math and basic literacy should be accomplished before high school starts. In high school we should be teaching critical thinking, civics, and how to structure and analyze an argument (oratory and rhetoric). Other life skill classes should be available as electives.

The other side of the issue at 24:57 is when the teachers has ONE interpretation and refuses any other answer. I believe we were doing Death of a Salesman and I suggested that Biff relates to certain sounds and onomatapia for punching something and a general association to toughness, and the teacher shot that down soooo fast.

I had a college Latin professor who said that literature tends to reflect visual art of the time. For example some 19th century English novels can be viewed as a reflection of viewing a painting where the point is to paint a picture for the reader so they can experience a scene as if they were there. It's kind of an interesting thing to think about when viewing historical and modern literature.

One year in high school my English teacher was a published fantasy author. He had us read Z for Zachariah and played a spaceship RP game instead of the usual fair. I was security on our ship and spent most of the semester dealing with the alien we captured. I'm not terribly upset I didn't read Lord of the Flies like the rest of the classes.

I'm going to do a food heist and leave a calling card that just says "As covered on Intentionally Blank" and pretend to be a time traveler from the unwritten time travel disaster tourism novel 😎

I liked the Odyssey. We read an abridged version of it in high school and I went back and bought it myself (and the Iliad) later to read it. I also enjoyed Beowulf. What I didn't enjoy was Paradise Lost. I still can't read poetry because I don't get it, but I'm reading the Divine Comedy because I want to try and read it. I enjoyed most of my classic literature in school and I have more of it now that I can spend my own money on it. But I also read a lot of contemporary literature. Both have worth and a place but it depends on the reader.

Much as Simon Pegg and Nick Frost may wish everyone here in the UK used (or even knew) the expression 'slice of fried gold', it has not become a common phrase.

As a kid who read only fantasy, highschool killed my passion for reading.

in HS we had to pick from a list of "History" novels & I picked "The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe and it instantly became a favorite. Others we had to read as a class I ended up loving: Animal Farm, The Crucible, & Great Gatsby

My son had to read Lord of the Flies in 8th grade. I was made to read The Blue Sword. We went to vastly different schools.

I related to Scarlet Letter because it is about bullying and being bullied was a fact of life for me.

I had to read The Odyssey in high school and it changed my life. Literally. I made a goal that I wanted to learn ancient Greek and read The Odyssey in its original language. And I went to college, wasted a bunch of money to achieve an arbitrary goal and I read it in ancient Greek after 4 years. An ancient language was part of one of my majors so it wasn't totally wasted but I had to take an extra 2 years of Greek to get to that level. And now I forgot every piece of ancient Greek except the alphabet lol But goal setting and a sense of accomplishment. I read everything, classic, romance, historical fiction, non-fiction, thriller, etc. because I don't know which book might change the course of my life.

The last 2 min was painful. One of the biggest movies of all time and it came out almost 2 decades ago

High School lit was skulduggery, in many ways as noted here, with an excessive search for meaning and overanalysis. The class that got me into Tolkien (by starting on the Hobbit) lead me to a deeper understanding of meaning, since LOTR and the Silmarillion are both intentionally obfuscated and inference is required. In comparison to the literature classes, it was nice to be able to grasp the depth on my own without having the English teachers pound their innumerable interpretations into my head.

My thinking about why they still push “the classics” The parents often read them so they are deemed less offensive because the parents already knows what’s in the book. Imagine trying to sell the plot for some of those classics now to a group of angry parents are a school board meeting.

I keep reading and rehashing and mulling over all I take in. If you want to know a time, read its works. Jurassic park is a good example. Cloning was the big science news & that book gives it a good look. It expressed the feelings, fears, and hope that science could bring. The current political climate made me think of it. The same issues are now being debated. Slide of gold indeed sirs.

I graduated high school in 2016 and I definitely studied more classic literature than contemporary. While I hated a lot of those books, I think they were essential reading. Classic literature is so important in education because all contemporary literature is inspired by and makes references to it. Without a background in classic literature, many themes and references in modern literature are completely lost on us. Brandon himself gives two examples from his own work: Taravangian being inspired by Faulkner and Hoid by Shakespeare. If I hadn't read Scarlet Letter in high school, I probably would still think it was about a red envelope, and I certainly wouldn't understand references made to it in other works that have similar themes.

What happened to the weekly update? Is it coming next Monday instead?

I had what I have to think was a fairly unusual high school English situation. My first two years of high school I ended up in the 'dumbbell English' classes, not because I was bad at English, but due to tardy/attendance issues. And I was bored out of my mind! I kept failing because there was nothing to interest me. I could write better than my teachers, and was being told to diagram sentences. Instead I ended up sitting in the back of the classroom with my friend Phil, playing hangman, and listening to him repeat song stories about truckers and tales about that Wild Wood Weed. (I can still go through that entire 'song'.) God Bless my 10th grade English teacher, Ms Dutch, who said "You've done nothing in my class. I HAVE to fail you. But for the 11th grade I'm having them put you in honors English." My grade shot from Fs to As and Bs because I was no longer bored sick. (And wasn't asked to waste my time diagramming sentences.)

I love this podcast. Please never stop.

In Poland in primary school we had to read The Secret Garden, A little princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett,The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain,Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, The little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Among them there also was a book where a dog died. Some kids later got to read Hobbit or Narnia or Sherlock Holmes books. High school it's Antigone, Oedipus the King by Sophocles,Iliad by Homer, Macbeth,Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare,Tristan and Iseult, Heart of darkness by Joseph Conrad,The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri and in both cases other Polish/non English authors and their books. There was also this thing like "a current teenager's book" so every kid could read the book they chose and then tell the class what the book was about.

A few of the assigned books me and many of my friends in high school really liked (class of 2017): Cyrano De Bergerac The Stranger Crime and Punishment The Great Gatsby The most divisive was probably Catcher in the Rye, some of us really liked it and some absolutely hated it. Even if I didn't like some of the assigned classics I am really happy they made me read them. It got me interested in some stuff I never would have found on my own and got us all acquainted with these older parts of the culture. A lot of us like that we can make references and have this sort of common allegory through the shared experience of the classics. If each generation only read contemporary fiction in school that would sort of be lost. A mixture of classics and more contemporary fiction would be ideal to me. Also I believe it's the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet with the topless scene, we also watched that

I have to say the way my school (Canadian highschool) handled classics worked pretty well. You were given a list and were able to choose the "classic lit" you wanted to read. You could also make a request to have something reviewed and be put on the list if you thought it qualified.

I agree with you, Dan, but I think that our education system doesn't just overly focus on old literature, but it entirely focuses on that time period, making you feel like we're a hundred years in the past. It's why kids learn more from TikTok now than school.

"how's that for a slice of fried gold" came up 3rd for me!

That opening caught me offguard and tickled the humourous till I leaked.

This was an interesting episode for me, since I have a degree in English Literature and currently teach people who are in university to become teachers. The question of "What is education?" is something that has been hotly debated forever, going back to ancient Greece and beyond. There are philosophy professors in my department who continue to discuss this question. The discussion here deals more with what we would call "schooling" than education. I also find it interesting to hear what Americans are made to read in high school. As a Canadian, Edith Wharton was not part of our canon, which tended to lean more toward British literature. Although that is changing now with the inclusion of more Indigenous and BIPOC voices in curriculums. Actually, I did not read Edith Wharton until my late 30s after stumbling on an excerpt from her work "Summer" in an issue of Lapham's Quarterly. I really love her writing. That said, despite reading a number of her works, I still haven't gotten around to Ethan Frome. Maybe it's a good thing I started elsewhere. She was a genius, in my opinion, but I think some works do not fit for the high school classroom. It's only as an adult that I came to appreciate Julius Caesar by Shakespeare. I was made to read it in Grade 8 and that was a bad choice by our teacher.

I'm a highschooler and I was actually assigned Rithmatist my freshman year, this was after I had already read it for my self.

I had to read a lot of "Classics" in high school and I did not like most of them and being forced to read things I had no desire to read was part of why English was always my least favorite subject. I also somehow managed to get away with doing very little actual reading of those books unless they were short. I think I remember out of the around 15 or so classics I was required to read throughout my high school career I actually fully read two; Antigone and Of Mice and Men, because they were the shortest. Of the 7-10 more modern books (written post 1980) that I was required to read, I read all of them. It was those more modern books that probably saved my love of reading.

The curtains are blue and crabgrass is crabgrass. It sounds like what you were training for was steganography in spy work.

I would add something to the education bit. Along with math, reading, and just general learning, we definitely need more history in schools. We tend to just learn the same chunk over and over and over.

In regards to classics I generally tended to enjoy the ones I had to read but never loved them. But recently I have been reading the Count of Monte Cristo and loving it as much as something like stormlight. It's reads surprisingly modern despite its archaic-Ness (though i am a person who reads ancient Epics so maybe I am geared to like it)