Death of a Salesman

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1. matt_holmesJan 2023
   As you have a good sense of humour, try

   Kafka "The Trial", and his other short works

   Hesse "Steppenwolf", and if you like it "The Glass Bead Game"

   Stendahl "The Red and the Black"

   and Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita"

   Once you've read them come back for more! And if I may note, literature is a world thing that opens up new domains. No way to limit it to one place. However in your stated context, how about

   Steinbeck "The Pearl"

   and Miller "Death of a Salesman"

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2. dkharAug 2014
   Well, some classic "high school English literature class" books that fulfill that criteria are Miller's Death of a Salesman and Wharton's Ethan Frome.

   Still in the Western classical canon, Puccini's Madame Butterfly is fantastic, if you're into opera.

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3. chasingsparksApr 2010
   This is just idle speculation, but I think people get turned off to fiction because they were forced to read classics in high school. Classics in high school are mostly useless unless you are particularly mature; I was not.

   Rereading those books now is a bizarre experience. I remember reading Death of a Salesman a year back in a state of disbelief. It was something I remember absolutely hating in high school but six years later, I thought it was brilliant.

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4. chasingsparksJan 2010
   Death of a Salesman. This is yet another book that you are forced to read prematurely in middle or high school. At the time, it was a frustrating exercise; upon rereading it at age 25, I thought it was fantastic.

   I also enjoyed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. It was very creative.

   Sadly, I had no books that yielded a personal intellectual epoch this year.

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5. problemtheoryJan 2026
   Hopefully that play ends as tragically or more as The Death of a Salesman.
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6. pclmulqdqOct 2024
   > And those books should be modern and relevant.

   What makes Pratchett more "relevant" than Shakespeare? I would posit to you that the same order of magnitude of people (or more) read and watch Shakespeare plays by choice as read Pratchett books. Let alone modern adaptations like West Side Story. I get that you prefer the one, but not everybody does.

   English classes also have you read lots of other more recent and more modern works. It's not exclusively Shakespeare. I remember, for example, Death of a Salesman, 1984, and Slaughterhouse-Five being part of my high school's English curriculum.

   Lord of the Rings is apparently in several English curricula now.

   Comedies of all kinds (from Aristophanes to Pratchett) usually take a backseat to tragedies, bildungsromane, and other more "serious" genres in English classes because they tend to be much less timeless and much more current in terms of their themes and references.

   > That modern writers reference old works is true, but so too did Shakespeare, and we don't reference his cultural ancestors to understand his works.

   Schools do generally have you read ancient writers, often including Greek comedies and tragedies, and some have you read medieval British literature and those references do, in fact, come up. It's possible that you did not fully enjoy Shakespeare if you did not get that context.

   > That fine, but it's not the job of school. If it was, we'd also have mandatory watching of foreign language horror films.

   Believe it or not, if you take advanced French classes, you're going to watch a lot of French films and listen to a lot of French music for school! Since most students in English-speaking schools spend a lot more time studying English than French, they read a lot more English literature than French.

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