Don’t tell my students, but it is International No Homework day. We are in the middle of preparing for Spring Break, so they will soon enough have a week with no homework.

As a teacher, I will not debate with you over the importance of homework. I, however, will discuss today the most hated homework assignment at my school — the summer reading assignment. And every year I hear a litany of complaints about assigning a novel while they are “recovering” from to workload and stress of the previous year, I could not find the book all summer because the book store was always sold out, and my parents would not buy me a copy. (I loved that excuse this year: “I was still recovering from the stress of my freshmen year and could not complete the summer reading assignment.”)

I think that we have a pretty decent summer reading list, but students still object to reading the material. The freshmen students will read M.T. Anderson’s Feed. My sophomores will read Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships.

M. T. Anderson’sFeed

Feed is a young adult, dystopian novel that serves as a cautionary tale against consumerism, information technology, data mining, and corporate power. In the near future America, every one is manipulated by advertising and corporate exploitation due to the popularity of internetworking brain implants called feeds. The book follows two teens who decide to fight the feeds.

Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships

This retelling of The Illiad and The Odyssey focuses on the women’s points of view. The story is told from several perspectives, including the victims, the goddesses, and the women who are patiently awaiting the return of the husbands. The best part of the book is the letters Penelope pens to Odysseus. Readers are given an interesting look into the emotions of all these women, making for a richer experience.

What was the best book you read in high school?