This is Radio Atlantic.
I'm Hanna Rosen.
Last week we talked about how college students struggle to read whole books these days.
One issue, it turned out, was that they weren't reading whole books in high school.
So this week we continue to make the case for why reading books
in high school is great for your life outside of school.
You'll hear more from our Atlantic colleagues and from listeners who sent in their contrib.
All of them recall the books they read in high school that stuck with them the longest
and how those books changed for them over the years
as they got older and understood them differently.
Mostly, this is an episode about happy memories, enjoy, and happy holidays.
The book that probably most impacted me in high school was William Faulkner's As a Lay Dying.
I think I read it junior or senior year in AP Literature,
and I remember being blown away by how weird it was,
how tangled the sentences were, how kind of inscrutable the characters were.
I think Faulkner's kind of run on sentences and tangling rhythms and sort of weird use of words
that all kind of,
like, excited me and got in my head and,
you know, inspired me to try to double major in English and journalism in college,
where I took a Faulkner seminar my freshman year