Required readin?

It's always kind of bugged me that in high school English -- those years when the classics were supposed to be introduced, dissected, and shoved down our throats if necessary -- my class was reading Lance Rentzel's "When All the Laughter Died in Sorrow."

What gives? Maybe the new teacher, fresh out of college, was trying to show he was cool and that even though it was a Catholic school, he didn't care there was a scene focused on menstrual fluid. After all, he was young. Maybe he was tired of the classics and couldn't stand the thought teaching one. Like the woman with the Carolyn Keene pseudonym who acknowledged not too long ago that she was so sick of Nancy Drew she could vomit.

Maybe he was trying to give the guys a reason to pick up a book, so he assigned the football player's autobiography so they wouldn't want to chuck it at him. It's been a lot of years, so I can't say for sure but I think there was only one woman in the book -- Rentzel's wife, Joey Heatherton of mattress commercial fame.

Ah, the craft of it all.

Sparking this morning's screed is a Reader's Digest piece on writer Rick Bragg, who I doubt ever read about Lance's laughter and sorrow. But I could be wrong about that. What I do know is that his assigned reading in high school was "To Kill A Mockingbird," and he said it changed his life. The best I can tell you is Lance's book didn't change mine.

Thanks to my kids' high school assignments we have a copy or two of Harper Lee's only published book, so I can catch up anytime I want to. Hearing Bragg reminisce about it, quote from it, and share what it meant to him has inspired me to at least add it to my list (you know the one) of books to read.

There were a couple of side comments from Bragg that struck home, in a coincidental sort of way. One was that he's pretty sure that the character Dill is someone he would have beat up for his lunch money, given the chance. Yet, growing up in Alabama, he said he already knew as he red the book that was happening to Tom Robinson, the black man accused of rape, was wrong. That was an interesting juxtaposition of right and wrong in the one person's mind. I'd just seen the same -- but opposite -- contrast in the book I'm about done with, Philip Yancey's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" Yancey has written many well-crafted and well-researched books on various aspects of theology. Like Bragg, he grew up in the South, but he grew up hating black people and admiring the KKK. I wonder what it was that changed him, if "Mockingbird" changed Bragg.

The other thing was that when Bragg describes being handed a copy of the book to read as a teenager, he says it was old and suffering the ravages of whatever bugs had made a home in it. It didn't seem to bother him. I wish I could say the same for the copy my son was handed, with dried food sticking some pages together. At the time I could afford it, so I bought new ones for the class from some discount Web site. OK, it's an idiosyncrasy, but I like clean books and I knew it couldn't be a priority for a Catholic elementary school trying to keep tuition down.

Somewhere, though, I hope someone who shares my low threshold for "ick" is reading Lance Rentzel's book and saying "Who?" "Why?????" and "Yuck!" to whatever she finds between its pages.