Lit Up ─ One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives.

A bestselling author goes back to high school to find out whether books can still shape lives

It's hardly a secret that millions of American kids, caught up in social media, television, movies, and games, don't read seriously-that is, they associate serious reading with duty or work, not with pleasure. This indifference has become a grievous loss to our standing as a great nation-and a personal loss, too, for millions of teenagers who may turn into adults with limited understanding of themselves and others.

Can this be changed? Can teenagers be turned on to literature? What kind of teachers can do it, and what books? To find out, Denby sat in on a tenth-grade English class in a New York public school for an entire academic year, and made frequent visits to an inner-city public school in New Haven and to a respected public school in Westchester county. He read all the stories, poems, plays, and novels that the kids were reading, and here combines a chronicle of what he observed with fresh and inspiring encounters with the books themselves, including The Scarlet Letter, Brave New World, 1984, The Alchemist, Slaughterhouse Five, The Kite Runner, Long Way Gone and many more.Lit Up is a dramatic narrative that traces awkward and baffled beginnings but also exciting breakthroughs and the emergence of pleasure in reading. In a sea of bad news about education and the fate of the book, David Denby reaffirms the power of great teachers and the importance and inspiration of great literature.