My high school years brought more assigned reading, some I loved, some I disliked. During my late “junior high” years (now called “middle school), I had a young, progressive English teacher whose assignments included Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and On the Beach by Nevil Shute. The class enjoyed the Salinger book, but I think many were left unsettled by On The Beach, and quite frankly, it haunts me to this day. In my junior year, Miss McGinniss assigned us Moby Dick. She was a fanatic about “biblical allusions” and just loved the first sentence, “Call me Ishmael,” saying it was the first one in the book. I think I was in the minority, but I actually liked the book.

We were assigned other books: The Scarlet Letter (meh), The Crucible (hated it), and another one that required a project that to this day, remains one of my crowning achievements, but more on that later.

In between assigned reading, I remember continuing my journey through gothic romances, and was happy to discover I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, which took place in a crumbling manor but it was more of a coming-of-age novel than romance.

And I never lost my love of magazines, moving on from 16 to Seventeen, and then, upon the recommendation of my business teacher, Glamour, for which my love continued until it ceased publication in 2019. From there, it was a quick slide into more sordid content, such as True Story (PG-rated) and True Confessions (R-rated), and for celebrity gossip, Photoplay. So, was anyone else highly disappointed to discover that the stories in the “true confessions” magazines were fiction?

The Raveloe Report

As a sophomore, we were assigned Silas Marner by George Eliot, with a required project to receive full credit. I may have gone a little overboard (story of my life), but I decided to create an entire newspaper issue called The Raveloe Report. Now, for those of you who may not remember the book, after being framed for a crime, Silas flees his home and moves to the village of Raveloe, where he becomes a hermit and hoards gold. He finds a 2-year-old girl and decides to raise her. So my newspaper was patterned after the local newspaper with the big news of the day, social news (a wedding!), advertisements, and even an advice column. But here’s the thing: in those days, we had no computers with newsletter software, no printers, and not even an electric typewriter. I had to use my mother’s ancient manual typewriter WITHOUT WITE-OUT (yes, the horror, the horror)! I eventually crafted the following masterpiece, which to this day I believe was one of my greatest achievements. (Note: the third page is part 2, 16 years later, and the last page is my teacher’s grade and comment. For the record, I tried signing up for the high school newspaper in my junior year, but I expended all of my talent on this project.)