What makes a book a good book? What is good? How about great? How do we define literature? And how do we separate, categorize, and qualify writers deemed as decent, good, great, influential, visionary? Should we? Whose job is that anyway? Why should you care?
For the past two years, SMHS AP Lit students have explored the qualifications of literary merit. They have considered what makes a book good, what makes a written work literature, and why we are in the business of studying such works.
I’ve been aiming to save this assignment for our discussions early in the year, but as I see the summer blog posts rolling in and an awful lot of, “yeah, yeah we all expect required reading to be terrible”, I thought — let’s get the literary merit ball rolling.
Check out this super cool survey below, and throw in your two cents (or 20 characters). Ready, go!