Reading as a cheap hobby

Brie

I remember there was one year in high school where the theme was troubled youth. I suppose someone thought it would do us good to know that being young it wasn't unusual to be troubled. The problem though was that everything we read was about young men being troubled. So Hamlet, Catcher in the Rye and so on. It really reenforced the idea that young women were supposedly untroubled. And it's not like there weren't books that could have been included - Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, etc. But being written by women they were likely considered frivolous and therefore not something a English class should waste its time on.