huck finn? some of them -- maybe two or three out of the 20 students in the class have read it. great gatsby. maybe a couple. the most popular ones the days for high school reading are o'"to kill a mockingbird"," probably the most popular novel that is chosen in high school, more than have threat but still only 20% of the kid there was a report on this a few years ago. this is a unique actual condition in american life of -- for 150 years in the schools and out of the schools, the bible was the book everybody knew. the bible was everywhere. it was in political discourse. it was in school reading books. the american primmer, lessons around biblical verses. everyone read the bible or head it read in church, at the dinner table. that was a book that was common could everyone. so i actually have my american literature students all read portions of genesis and leviticus which is very important at the time of the founding. and the sermon on the mount so when i say to students, president obama in his first nature inaugural used the phrase, time to put away childish things. does anyone

it was huck finn. it was, like, he was the bart simpson of his day. he was smarter than all the adults. it was so magical to see kid power. and that brought me into literature. and so i've always loved writing and storytelling. and i got it from my family, i think. as to the, you know, how -- what made you think you could make a living from this, you know, people raise this question every time there's a new take call device. steve jobs said at one point that the iphone would be the death of literature, because -- depth of reading because he said -- death of reading because he said people don't want to read anymore. certainly, it's changed our attention span. there was a story saying that the average attention span is now eight seconds, which is less than a goldfish. [laughter] according to the study. [laughter] but, i mean, i wrote this as i was reading the second volume of william churchill's biography which is nothing more enjoyable that going really deep into a fantastic book. so the making the living part, look, no matter what the technology is, w

the short stories and the scarlet letter by hawthorne, and huck finn, gatsby, hemingway. it was in the multiculturalism came along and the promise of multiculturalism was that we would have those works being read but we did have a much richer set of traditions as well. we would have more literature by women and minorities. authors. authors, this would actually build greater knowledge and so we would have an african it american literary tradition of people that would along with other traditions. that is not what happened. what happened was instead of having a bigger tradition that everybody would read portions of, it was all over the place, teachers are largely allowed to select or school districts, select their own works. common core does not have a required reading list as a recommended reading list and it's largely ignored in the dacians of common core. we don't want to tell people what to read, that sounds like prescription weight don't want to do that. so this leaves us with a set of students who have not read a common book. the problem problem there is that people ha