This post is part of a series in which I describe the twenty-four books I read in 2017 for Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge.
Task: Read a collection of stories by a woman.
The summer after my junior year of high school, I attended a six week program called Arkansas Governor’s School. For those not in the know, AGS was a Bill Clinton initiative back before our state politics became an international embarrassment, and was the subject of a fantastically pearl-clutchy piece of propaganda called The Guiding Hand, which I unfortunately couldn’t find on YouTube. I did, however, find a transcript. Here’s a sample:
Rather than students learning how much two and two equals, they would be asked what they feel about two plus two. Right now we have a move going on in our Arkansas Schools called restructuring where they are trying to move away from more objective substantive learning to this subjective area of feelings and, I think, ultimately political correctness.
Heaven forbid!
Anyway, AGS is a great program and I thoroughly welcomed my leftist brain washing. I attended as a language arts student and specialized in fiction. As part of my liberal indoctrination training, my group read a couple of short stories from Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. And they positively set my hair on fire.