Doug Lemov's field notes

 

I gave my littlest a copy of Brave New World for Christmas and while I thought there was a pretty good chance she’d read it, I didn’t think she’d read it OG style.

 

I found that out because I came home from a work trip on Friday evening and found her sleeping on the couch. I woke her up. She’d left dishes on the counter and the sink was a mess.

 

“Sorry. I was up so late reading Brave New World. It’s amazing,” she said. “It’s much scarier than 1984… I mean 1984 is also really good. But Brave New World is like… that’s how you’d really coerce people…not by force but by giving them the things that indulge them.” She was groggy still and veering off in the general direction of the kitchen.

 

“You finished it,” I asked. “Already?”

 

I didn’t even know she’d started it.

 

But that was how we read books in high school. Often at least. You’d start. Sometimes you’d slog through it. But sometimes you would descend into the author’s world. A few times a year you’d just get lost and would stay up late devouring the thing. You’d been let in on a secret and you realized you had to know more. I just hadn’t really seen nor heard of that happening to a teen in a long time.

 

“Not quite,” she said. “I have like 50 pages to go, but I left it in Vivian’s car. So now I’m stuck.”

 

She was awake and she paused and turned toward me in the kitchen.

 

“It’s so good,” she said. “I can’t believe he wrote it in like 1930,”

 

I wished I hadn’t nagged her about the dishes. I just wanted to hear her talk about Brave New World.

 

The next morning I had to drive her to work at 5:45.

 

In the predawn darkness she was still talking about it. Or maybe I was.

 

“I’m so glad you read it,” I said. “I read it in school first. Everyone used to read it in school. But now no one does. You must be the only person you know.”

 

“No,” she said. “Some kids read books like that. Logan’s read it. and Joe. More people than you think.”

 

In high school I’d read Fear and Loathing because I’d heard a guy named Chris who was older, cool and a little dangerous, talking about it. I’d tried—unsuccessfully—to read Portrait of a Lady because this beautiful mysterious girl Sandra had said it was a thing of greatness. And the implication was I could not completely know the world as Sandra saw it if I didn’t read it. I failed, sadly. But for weeks I tried. If Sandra said it was great…

 

I was dropping my daughter off now. “I can’t really explain it,” she said. “But it’s like he took all the things that were happening around him and built this world that was a reaction to it… that understood it and what it might become. And it’s still so relevant. I mean it’s almost like… like…”

 

I admit I should not have done this, but my heart was racing and I finished her sentence for her.

 

“Like your education wouldn’t really be complete if you hadn’t read it.”

 

“Yeah,” she said. And nodded.

 

She was out of the car and unlocking the door of the store where she works.

 

I sat at the curb after she went in. The sun was just coming up. Part of me could not stop thinking about how happy I was for my daughter that that world was not yet gone. The world where young people—or many of them—believed that it was a challenge and maybe even a responsibility to understand those rare moments of brilliance when someone captured something timelessly important in words and where their teachers still believed that the purpose of English class was to read and understand great books.

 

Part of me was happy thinking how her reading of Brave New World meant that the world of books as I knew them wasn’t’ quite gone.

 

And part of me knew it was only a matter of time.