Well put. I agree that the primary purpose of literature classes should be to teach students to engage with texts—any texts—and language at more than a surface level, a useful skill not just when reading fiction but in their personal and professional lives.

Familiarizing them with culturally influential landmark works is still valuable but secondary to that. And there is no reason to make this process more onerous than it needs to be. Engaged students are better students. I read about an English teacher that had students read Shakespeare in comic book form; that sounds grand.

The production of every book involves "creative or imaginative talent." Whether that talent is "expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas" is entirely subjective.

>I don’t really understand this weird straw man or how it’s relevant to the discussion.

And I don't understand how a distinction between "pleasure reading" and "literature," even if it isn't arbitrary as I firmly believe, is relevant to the post to which you were responding, which simply argued that literature classes should at least try to "instill a love of literature."

I teach history. Certainly, I think learning history is valuable even if you don't care for it, and I stress that to my students. But getting them to enjoy the class and, hopefully, instilling a passion for the subject among at least some of them, is definitely one of my educational goals and, when I achieve it, most cherished accomplishments.

Hot take: all books are literature. Bad books are literature just as much as good books. By the same token, bad art is art just as much as good art. Whether something is "literature" or "art" has absolutely nothing to do with its quality. That doesn't even get into how it is literally impossible to create an objective standard of what "good" and "bad" mean in this context.

Or into how all reading that isn't forced on you is ultimately for pleasure. Reading is a luxury some people get to enjoy in their free time. I love reading, but hate the hyperbolic sacralization of it: no book is going to unlock Nirvana for you or summon a heavenly host to bear you straight to St. Peter's pearly gates.

Verdigris Deep by Frances Hardinge would be good for either/both, I believe. She also wrote Deeplight, a YA novel, if you'd rather something else for the elder, though I don't recall anything that would make it inappropriate for a 10 year old either.