There are not many actually good books on the AP English syllabus. The reason for this is simple. The syllabus designers presumably try to pick American books. And American literature is just not very good

A simple measurable test of how good a work is is how popular it is across countries and over time. Some works - the Iliad, Les Miserables, Shakespeare - touch the human soul deeply enough to transcend time and culture. American literature just hasn't produced much like this

This is actually a tragic shame - because American pop culture has done this to an absurdly dominant level. To nontrivial approximation, every good movie or TV show in the past century is American

The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Huck Finn; some educated intellectuals may have heard of them, but they just don't have that much impact. The Lion King, Batman, the Godfather: these deeply touched the souls of generations of people around the world

Suppose a curriculum designer wanted to design a course basically around teaching students great American works of fiction. Such a course should be focused almost entirely on pop culture. America is not good at writing novels. But it is absurdly good at TV and movies

@weakinstrument But you could easily make a list of 20+ movies that make it. America simply owns an entire century of human creative output. It's just not in the books

@weakinstrument @arpitrage Everyone brought up in a culture tends to think everything in their culture is the best ever, it is just that sometimes they are right (Batman) and sometimes they are not (Catcher in the Rye)