Clinton County’s Senior Citizens Council has been conducting its “Senior Scholars” seminar program for thirteen years. The seminars meet in-person for five consecutive weeks. I was coordinator of one of this autumn’s seminars, focused on “What They’re Reading in High School Today.”

The New York State Education Department provides 11th and 12th grade Reading Standards (“Key Ideas and Details, Craft and Structure, Integration of Knowledge and Ideas”) but not specific books to assign for student attainment of these standards.

An unscientific and limited canvas of North Country high school English teachers, however, yielded four novels that have been class assignments:

“Life of Pi,” by Yann Martel

“Parable of the Sower,” by Octavia Butler

“Namesake,” by Jhumpa Lahiri

“The Giver,” by Lois Lowry

In the broadest sense, and appropriately for adolescent readers, each of the novels can be considered a “coming of age” story. “Life of Pi” is about perseverance; “Sower” has an adolescent heroine in a world damaged by climate change; “Namesake” delves into personal identity; “Giver,” a young adult novel, tells of a youngster learning the trade-offs inherent in sameness and complexity.

In addition to books assigned, teachers and recent graduates were asked what books students read on their own. Trevor Noah’s “Born a Crime” was mentioned most often.

Only 40 years old, the multi-talented TV host’s memoir of his South African childhood is remarkable. Because his father was white and his mother Black, his 1984 birth in apartheid South Africa was “a crime.”

The racism Noah experienced in his childhood — apartheid did not end until 1994 — is horrible and consuming. But Noah is so skilled, so different, that in a chronicle of life damaged and limited daily by racial hatred, he sometimes makes you laugh — he demonstrates our common humanity by describing, for example, his high school efforts to find a girlfriend.

All of these books are significant, critically acclaimed award-winners, worth reading for themselves. But they also offer insight into the literary world high school students enter today. For comparison, some of us might remember “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Lord of the Flies,” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” from our own high school days.

“Born a Crime” was hands-down most popular of the five seminar books. That students are reading it is good news.