D.H. Lawrence versus Danielle Steel

Photo by Willivolt

I spent a few mornings of this summer rearranging the collection of English books at the school where I teach. It is like a mini-library, run by students who study English, who are responsible for lending books to their schoolmates, keeping a record and then having them return the books, safe and sound. What really bothered me was that most of the books were just shoved back randomly on the shelves, and recently it has become very difficult, nearly impossible to find anything. So I decided to take all the books, arrange them in categories, alphabetize them and create a list of what exactly we have there, so that anyone can find whatever they are looking for.
One day as I was working on this, I was telling my colleague who teaches Italian and French that I had selected all the romance and pulp novels and I was going to hide them on two dark, bottom shelves, so that students wouldn't, even accidentally, choose to read those over, say, Dickens or Hemingway or any other similarly established authors.
My colleague, a very experienced language teacher, educated, learned and intelligent man, said "Right, but, you know, sometimes romance novels are more useful for students to read ." I stopped with the bundle of books I had in my hand and blinked at him, looking for a sign that he was joking. He wasn't. Then he explained that romance stories, by the nature of their topic, contain much more of the basic everyday vocabulary and expressions in use today, in everyday life, in situations that today's learners of English (or any language) are most likely to find themselves later on. And that, back when the only French TV show we got here was Hélène et les garçons, he used to encourage his students to watch it. I blinked again, this time only to pretend that I wasn't completely surprised about how I had never realized this before, and I went on arranging the books on the shelves.
Then I kept thinking about it. Right. Nobody will actually be required to speak like this:

His soul leapt up into the gloom, into possession, it reeled, it swooned with a great escape, it quivered in the womb, in the hush and the gloom of fecundity, like seed of procreation in ecstasy. (from The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence, Chapter VII : The Cathedral)

They will, however, make greater use of vocabulary like:

“Yes I do…no, I don’t.” They had both laughed. It was true. She did and she didn’t. She wanted to be with Alessandro, before she missed it all, before he was suddenly nineteen and she had missed her chance. (from To Love Again by Danielle Steel, Chapter I)

So, do we admit defeat?

The romance and pulp books in our department library are now on a separate shelves from canonical authors. Yes, they are bottom shelves, but not really dark and hidden. Will I be sending my students off to read romance? Umm... I think not. But I might just give away some clues about differences between reading for fun and/or culture and reading as a tool for acquiring vocabulary, fluency of language etc. 

It is a tough choice, really. If only we had all the time in the world; then we could read every book ever written, then it wouldn't matter which one we'd begin with.