Like the elusive white whale, classics are becoming more difficult to find on certain high school summer reading lists. The Boston Globe reports that area educators now often assign or recommend many contemporary works by authors like Dan Brown, John Grisham, Dave Eggers, and Mitch Albom. Less a lesson in literature, these lists are designed to get kids reading. “I’m concerned about turning reading into work,’’ said Donna Johns, a library teacher at Newton North High School. “Sometimes you do read for work, for information, for class, but sometimes you really should just be reading for pleasure.’’ Traditionally, Johns said, lists were created to maintain students reading skills over the summer break. Not that those efforts weren’t “noble attempts,” she said, but she also wants kids to read for fun. Her solution was to create a list with wackier works, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, a spoof of Jane Austen’s domestic tale and Our Dumb World by that satirical press, The Onion. Robin Cicchetti, head librarian at Concord-Carlisle Regional High School, recently unearthed a Concord High School list from 1915 to 1916, which included selections by Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson. “It was the canon of great white dead men,’’ she said, unlike the current list in which students get a say. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin was this year’s pick. Other titles also suggest a more global landscape, like Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Not everyone accepts this trend. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, warned schools to consider their “cultural responsibility to keep this literature alive….I think it’s just heartbreaking,’’ she said. “These are classics because they possess a beauty of language and a richness of language that has survived decades or even centuries of reading.’’ For now, however, teachers like John Cleary of Bellingham High School’s English Department plan to cast a wide net. “If you can offer diverse enough reading material,” he said, “we’ll hopefully catch the majority.’’