Which book did you most hate in school?

Were you made to read a book in school or college that you absolutely hated? Have you ever gone back & re-read that author's work?

Lord of the Flies, and no, not in a million years!

I don't think I hated any high school book, except the Geometry text book -- 2nd year in a public h.s. (I was, however, indifferent to many). One of those was Eliot's Silas Marner. I read in a newspaper article about drop-outs, years later, that it had the reputation of being a very hated book: A h.s. drop out was quoted as saying that the assignment of "Silas" alone would be enough to keep him from returning to school. Whereas I had thought it was tolerable, though not great.
The same for Julius Caesars Gallic War. Not such a huge burden as many others seemed to find it, but not great either. Over-rated.

Hated and still do;
Silas Marner , The Yearling, The Pearl and The Old Man and the Sea.
As I matured (got old and cranky) I got over some of the dislikes and Hemingway and Steinbeck are two of my favorite authors

I don't think I hated any either. I do remember getting a bit bored during Julius Caesar but usually I grabbed every new book with glee, took it home and read it the first night - probably while I should have been doing my maths homework.

I was receptive to most of the assigned reading. But I could never get into The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. That was either junior or senior year of high school. And we didn't discuss it much either, which didn't help.

I'm with Sophie236 - Lord of the Flies. For some reason, my parents got me another William Golding (The Spire)a couple of years later, and I didn't like that, either, although my animosity didn't reach the level of Lord of the Flies. I wouldn't read that author again.

There's a part of me that still wants Pip to die in the cemetery in Great Expectations - I think it was having to read it twice that was the really painful part.

Magwitch didn't even have to get him...I mean, he could have tripped on a rock and hit his head. I'm not asking for a long-drawn out torture scene.

My name is Pip. I'm about to slip on a rock and die. The end.

See - great book!

Romeo and Juliet. Just unbearable, couldn't finish it. Happily I had watched the episode of Hey Arnold where they perform the play, so I could still take the test! I've read other works of Shakespeare--Macbeth and Julius Caesar in other high school classes, and Richard II in college--and liked all of those well enough. I guess Romeo and Juliet put too much emphasis on romance and not enough on politics or intrigue, which is what I like about Shakespeare!

Also hated A Separate Peace, but who doesn't?

The Crysalids for me. Grade 10 English. I got about 50 pages in and called it quits. I remember failing miserably the post-book quiz we had to write. The teacher took me aside and asked if I had read the book. For some reason I lied and said I had. She nodded or something and went away. That was that.

I know people love the book, so I have considered picking it up again. We'll see.

There were many that I did like, though. To Kill a Mockingbird. Forbidden City. Flowers for Algernon. Great Gatsby. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A Streetcar Named Desire. Animal Farm. Catcher and the Rye.

Tess of the D'Urbevilles! I quite enjoyed reading The Mayor of Casterbridge and some of Hardy's poetry but Tess and trying to read Far from the Madding Crowd put me off ever starting another of his novels.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Our entire class complained about it so vociferously that our poor teacher ended up dropping it and assigning something else.

I do think I should give it another chance, all these years later.

For me it was the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne that we had to read in high school. I just didn't care for the main characters. Unfortunately it was my teachers favorite book. She had a meeting with my mom and the principal because she felt my dislike of the book was an attitude problem. After answering what felt like dozens of questions the principal told her I just disliked the book and wasn't trying to be difficult. I have no desire to read that book now or in the future.

BillyBud by Herman Melville. I hated that book - the subject, the writing, the whole thing sucked.

Catcher in the Rye. I couldn't understand the point of it, or why it was supposed to have any relevance to me. And why all the swearing? There are too many interesting books around to go back and try it again.

Narziss and Goldmund by Herman Hesse. Don't think i'll be reading Steppenwolf anytime soon.

>#8 & 9: lol.

Rabbit,Run by John Updike. One of the most miserable, over rated books ever written. Had to do my Junior research paper on that piece of tripe.

To MrAndrew (#16)

If Hesse wrote Steppenwolf first (I'm not sure of the dates), it was a hard act to follow. If he wrote N & G first --I haven't read it, but it sure would show that he improved a lot in writing Steppenwolf.

Without having read many of Hesse's, I'm convinced that Demian was his worst.

>9 moneybeets: I kinda liked A Separate Peace!

I hated, hated, hated Johnny Tremain and Things Fall Apart -- had to read that one in two different classes and if anything hated it more the second time. Didn't really like Great Expectations.

Whew!

ETA: I sort of liked Lord of the Flies, too.

I'm another one who didn't like Lord of the Flies. I couldn't even force myself to finish it for school. I just skimmed enough to find the answers for our homework questions. Luckily that ended up being enough to pass the final test on the book too.

>12 SugarCreekRanch:, I was forced to read Walden back many eons ago, in High School. I still recall it was about exciting as watching hair grow or paint peel.

The worst for me in high school was Of Mice And Men .
I don't think I'll ever try to read it again.

Had to read A Separate Peace in college for Adolescent Lit. The prof beat us over the head with the symbolism until I wanted to scream. When Julia Roberts named her son Phineas, I went nuts. Bleah.

They made us read The Fountainhead in AP English... I could not get past the first 5 pages. I'm not sure how I managed to flub my way through the paper and exam on the book that followed our reading.

I liked Lord of the Flies, but found Catcher in the Rye truly awful (I wanted to strange Caulfield for being a jackass teenager, and I was 15).

But I really, really hated The Scarlet Letter and The Faerie Queene.

Shelly's Prometheus Unbound just isn't very good.

On Shelley's "Prometheus" (#26)

Aeschylus is a hard act to follow. "Unbound was a desperate try to write a sequel to "Bound".
I would argue that Shelley's "Prometheus" just IS very good, but I'll limit myself to saying I'm amazed that a school would assig n it. DId you mean high school level?

>23 MerryMary: MerryMary
I thought Julia Roberts named her son after Phineas Fogg from around the world in 80 days.

I absolutely hated Lord of the Flies at school and will never re-read it. It still gives me the creeps! :P

Other books which I disliked and have either re-read (20+ years later), or plan to re-read, include A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice and All Quiet on the Western Front. As a 12-year old I could neither understand nor appreciate them.

Another vote for Lord of the flies here. Yuck. I wasn't wild about The Red Badge of Courage, either. I liked A Separate Peace, though, symbolism and all.

Schools have so much to answer for - most of these are wonderful books! Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Great Expectations, there's a reason why these are classics. Come to think of it, one book I did dislike quite a bit at school was Jane Eyre and I've grown to love it since. (Another was Wuthering Heights but I still feel the ame way about that.) Children should be absolutely forbidden to read any of these books at school. With bad teaching and the problem of tackling them too young - it's a wonder anyone wants to read at all once they leave the education system.

>31 Booksloth: Or - sometimes, as an individual, you just don't like a book. Who do you blame today when you pick a book you don't like that everyone else adores?

Honestly, I had great teachers. They had nothing to do with my hatred of Great Expectations. I didn't like that book. Classic or no. There were plenty of books on this list named that I do love and would put in my top 5 of all time - I don't begrudge people for not liking them or blame bad instructors.

This happens all the time with popular novels today - we don't try to blame old high school teachers if you didn't love The Time Traveler's Wife, do we?

I am an English teacher myself and I'm loving this conversation. I have said it before but I will say it again. So much of whether you like a book - in school - depends on how the teacher approaches it. Many of my students have loved Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men. (So many that I am surprised to see so much hatred for them here.) But I love those books and I think that transfers to our study in the classroom. The problem is that many teachers will dissect a work to death, to the point that students wish for death.

Then again, some times you just don't like a book. I tell my students that they are allowed to dislike the book, but only if they bother to read it. You can't read the first five pages, fall asleep, and they complain about how boring it is. I would love an argument with a student pointing out a book's actual flaws.

Absolutely, emaestra! As an adult you should have developed your own critical faculties but as a child much of your enjoyment of a book is down to the way it is taught - much of, that is, not 100%. If I have a class full of students who love reading, yet a large number of them are hating the book enough to be put off, in the way that many posters here have been, then I must take at least some of the responsibility for having failed to engage the class with the book.

I was one of the lucky ones who, for much of my school life, had a wonderful English teacher who loved books herself and knew how to ensure her students could invariably find something in the set works that would appeal. In fact, the books I have mentioned that I disliked were all (coincidentally?) tackled during the one year when we had the kind of teacher who thought her job was to hand out homework and not much else. If you have found some way of engaging with a work, even if you didn't like it, you are generally able to give it another try later in life if you so choose.

I hated The Scarlet Letter and so did my three children who all had to read it in 10th grade.

I hated Iliad when I needed to slog through it - and I loved it a few years later when I decided to give it a chance again. And as far as I remember I was bored from all the Greeks. I suspect it was just too early for all the Greeks (Greeks in literature classes, Ancient history in history classes - both bored me to death and I had always loved both subjects) - maybe I should revisit them.

What's interesting about these threads on LT is that this is a list of books that people who otherwise like to read disliked.

For me it was Lord Jim, which I was assigned no less than three times (high school? certainly in college) and simply gave up on. Could not become interested in it. I blame it in part on Conrad's dearth of female characters, much less interesting female characters, but I think that's just an excuse.

Somehow, though, despite being an English major, I've never read a number of these--The Scarlet Letter, A Separate Peace, or Lord of the Flies. Don't know how that happened.

In high school it was definitely House of Mirth; a friend and I had to do a project on it, so she read the first half and I read the second. We did surprisingly well, but what a depressing book!

Freshman year of college was The Faerie Queen; I might have enjoyed it had I not done all the readings in one night. As it was, I wanted to kill myself!

I actually really liked Lord of the Flies. We analyzed it to death, which pretty much destroyed it for everyone, but overall I thought it was pretty cool.

Lord of the Flies may have been a brilliant book -- I certainly didn't get bored reading it. I just was the kind of reader (both in high school and still) that liked to feel themselves in the story with the characters, and I did NOT want to be part of that particular story!

What strikes me most in these posts is the vexed question of how to incite young people to read and keep reading, especially when so much important literature is more than they're ready for. They're not yet mature enough to "get" many things. But good teachers try their damnedest, in an uphill struggle, because for most of these kids, school is the only time they'll be exposed to it.

Lord Jim is great...but it's not for teenagers. Maybe I was slow, but I don't think I really started to get my head around The Scarlet Letter till I was 40 or so.

The difficult trick is to find a way to make people want to keep reading after they've escaped the school structure. Any teacher who can do that is gold.

>40 krolik: It's funny, but I just realized that I started reading outside of school and my memories of the reading I loved to do as a child have nothing to do with school. There were books at home and I read them and loved many of them, including books well beyond what may have seemed age appropriate. I read everything from Pollyanna to James Bond to Gone with the Wind before I was ten. I don't think my dislike of Lord Jim has anything to do with when I tried to read it.

Moby Dick! I hated it. Maybe it's just that I read it too young, but I can't see myself ever enjoying that book.

I hated Northanger Abbey and Emma. But I read Pride and Prejudice a couple of years ago and found it bearable. I'll probably read Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility but I doubt that I can ever go back to the first two.

"I am surprised to see so much hatred for them here"

I think the books most listed here are just the books most widely read in schools, not specifically the worst books taught in schools. The more frequently taught a book is, the more listed on threads like this it will be, even if the same percentage of readers of dislike every book once having read it.

My math book. My sister hated slauterhouse 5.

I hated Pride and Prejudice, absolute torture to read. However, our teacher let us watch the BBC movie of it, and it was then that I actually understood what the big picture was. It also made me realize how great a character Mrs. Bennet is.

44: Kira,

I always was a reader, read a wide range of books from a young age, classics to popular fiction. But I think that the way these books were presented to us (In my long ago school days) was a problem. They said here read this it's a good book, it will be good for you. Then they made use write a book report. No discussion, no guidance as to why they were good or their significance.

I recall a tenth grade English class where we were presented with an anthology of American Literature. I was overjoyed! Stories by great authors. The booklover in me quietly shouted "Yay!"

Sister Caroleen then proceeded to spend the next three weeks tediously analyzing a tedious story by Conrad Richter. I've blocked the name of the story and, of course, would run the other way if anyone recommended anything by Richter. I will never know if the story was indeed tedious or if it was just the minute pulling apart of it that made it so.

Another factor to keep in mind is that very often, at least in the US, lit curriculum is mandated by the state. I was given a list of titles to choose from that were expected to be taught to high school juniors. I did the best I could to pick titles I loved myself, so I could be enthusiastic (Of Mice and Men, My Antonia), but I also had to include The Scarlet Letter which I wasn't crazy about. I just tried to be honest with my students - we'll get through this together!

As far as A Separate Peace is concerned, over-analysis killed that one for me. And you're probably right, LA12hernandez, Julia Roberts probably didn't have that book in mind when she named her son, but I had it in my mind! Don't really like that name, I'm sorry to say.

certainly was NOT a fan of Old man and the sea ... yuck!!!

I'd have to say The Old Man and the Sea and Lord of the Flies.

I will join the chorus for The Old Man and the Sea; I have horrible memories of that book, picking apart each and ever damn line. I have never read another work by Hemingway and more than likely never will. Darn him and his horrid giant sail-fish to heck!

I'm surprised at how turned off many were by The Old Man and the Sea and by Moby Dick; not so surprised by the reactions to Lord of the Flies because I haven't read it. and it has never been on my TBR List.

I really loved Melville's most famous, and admired Hemigway's most famous (though not his greatest) -- and I'm not a fan of a deep-sea setting. I read Moby Dick at age 19. Early PM readings, just before heading out to a part-time evening job. With my other serious tries at a Melville novel, it was more a love-hate relationship: Mardi and {The Confidence Man
I didn't admire Israel Potter, but I did read it through, which I couldn't manage to do with Whitejacket. Melville has never become one of those authors that I want to read ALL of.

I'm surprised at how turned off many were by The Old Man and the Sea and by Moby Dick; not so surprised by the reactions to Lord of the Flies because I haven't read it. and it has never been on my TBR List.

I really loved Melville's most famous, and admired Hemigway's most famous (though not his greatest) -- and I'm not a fan of a deep-sea setting. I read Moby Dick at age 19. Early PM readings, just before heading out to a part-time evening job. With my other serious tries at a Melville novel, it was more a love-hate relationship: Mardi and {The Confidence Man
I didn't admire Israel Potter, but I did read it through, which I couldn't manage to do with Whitejacket. Melville has never become one of those authors that I want to read ALL of.

I have to join in with The Old Man and the Sea with all the others here. I loved Lord of the Flies though. I read CONSTANTLY when I was a kid, but the second I was ASSIGNED a book, I automatically lost interest. That's probably why my teachers were always so frustrated with me!

I had trouble with any Hemingway I've ever tried. Maybe as an adult I'd have better luck, but I've got so many books on my want-to-read list that I'll probably never find out!

55: nduke

I did not read Hemingway or Steinbeck for many many years due to theses books . But I did start to enjoy them both as I got older.
Hemingway's short story Hills Like White Elephants and Steinbeck's East of Eden led me to read an enjoy alot more of their works

I have never been able to face re-reading A Tale of Two Cities after being forced through it in high school. I loathed Lucy and her little daughter, and the rest of the cast. And the thing is, now I love Dickens and nineteenth century novels in general.

I was introduced to so many authors I loved in high school and college. One semester in college I enrolled in "Family Relations and Explicit Sex in American Literature" ... it was only taught once as you can imagine! I'll never forget rolling my eyes when the first assigned book was The Scarlet Letter to this day though I shudder and feel sick at the memory of Blood and Guts in High School Threw it away the day we finished it.

It's interesting to see so many of the books that I loved and taught listed above - and yet strangely comforting to see both Hawthorne and Dickens on the list. I still can't stomach their writing to this day - mostly because nothing ever seems to happen. I'm sure it does because there's dialogue and characters seem to move from one scene to another, but I can't quite catch them doing either in the act.

The biggest surprise for me was coming back to Moby Dick as an adult and being gripped by the story. I guess life experience has a way of seasoning your reading experience.

Out of these I've read and like a lot of them, I had to read very few books for school because I had the same English teacher throughout most of high school and he hated reading lengthy books or reading our essays so he he did the minimal amount of reading that he could combined with with the least amount of writing and maximum amount of presentations. As a result, while I have read a lot of these in high school I only I had to read Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet (twice), Othello, Speak and Man of La Mancha. I didn't mind Romeo and Juliet when I read it half way through the book because so many people didn't get Shakespeare (in the first year of highschool everyone had to take the same stream so you had all the stupid kids who normally have an easier class mixed in with everyone else) we watched the movie version with Leonardo DiCaprio then, god did I hate the book.
Speak, however, I hated from the start. I felt so patronized by the fact that we had to read that book. It was very clear the entire time that it was written by an adult who thought that no high schooler could not pull their head out of their ass long enough to look around them, the main character spent so long worrying about cliques that I wanted to hurt her and that high school art class was the same as a kindergarten's art class. The main character spent a whole 8 months being unable to draw a tree. At no point did she actually sit outside and draw a tree, she just sat there and whined about it.

I've always been an enthusiastic reader, but I hated most of the reading assignments I had in high school. Even a novel or play that I might otherwise have enjoyed--Julius Caesar is the one that comes to mind--turned to dross in the hands of English teachers who were straining every nerve to be "hip" and "relevant" (I would personally like to fire any teacher who uses the word "relevant.") Thomas Hardy with his view of life as a river of misery--what kind of crap is that to throw at fifteen-year-olds still suffering from acne and baby fat? I will never ever pick up another book by that man. Books about "hot topics" such as 1984 and Lord of the Flies--I loathe them. Fortunately, I never was forced to read Catcher in the Rye. I've just scanned a page or two, to see what people are so thrilled by, and came to the conclusion that the whining protagonist needed a good hard kick in the butt. I wouldn't willingly spend time with anyone like Holden. Ever. I also escaped Wuthering Heights, which seems, from the reviews I've read, to feature two of the sickest losers in all literature. Although I love to read, once I completed the minimum requirements, I stopped taking English classes, except for one on mythology and another on the supernatural in literature.

I echo #12 - Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I spent the entire book trying to find its longest sentence (some of them lasted more than an entire page). I snagged enough quotes to write my paper - making a statement by using some of the whoppers I found - and never looked back.

#61 Hear, hear on Thomas Hardy. We were made to read Jude the Obscure, which is possibly the most miserable book in literature. I've only recently been able to bring myself to read some of his other works and found I quite... well, 'enjoyed' wouldn't quite be the appropriate word with Thomas Hardy', but I appreciated them.

I also loathed Madame Bovary.

Wuthering Heights on the other hand, is best read in school. All that mad passion gets a bit laughable as you get older.

The one that sticks in my head is Old Man in the Sea. Still hate that book. My daughter just read Call of the Wild (or a different Jack London book, I can't remember) and loathed it. Came home cranky every single day. Every single damn day. I was so very very happy when they were done -- she is very conscientious about doing her work, but I think she missed some of the assignments for that book because she hated it so very very much.

My son picked The Iliad when he had to pick a book more than 100 years old...he said a bunch of his classmates picked Pride and Prejudice because their moms loved it, but he didn't want to (and had been giving me much crap for years over how I love that book and the A&E mini-series), and struggled through. The next year he had to read P&P and really enjoyed it. Swiped one of my copies for his library.

#64 If only it had been 'Old Man in the Sea' it might have been over even faster!

It is so hard to bite your tongue when your kids come home with books you hate. My boys have read The Hobbit and Watership Down this past semester. I hate them both. The boys like fantasy, so it was possible they would like them. Mostly they were relieved when they were over. Their English teacher also has the notion that they should be memorizing old poems. I can see the value in memorizing poems (increasing memory power, picking up chicks later, etc.), but "The Charge of the Light Brigade"? Really? All the things they've been memorizing are equally dusty. I keep telling them it's only for one year and next year they will have an English teacher who is crazy in a different way.

I'm sure that's a comfort to them, emaestra.

>66 emaestra: I quite like Tennyson but wouldn't memorize anything beyond the last stanza of Ulysses, myself. We got to memorize e.e. cummings and Robert Frost, much more pleasant, I think. "Who are you, little I? Five or six years old/Standing at some high window and thinking/That if day has to become night/This is a beautiful way."

Not sure I got that exactly right, but I still remember it!

I had three big required reading nightmares: Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl; a long, long, long short story by Faulkner, "The Bear" (and it was); and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I was not equipped by either local (greater metro NYC) or gender culture to appreciate any of those. I was blessed by having a great teacher when I confronted Moby Dick, so I remember MD with affection and a vague inclination to reread it. I expect I will attempt some more Faulkner in due course but I don't know that I will ever be ready for Joyce.

#66

Does that really work? Because whenever I quoted poetry in an attempt to pick up a chick I just got a blank look. Of course, I only know “Jabberwocky” and some Kipling.

71 -
Poetry is certainly not the way to get to my heart. Just ask the last boy who tried that on me.

To NeverStopTrying: (#70)

Portrait of the Artist is not typical of Joyce's overall work; so, I would say don't judge him on that. "Portrait" is fixed in the late era of British rule in Ireland, and is much more political than Joyce's major works (which are Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Those 2 take a more world-wide view. Politics and religion are there, but mentioned in passing, as a part of life, but not dwelt upon In style, it is still struggling with the drab late Victorian English style -- which Joyce himself didn't admire. U. and FW sail out into a new style personal to him. --Not that they're easy or short, but they are more worth attempting.

#71, 72, it worked on me. The guy is long gone, but I still love Berryman.

It all depends. Does he really like poetry, or is he just using it to get to your...heart?

If the guy is genuine, even "Jabberwocky" can be useful.

If anybody quoted Jabberwocky at me, I'd join in!

I enjoyed Carries War by Nina bawden and King Solomons Mines by Rider Haggard. I never disliked any at all until Uni when we read the classics I disliked all Shakespeare

#65...I am so with you on that one. And giggling at the thought.

Hi benacre

I'm sorry to hear that Shakespeare was such a turn off for you. I taught Macbeth for years and I am always curious about when people have negative experiences with him. I'd appreciate your input, please, so that I may better inform my future teaching.

Thanks,
Mark

>80 Mark_Bell: I enjoyed Shakespeare but I think one key to it is to see it performed by good actors; it makes so much more sense when said with appropriate inflections and feeling. The Zefferelli Romeo and Juliet is a case in point: the actors are appropriately young and you can feel their desperate young love and the horror of the families at war. The lush costumes and settings and music don't hurt, either!

You probably already know this, and also the usefulness of annotated versions that explain some of the more arcane language and meanings. Lots of "ah ha!" moments provided by those.

I would have picked of mice and men from freshman english but I had to read Siddhartha my last year of high school and that was worst.

The only book I remember actively disliking was in college - A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. I was terribly incensed at the strange language and wrote my whole book report in it - and at the end wrote a snarky paragraph saying that I hoped the professor was as frustrated as I was at having to get past the language barrier in my report as I was in trying to understand the book.

I've never attempted to re-read it, and never saw the movie. I probably got an A on the report - don't remember.

> 73 - Thanks for the pointers on Joyce and I will definitely give Finnegan's Wake a whirl some time. If I survive that then maybe, just maybe I'll take a stab at Ulysses.

I didn't exactly hate it, but I was very depressed by The Lottery Rose when I had to read it in sixth grade. For some reason all the books we have to read in my school are really sad!
(edited for typo)

The only book I hated in high school was my Algebra book. However, I was home-schooled, and at that point Mom basically let me pick my literature curriculum -- I worked my way through a lot of classics during those years, including several listed above. (She wouldn't let me be so self-directed with math, because she knew I'd never do it if I didn't have to!)

I do remember fervently hating wishy-washy Clarissa, the eternal victim, which I had to read for my English Novel course in college.

>84 NeverStopTrying:

I think Ulysses is the more accessible of the two. I've read it; I probably had about a 20% comprehension level.

Brighton Rock was one of my O-level set books and I hated it, in fact I didn't read it all. Still passed my O-level though, thanks to the poetry unit and the Shakespeare.

I agree with Sandog1 that Ulysses is more accessible than Finnegans Wake; it's not as poetic as FW. (I regard FW as basically a long poem.)

Whole books have been written about both of them, especially FW, specifically about how to understand them. As for comprehension level (#87), I think I'm at about 87.6% for Ulysses, and 37.8% for Finnegans Wake.

I collect non-sequiturs b t w, and CDVicarage's comment on Brighton Rock (#88) is the best non-sequitur I've heard since Dick Williams's coment on Jim Bouton's 2nd book: "I didn't read it and I'm against it."

>81 ejj1955:

You're absolutely right about the performance - it's everything. I had an 8th grade class of struggling learners and after we studied Macbeth, watched the movie we went to see it. We were center front row with the witches moaning writhing and screaming right in our laps. And Lady Macbeth's shriek during the sleepwalking scene made most of them leap out of their seats. It was so cool to see them interacting with the play and each one having their own emotional response to it.

>89 rolandperkins: Well, it wasn't very well expressed, I admit. I did read some of it - and I went to the lessons - but I didn't read it all. Perhaps you read it as "I didn't read it at all", I did when I looked back at the post.

"Perhaps you read it as 'I didn't read it AT all"
(#91)

Yes, sorry, I did read it that way! I guess it's proof of my -- or someone's -- old theory that you see what you expect to see (in this case, expecting to see "at" in front of "all").

The Dick Williams I referred to was a baseball manager (= what is called "coach" in most other sports). He managed the Boston Red Sox, the Oakland Athletics (VERY successfully) and the Montreal Expos. He isn't the one that Touchstones is picking up on this thread. The title of his autobiographical effort, however, can be picked up in "Search" putting it ahead of titles by the religious writer Williams.

I did read and greatly admired Brighton Rock. But it is a depressing book. Basically it is about going to hell, as was brought out in a answer made to an interviewer by Greene. Asked "Do YOU think Pinky (the anti-hero of BR) went to hell?" Greene said "Yes." To my mind it is Greene's 2nd greatest, second only to The Power and the Glory.

I read a lot in high school, things that were assigned and things that weren't. Of the books that were assigned, I remember having a strong dislike for The Sun Also Rises, Darkness at Noon, and A Tale of Two Cities.

One of the set books when I did A-level English Literature was a collection of poems by T.S. Eliot. I found it incomprehensible, for the most part, and suspected he'd written that way out of intellectual snobbery. A couple of years later I found a much more interesting book of poems: it was only several weeks later that I realised it was actually that set book. And yes, I did pass the exam - but only by reading and quoting the critics, not by understanding the books.

I couldn't get excited about The Great Gatsby in 11th grade. Haven't tried it since then, but my girlfriend recently added it to our shelf, so who knows?

actually was supposed to read Moby dick in college and just didn't have the time so ..yes shame on ME ... I read the cliff notes ... the thing was I enjoyed them so much I went back and actually read the book! Which I loved!

The only books that I remember not liking in school were A Separate Peace by John Knowles and Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger, which were both read during my sophomore year of high school. I think this was mostly because I was a fairly advanced reader and my teacher portrayed the books as ones we should like because they were about adolescents. I felt like she was talking down to us as if we could not understand books that portrayed the adult world. I enjoyed the assigned readings much better the following year when we read The Great Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter.

I just remembered there is a rather lengthy thread along the same lines as this in the Awful Lit. Group.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/12413

Books to Be Struck from the HS Reading list.

Fun reading ^_^

I agree with the posters who have written that the teacher makes all the difference! In high school, I read The Crucible in 10th grade (hated it) and 11th grade (loved it -- it was alive and meaty, and a springboard for terrific discussion). Come to think of it, it was pretty poor planning on someone's part to be assigned that two years in a row. The one I never could stand: Crime and Punishment.

Being Dutch it was the Dutch "classics" I was forced to read and resented until much much later. Gijsbreght van Aemstel - a 17th century play - springs to mind especially. The principle is the same I guess. The combination of having to read stuffy old texts as an adolescent AND having to analyze them to death seems to be lethal. Maybe I just didn't have the right teachers though.

I can remember being bored to tears by a Principal who did his master's thesis on Animal Farm and sharing his insight into the book.
On the other hand, my fourth grade teacher was a maniac for mythology. We read junior versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey and Edith Hamilton's Mythology. We put on a play called The Wrath of Achilles, sewed our own togas and painted our shields. I learned much later that she was addicted to diet and sleeping pills but I was fascinated by world mythology for years after nonetheless.

"fourth grade . . . . . we read junior versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey; . . . a play called the Wrath of Achilles....." #101

My first reaction to this was "Fourth Grade (??!!)
WOW! I entered the 5th grade, without knowing there was any mythology outside the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Wonder Book which was in my parent's library, and I didn't read much of it. One of my professors, Cedric H. Whitman later put in a good word for The wonder Book, i.e. you gotta start mythology somewhere.