My summer reading for tenth grade was Les Miserables and Siddhartha. No one told me there was an abridged version of Les Mis, so I got the Thickest Book Known To Man and slogged through it. Great Zod, I hate that book. Dull dull DULL! Every other character in it was a complete idiot and Hugo just had to give everyone’s complete life history before getting on with the story at hand.
Two weeks before school started I finally finished it. Then I picked up Sid. Nice and short. By this time I was pretty much read out, so I decided I’d just look at a chapter before bed.
Three hours later, I had finished the book and went to sleep. Perhaps it was the contrast with the interminable Les Mis, perhaps it was the contrast of Sidd with every other book I had ever been assigned in school before, but I loved it. That was the first assigned book I ever kept. Still have it too.
Ironweed by William Kennedy. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, by Eugene O’Neill. Macbeth, Henry V, etc., etc.
I think you should know, SpazCat, that Ol’ Victor was getting paid by the word, and he was very short on cash at the time he was writing Les Mis, and therefore was padding the book wordwise in order to get as much money as he could out of it. Publishing companies didn’t operate on the advance/royalty system the way they do now.
OK, now for the perfectly good books that were ruined for me by having to analyze them and write a composition-
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Scarlet Letter
Of Mice and Men
The Moon is Down
The Red Badge of Courage*
[hijack]Trouble with Comp & Lit classes is that the emphasis is on the composition. Most teachers couldn’t care less if you read the book, as long as you turn in the paper. I can’t tell you how many people coasted through the class on Cliff’s Notes, and got the same A on the composition that I got when I actually read the freaking book. Also, the teachers I had pretty much had the format of the composition laid out, and if you deviated from it, you would get a bad grade. I got a D on probably the best composition I ever wrote. We were reading Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”, and I had just seen Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and drew a parallel between the Poe story and the “Death Crashes a Party” sequence in the film. My teacher’s note said that it was not appropriate for a serious literary something or other. If what you get out of a story or book isn’t what the teacher thinks you should be getting out of it, you obviously don’t deserve a good grade, no matter how well-written your paper is.[/hijack
I think you should know, SpazCat, that Ol’ Victor was getting paid by the word, and he was very short on cash at the time he was writing Les Mis, and therefore was padding the book wordwise in order to get as much money as he could out of it. Publishing companies didn’t operate on the advance/royalty system the way they do now.
OK, now for the perfectly good books that were ruined for me by having to analyze them and write a composition-
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Scarlet Letter
Of Mice and Men
The Moon is Down
The Red Badge of Courage*
[hijack]Trouble with Comp & Lit classes is that the emphasis is on the composition. Most teachers couldn’t care less if you read the book, as long as you turn in the paper. I can’t tell you how many people coasted through the class on Cliff’s Notes, and got the same A on the composition that I got when I actually read the freaking book. Also, the teachers I had pretty much had the format of the composition laid out, and if you deviated from it, you would get a bad grade. I got a D on probably the best composition I ever wrote. We were reading Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”, and I had just seen Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and drew a parallel between the Poe story and the “Death Crashes a Party” sequence in the film. My teacher’s note said that it was not appropriate for a serious literary something or other. If what you get out of a story or book isn’t what the teacher thinks you should be getting out of it, you obviously don’t deserve a good grade, no matter how well-written your paper is.[/hijack]
Animal Farm–my favoritism towards this book was heightened because we had just finished Old Man and the Sea by Hemmingway. Uck. I have a feeling I would have loved the phone book if we read it after Hemmingway. Seriously, though, while reading AF my teacher told us about 1984, which would become my favorite book of all time. The Great Gatsby To Kill a Mockingbird Lord of the Flies
b]Thea Logica** - you poor thing. My English teacher was the exact opposite of yours. We had to write the papers, but we HAD to read the books. He allowed the use of Cliff’s Notes for study purposes (in fact, he used them himself as a sort of classroom syllabus) but he could tell if you hadn’t really done the reading. I really think his own passion for the books he assigned came across to us, and he made us deconstruct and analyze every damn detail, from the story itself to the technical “tricks” the writers used.
Funny - he was the toughest teacher I ever had, and he was my favorite. I’m finding now that most kids I know prefer the teachers who make them work their asses off to the teachers who “teach to the test.”
Just for the record, if you were a student of mine, and if what you’re describing was executed well, you’d definitely have gotten the ‘A,’ plus a little note from me expressing enthusiasm that you’d done something different from the other 99 papers I’m reading.
Doesn’t everyone realize that the reason you’re “forced” to read all of these books is that they are worthwhile and of course you’ll come to like many, if not most, of them, in time?
I’d find it a lot more surprising if a group of educated adults DIDN’T come to appreciate the classics that their heartless teachers cruelly forced them to read.
I think part of my teacher’s problem was that I saw a note of black humor in. “Masque of the Red Death” , mostly because of the almost absurdly pompous tone Poe took in writing the story. I was attacking the story from a completely different angle than was expected or desired.
I didn’t say in the composition that I thought the story was funny, just that there was black humor in the story. Then brought in the Monty Python parallel.
I’m actually reading Upton Sinclare’s The Jungle right now in school. We just started reading it today and I am totally hooked. The only reason I am not reading it right now is so I can post this, then I’m going back to read it. Its so realistic and disgusting and sickening that you can’t help but read it.
I thought A Tale of Two Cities was good for the most part, but sone of it was boring.
Absolutely LOVED loved loved Red Badge of Courage.
A lot of the short stories, like Poe and Conan Doyle, were fun.
Most of the Shakespeare that we did was enjoyable, too. Probably because my teachers all realized that plays were meant to be performed, not read, and had us act them all out.
The White Mountains and The City of Gold and Lead in Jr. High. Animal Farm Lord of the Flies Of Mice and Men As I Lay Dying, quite a nice change after The Sound and the Fury.
A lot of other books have been mentioned that I’ve read and enjoyed, but we were never assigned them in school. You guys got to study Vonnegut? Man, what I would have given to do that instead of yet another brick o’ Dickens.
I don’t think I could name all the books.
Farenheit 451
Of Mice and Men
The Time Machine
Animal Farm
Any Shakespeare play where we read it aloud in class (Teachers, the Bard is meant to be ACTED, not assigned as homework).
Huck Finn
Tom Sawyer
The Cay
But the best one, the one you were all waiting for to appear on my list, was tossed to me while I was sitting in the backseat after a weekend at the Ozarks summer of 8th grade.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Just read it. Mr. Nickels is going to make you read it when you get in his class freshman year.”
I looked at the cover. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. So I shrugged my shoulders and opened the book. A day later I was done with it and when I got to Mr. Nickel’s class I read it again, along with Speaker for the Dead.
Sidenote: Last month I met Card at a book signing tour. He was speaking in front of 200-300 people and Mr. Nickels was there. After about an hour of speaking, before Card started signing books, he pointed out my former teacher and said “I was talking to this man before I came up here and he jokingly told me that he was singlehandidly responsible for a great deal of my fan base. Tell me, how many of you are current or former students of his?” I raised my hand…and was floored when I saw that well over half the audience had their hands up in the air too. Whatdayaknow? Sometimes teachers can make a difference.
WordMan, they had you reading A Clockwork Orange in High School? Geez…
And, Calliope, you were lucky. I didn’t discover Maugham until Cakes and Ale was on a reading list for a lit class I took my second year of college, and I’ve been devouring his stuff ever since.
I’m going to go with divemaster with Crime and Punishment. I had struggled through it for a special assignment in 10th grade, and eagerly reread it in 12th (and again in my first year of college). Lovely book, and probably my favorite until I read Of Human Bondage.
I also loved Great Expectations and The Stranger, both from 10th grade, although my other attempts to read various Dickens works and Camus’ The Plague were met with vicious ennui.
Till We Have Faces which I keep meaning to reread
& Catch 22, (I also liked To Kill A Mockingbird, I think.) most of the rest I now appreciate but that is not the same thing as “like.” (sometimes it is closer than others, though.)