# Books you had read in high school that you absolutely hated **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** books-writing-myths\ **Created:** [September 4, 2025, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732 "2025-09-04T01:34:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![abcdefghij](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/43a26b/32.png) [@abcdefghij](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/abcdefghij)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/81 "2025-09-04T20:48:11Z")
> [@We\_re\_wolves\_not\_werewolves](#): > > _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ by James Joyce. I…just…did…not…get…it (still don’t really) I was starting to think there was something wrong with me when I’d gotten this far into the thread before anybody ragged on PotA. > [@bump](#): > > And then you get moronic stuff that they say like “Authors can have symbolism in their work that they didn’t intentionally put there, or that they’re not conscious of.” We got one of these dreadful “find symbolism that isn’t there [\*]” assignments for PotA. A friend of mine absolutely adored this book and I absolutely abhorred it. He slaved over his final paper for weeks. I procrastinated until the night before, flipped through looking for every reference to a cow, and wrote “Bovine imagery in _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_”. I got an A; my friend got a C. This did nothing to alter either of our certainty that the teacher was a bozo. [\*] In fairness, Joyce probably did intend all of the symbolism, including the symbolism that isn’t there. This does not make it better. ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/82 "2025-09-04T20:54:31Z")
I answered the thread before reading it. We only read maybe 20-25 books. I am surprised to see how many of them were the same - in Canada, the US and Germany over many years. Are English teachers so lazy? Heart of Darkness was good, not “lugubrious drollery”, a phrase from the first page we used to make fun of. A Separate Peace was very mediocre. Maybe the worst of the lot. But not detestable. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/83 "2025-09-04T21:01:46Z")
> [@bump](#): > > And then you get moronic stuff that they say like “Authors can have symbolism in their work that they didn’t intentionally put there, or that they’re not conscious of.” Do you doubt that this happens to authors? It happens to me all the time. Especially for those of us who are pantsers, most of what comes out on the page is some unconscious and nebulous process that still remains a mystery to me. I would imagine for the masters of literature it happens even more. Sorry, I meant to address that to @bump. ---
**Author:** ![IvyOfPoison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ivyofpoison/32/20489_2.png) [@IvyOfPoison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IvyOfPoison)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/84 "2025-09-04T21:32:25Z")
> I also think that the way English classes work wrings most all of the fun out of any book or story you may have read. Getting quizzed about meaningless and mundane details sucks, and so does trying to second-guess the author about what they’re writing about. That was my biggest complaint about two of my four high school and one of my college English classes. My instructors relied on standing up in front of the class and asking us lots of often stupid questions about the stories and books. Hello! How am I supposed to remember what the protagonist’s little brother ate for breakfast in Chapter 7, you know? Anyway, that led me to hate just about all the short stories and American literature (HS junior honors English) books we were assigned. About the only American lit book assigned that I actually enjoyed reading was Huck Finn. There were a few books in English lit the next year I wasn’t crazy about, but I didn’t actually hate any of them. It helped that the teacher in that class, although she still quizzed us, gave us the lists of quiz questions at the beginning of each weekly test, we had all period to answer them instead of trying to remember them in a few seconds, and she only tested us once a week. BTW, of all the books I read in senior year, my favorites were Animal Farm, The Canterbury Tales, and Far from the Madding Crowd. The last one, I was able to pick from a list of books I could’ve chosen to do our big research paper on that we didn’t choose from for the paper. I can’t really remember what FFTMC was about, but I remember I liked it. ---
**Author:** ![Gordon\_G](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/3da27b/32.png) [@Gordon\_G](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gordon_G)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/85 "2025-09-04T21:36:57Z")
- Dickens’ Great Expectations - Cather’s Death comes for the archbishop - Eliot’s Silas Marner - Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey I found these all out-of-date and insufferably boring; mainly they were just too long. Surely there were more appealing choices: Heller’s Catch-22, anything by Mark Twain or Lewis Carroll, even a good detective story. I’m a fan of short novels. Hemingway, London, Steinbeck, Dostoevsky, Hesse, Kipling all wrote novellas that I love, but I can’t even finish their long novels. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/86 "2025-09-04T22:00:51Z")
My word, I didn’t expect this many responses so quickly. Lots of interesting books and it seems that the age of the poster makes a difference, as a few of these were later than my schooling. I graduated in 1973, ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/87 "2025-09-04T22:04:34Z")
> [@Baker](#): > > Lots of interesting books and it seems that the age of the poster makes a difference, as a few of these were later than my schooling. I graduated in 1973, When I was in High School (1978-82) it seemed that most of the “modern” books assigned were from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. I wonder if that’s considered some kind of Young Adult Renaissance in publishing. ---
**Author:** ![gkster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gkster/32/14107_2.png) [@gkster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gkster)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/88 "2025-09-04T22:06:18Z")
> [@Infovore](#): > > If I can mention one book that I absolutely hated that wasn’t in high school, but in a novel writing certificate program I did a few years ago at Stanford, it’s _Beloved._ I know that’s probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but I absolutely despised the book, to the point where I ended up having to read the Cliff Notes just so I could get past that part of the class. I had to read _Beloved_ for a postgraduate seminar, and loathed it too. I despised the pretentious convoluted writing. And the whole revenant thing creeped me out so much that I could hardly stand having the book in my house. While the seminar was going on, I kept it near the front door, and when it ended I gave it away. It was upsetting, years later, to see that it’s still going strong in high schools–my daughter had to write an essay on it. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/89 "2025-09-04T22:16:58Z")
> [@Roderick\_Femm](#): > > but the book was most decidedly an allegory for the wider world and the nuclear war that had happened at the beginning of the book. I It may also have been an allegory for Golding’s experience as a teacher! ---
**Author:** ![I.Dunno](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/9f8e36/32.png) [@I.Dunno](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I.Dunno)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/90 "2025-09-04T22:27:18Z")
I see I’m not the only one who disliked Catch-22. The only thing I remember about my report on it was I opened with “It’s like Heller bundled up each chapter and threw them down the steps. Then he picked up the bundles at random and published them that way.” (I paraphrased that, it’s been more than 50 years.) I’ve watched the movie, twice I think, in the ensuing years. I found it simplified and much easier to follow. I doubt I’ll ever watch it again though. I’ve never seen the tv series or whatever it was. I don’t recall any other books from high school or college that I took a dislike to as I did Catch-22. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/91 "2025-09-04T22:34:48Z")
> [@I.Dunno](#): > > “It’s like Heller bundled up each chapter and threw them down the steps. Then he picked up the bundles at random and published them that way.” (I paraphrased that, it’s been more than 50 years.) I went through a long stint of studying story structure. During a two-year period, I analyzed countless books and movies. There are only a handful of books I couldn’t pin down structurally. **Catch-22** is one of them. I still love it though. (The others? **Slaughterhouse Five** and **Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland**. - Alice being another of my favorite books.) ---
**Author:** ![mbh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a6a055/32.png) [@mbh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mbh)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/92 "2025-09-04T22:52:07Z")
As near as I can tell, the Alice books are what a D&D player would call a series of Random Monster Encounters. It’s like a Saturday Night Live performance: an anthology of short sketches, each of which may or may not have any connection with any of the others. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/93 "2025-09-04T23:03:13Z")
Much like a dream, which is what it is. Nice how that works. (It bears pointing out the Reverend came up with those vignettes on the fly in a rowboat to entertain a bunch of little kids. I don’t think he had much time to consider the structure.) ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/94 "2025-09-04T23:31:07Z")
> [@Baker](#): > > Fahrenheit 451 Yes, held up as a token Science Fiction story, but Bradbury didnt write classic SF. F451 was more of a fantasty molalistuic tale. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/95 "2025-09-04T23:34:40Z")
> [@kitap](#): > > **Tess of the D’Urbevilles** Did Hardy ever have a happy thought in his life? (Side note: he was clearly reincarnated as George R.R. Martin.) Hey, that’s unfair! Thomas Hardy could at least finish a story. I remember really, really hating _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ at the time, but I remember almost nothing about the plot. I also read _A Separate Peace_ around the same time, and while I don’t much recall my reaction to it at the time, I remember a huge amount of the novel, even thirty plus years later. The weird combination of jealously, love, and guilt that drove the main character really made an impression on me. I think I saw a lot of myself there, and my relationship to my best friend that had a lot of that going on under the surface. (I never threw him out of a tree, though). I hated John Steinbeck when I first read him in middle school - we did a double unit on _The Pearl_ and _The Red Pony_ in sixth grade. When we did _East of Eden_ in my junior year of high school, it was a revelation to me. It was the first time I “got” a novel, where I could see and understand the subtext, and it was electric. Steinbeck’s been one of my all time favorites ever since. Chaim Potok was another one that I was exposed to in high school, but didn’t fully appreciate until I was an adult. _My Name is Asher Lev_ and _The Gift of Asher Lev_ have some of the best writing about the methods, importance, and impact of modern art I’ve ever read. I didn’t read any Kurt Vonnegut until college, and I gotta say, I don’t see the appeal. We did _Cat’s Cradle_ and _Slaughterhouse 5_, and I’ve seldom felt so condescended to by a novelist. “Harrison Bergeron” also reads very differently in a modern political context - comes across a lot like an anti-DEI screed nowadays. Just needs a few sneering references to “wokeness” to seal the deal. ---
**Author:** ![Apodder](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/apodder/32/17727_2.png) [@Apodder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Apodder)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/96 "2025-09-04T23:54:04Z")
I’ll agree with The Pearl…kind of horrifying and depressing. But also I had to read one of Michener’s…Chesapeake, maybe?…that spent the first 200 pages on description. I couldn’t get through it no matter how I pushed myself and had to fake my way through the assignments thereafter. No more Michener for me! ---
**Author:** ![zimaane](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a3d4f5/32.png) [@zimaane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zimaane)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/97 "2025-09-04T23:54:07Z")
The only assigned book I really disliked reading was Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. I just found it boring and confusing. The only good part was that the student who set next to me also disliked it, and we bonded over our dislike, and ended up dating for a while. We never read A Seperate Peace, so looks like I dodged a bullet there. I’ll just say that I enjoyed many of the books that others didn’t. The Sun Also Rises may be my favorite novel. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2025, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/98 "2025-09-04T23:58:24Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > I didn’t read any Kurt Vonnegut until college, and I gotta say, I don’t see the appeal. We did _Cat’s Cradle_ and _Slaughterhouse 5_, and I’ve seldom felt so condescended to by a novelist. I didn’t love Slaughterhouse 5, and I thought I would. Parts of it were interesting, but the main character had zero agency. Which I get is like, the point, but it doesn’t make for exciting reading. I hope the author got some healing from writing it, though. ---
**Author:** ![Jaycat.again](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jaycat.again/32/11525_2.png) [@Jaycat.again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jaycat.again)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2025, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/99 "2025-09-05T00:03:19Z")
The best thing I read in high school was Zap Comics. ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2025, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732/100 "2025-09-05T00:03:22Z")
It’s been mentioned, but _Wuthering Fucking Heights_ was the worst glurge ever for a HS junior. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-had-read-in-high-school-that-you-absolutely-hated/1022732.md?page=6)