I was an avid reader and hated required reading because it stole time away from me reading books of my own choice.
I hated To Kill A Mockingbird in High School. Now, it’s one of my all-time favourites, but I was a bit young to appreciate it at the time.
Heh. I was an avid reader, and had read many of the books we were assigned before we ever took them up in class. And by “before,” I mean before. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was assigned in Grade 12; I had read it twice before that. (Some in our Grade 12 year had to read The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh instead; I read that on my own just for S&G.) Shakespeare was no stranger; I had read Hamlet and Macbeth on my own before we studied them in English class, and with my familiarity with Shakespearean English from those, I was well-prepared for King Lear when we got to that one in class. I’d always liked short stories, so “The Rocking Horse Winner” and “The Most Dangerous Game” were not strangers.
James Hilton’s Lost Horizon was a joy to read for English class, as I knew the basic story and had seen the 1973 film, bad as it was. I’ve re-read it a few times since, and on film, I much prefer the 1937 film version with Ronald Colman.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that a lot of my required reading was books of my own choice, that ended up being required reading.
I had to read many of the books mentioned (not Ethan Frome, which other classes had to read and sounded horrible, though.) And i liked or was okay with most of those.
But i really hated:
American Tragedy. I didn’t like any of the characters and didn’t understand the point of the book. I suspect i was too young and it wasn’t taught well.
Bonus points for
The Great Gatsby – also a bunch of unlikeable characters, although i could see it was well written
Grapes of wrath – soooo long, so depressing
The Brothers Karamazov – did someone say long? I just never got into it. And i even had a good teacher for that one.
Heh. I never had to read it in high school, but I did major in Russian in my undergrad. I read many Russian novels. Hell, I had to read Dr. Zhivago in three of my four years of undergrad. Mostly in translation, but not always.
Anyway, I’ll never forget what one TV comedian said once (maybe on Johnny Carson or similar):
“In an English novel, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again, and they live happily ever after. In a French novel, boy meets girl, boy marries girl, and later, boy takes a mistress. In a Russian novel, boy meets girl, and they agonize about it for 900 pages.”
That describes Dr. Zhivago nicely. Plus, I had to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in my undergrad. Compared to them, Wuthering Heights is a thrilling page-turner.
I wanted to like this book. I really tried–everyone has such great things to say about it.
But it really is a terrible book, even allowing for the dated language (the word “phony” calls attention to itself in a way that surely wasn’t the experience of the original readers), the plot just wasn’t worth it.
Another book that I would fit into the same category of “not worth it”: Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22”
That book is one giant convoluted mess of clever ways to say the same thing over and over again. I have never made it completely through the book.
Thankfully I was never assigned the latter as a reading assignment.
Neither was I, thankfully. I’ve tried reading the book, and it makes no sense to me. I’ve tried watching the movie, and it makes no sense to me. I’ve read the Mad Magazine parody (“Catch-All-22”) and it made no sense to me.
If it was assigned in high school, I’m sure that I would have failed the course.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song.
Regarded as a classic, this Scottish coming-of-age-in-a-changing-world is a feast of turgid misery centred on Chris, a young woman growing up on a farm in North-east Scotland. It kicks off with her mother dying in child-birth, and follows on with the break up of the family, her father’s lingering death punctuated by attempts at incest with Chris, WWI taking her husband, brutalising him and killing him for desertion, and ends with a War Memorial dedication ponderously symbolising the end of Chris’s rural way of life forever. Frankly, this strikes the reader as no bad thing, all told. The prose is turgid, the message heavy-handed, the tedium blanketing.
That this has only recently come off the national curriculum is testimony to the dead hand of tradition. Meanwhile, O Caledonia does the dysfunctional family/coming of age/brooding Scottish landscape stuff with verve, wit and 100 fewer pages and yet nothing.
Heart of Darkness I have no memory if I made it through it or not. Possibly not. So dull.
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.)
I was going to guess I Heard the Owl Call My Name.
The Canterbury Tales. I think I’m still suffering some form of PTSD from that experience.
I don’t think I actually hated any of the books I had to read in high school. There were several I didn’t particularly like, or that went through me without leaving much of any impression at all, but I didn’t have a strong feeling about them one way or the other, and I was/am fully open to the possibility that it wasn’t the book’s fault but mine (I wasn’t ready for it or it just wasn’t my thing).
Books in this category include Babbitt, The Man of Property (part one of The Forsyte Saga), The Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and maybe some others that aren’t springing to mind right now. Including Heart of Darkness, which I tried to re-read not too long ago and just couldn’t get into.
Steinbeck I liked: East of Eden was one of my favorite books that we had to read.
Off the top of my head:
Catcher in the Rye
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
The Color Purple
Probably a few more, but as a voracious reader starting as a small child I never had a problem reading a book in school. Enjoying it was a different matter, especially with some English teachers pedagogy. Amusingly enough my senior year class was all about British literature and I had read a number of the books on my own well before, including Orwell and Huxley.
I don’t remember any books I particularly hated. I remember disliking the short story “The Knife Sharpener” by Bonnie Burnard (a woman worries that an itinerant knife sharpener may be messing with her child) but I would probably have more sympathy with it as an adult.
I read Catcher in the Rye on my own and I wasn’t particularly impressed by it. I enjoyed quite a number of the books mentioned so far, though.
I’ll second this, and my wife will third it. Then I had to read the damned thing again in college.
Other high school reading assignments I hated:
A Death in the Family by James Agee
Hard Times by Charles Dickens (I like a lot of Dickens, including a Tale of Two Cities, which was another assignment. But Hard Times was torture)
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Some teacher got the idea kids would like this because the hero is a rebel and says “crap”. It takes more than that.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding. I didn’t exactly hate it (i read i in one sitting, while waiting for the bus with a broken leg), but I didn’t love it.
Antigone by Sophocles. I liked a lot of the ancient Greek literature, but this play wasn’t among them.
I will say that, on the other hand, I liked a lot of the assignments. As noted above, I liked Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. One assignment was the complete Odyssey as translated by Fitzgerald. I liked it so much that I read Th Iliad – but by Lattimore (Fitzgerald’s translation was years in the future, and I greatly preferred it to Lattimore’s pedestrian version.). I also loved The Grapes of Wrath.
If we extend it to college courses, I could add:
The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James. There is neither a Beast nor a Jungle in this book. The point of the book is that nothing happens. But, if you’re familiar with Henry James’ hyperextended, pages-long sentence style, you won’t be surprised that it took an awful long time to not happen. This book started me on a long period of Henry James hating.
The Death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy. A short story, but it’s Russian, which means it’s long. Ivan Ilych is dying, but not fast enough. I don’t know why I hated this one – I read War nd Peace unabridged and loved it. But I could have lived a happier life without Ivan.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. And I didn’t even have the Coppola movie to Classics Illustrated my way through this.
Pride and Prejudice - until I read this, I didn’t know I hated Jane Austen.
A Separate Peace by John Knowles – my high school horror came back from the grave, like Jason, to haunt me.
Me too! But (a) I never had to read it for school, and (b) I was an adult when I read it. So it may have been a very different story if I had read it when I was too young to appreciate it, and was forced to wring every inch of symbolism out of it by writing papers and taking tests on it.
Oh geeze. I, too, was/am an avid reader, but not of those books. I did not like Brave New World or Shakespeare.
They do? I feel like everyone hates it and complains about it! I happened to love it the first time I read it. I’ve heard a lot of people say that Holden Caulfield was a whiny and irritating character, but I think I read it at the perfect age (middle school, I think) where I really related to the main character and it landed perfectly with me.
Same, although it had more to do with the language than the content. (Same with Shakespeare, who I mentioned above.) The fun of reading is the story-telling aspect, and when you have a language barrier, as you do with texts that were written many years ago, then reading starts to feel more like an exercise in learning a foreign language than in settling into a good story.
I just have to say I loved having to read The Death of Ivan Ilyich in high school. It changed my whole life permanently. It completely reset my worldview when I was 17. I wanted to live my life so I didn’t end up like him. When I was 40 I went back and reread it, and it didn’t seem half so gripping any more. But it was powerful stuff to stir the idealism of youth.
The Color Purple is one of my favorite books ever. I reread it last year for the remake of the movie, but nothing could reproduce the magic of reading it the first time when I was 24. I was working in a university library and discovered it on the hold shelf. I read it at work behind the circ desk in two days before the person who’d put it on hold came for it.
In HS was assigned to read Demian by Hermann Hesse. I didn’t really get it and still don’t. I never figured out what the point of it was. Fortunately it didn’t put me off Hesse, because I went on to read lots of his stuff that I liked.
I didn’t hate Moby Dick, but I didn’t love it. A few years later, I bought a copy and loved it. It’s a lot more fun when you don’t have to write an essay on it the next day.
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is a Very Important Book. But it belongs in a history class or a civics class, not a literature class.
Like those above I found the library better than class assignments. I hated Silas Marner. Shakespeare was meh. However there was one selection on the reading list that got my interest and had great impact on my life “Gods, Graves and Scholars” C. W. Ceram, otherwise it was:
A friends complete collection of Jules Verne
Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea, Pitcairn Island
Ivanhoe, The Talisman, Men of Iron
Animal books by Sy Montgomery
The books of Raymond Ditmars
Stuff like that