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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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!
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.
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.