Middle school: Johnny Tremain. I swear, we read and talked about that book for 6 weeks, and I hated every second of it.
Where did you go to school? I liked it, but I lived on the East Coast where Revolutionary War stuff was all around me, and I can see someone in the West not being drawn to the period.
It was read aloud to us in 4th Grade. I’m not sure if that was considered an English lesson or a History lesson. Like any exercise that didn’t require me to do anything but shut up and listen, I enjoyed it.
Our son, who later got a BFA in screenwriting, hated Walden with a passion. Our dog chewed up the copy he brought home, so she must have sensed his strong dislike. She never touched another book, and there were plenty she could have gotten to. When his church youth group went to Boston and visited Walden Pond someone took a picture of him lecturing a bust of Thoreau.
As coincidence would have it, this was published yesterday:
Put me down as another person who hated that book.
Let’s see, what else? Something by George Eliot… Silas Marner. Oh, and we had to read the play “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder. I found the people in that town to be the most stultifyingly boring creatures in all existence, and when someone finally died I thought “lucky character”.
I think I was about the same age, and my mother got her panties in a twist because there’s a reference to someone’s head getting shot off (or is that My Brother, Sam, is Dead?) We had to read them both. She complained to the principal, but I still had to read them.
They were fine. I think it’s funny my Mom got so upset about the minor violence when I was allowed to read anything I wanted at home and let me tell you how much crap I read that was age-inappropriate… Did she really have no idea?
No question she’d be a Mom for Liberty today.
I recall Johnny having his fingers fused together by molten metal being the most grisly part. Certainly less violent than blood fest Where the Red Fern Grows which I think was also 4th grade.
Yeah we read that one too.
I didn’t hate them but they didn’t exactly inspire me.
In 10th grade English I had the Norton Anthology. I read excerpts from the Canterbury Tales, including the Miller’s Tale, in the original Middle English. The Norton edition came with glosses in the margin and explanatory footnotes, allowing a modern reader to keep up with the original. I liked it that way. It’s the only way I’ve read them.
“The Mill On The Floss”.
CHRIST I WAS BORED! It was so dull, I couldn’t keep track of what I was reading! Nobody in class finished it. The teacher was fresh out of college. Hoping to “kindle a love of Literature”. HA!
Another , from a substitute teacher– “The Fountainhead”, by Rand. NOT for Junior High School. The Principal came to the class, three days later, and removed him. VP taught, until our regular teacher recovered from the appendix operation.
Quite a few people have mentioned ‘Lord of the Flies’ and also mentioned how much difference having the context made. ‘Lord of the Flies’ was one of our required books, and I hated it, until the teacher mentioned that it was a response or parody to the classic ‘Robinsonade’ stories that were so common in the author’s own childhood reading lists, specifically ‘Coral Island’.
Being that kind of child, I tracked down a copy of ‘Coral Island’ and read it, while we were still wading through LotF in class. If you’ve not read ‘Coral Island’, it also follows a group of boys shipwrecked on a small island, but they’re all terribly British, work together, maintain standards, keep stiff upper lips and have all but started a church, a cricket club and subjugated the dastardly native cannibals into farming tea for them by the time they’re rescued. It’s utterly shameless cultural supremecism, where the boys are simply better in every way than all the natives.
‘Lord of the Flies’ made so much more sense after reading that.
I personally loved that book, which I read in a college existentialism class, in the context of other books about colonialism, cultural supremacy, violence and corruption. The point is not that children left unattended will devolve into savages. It was one big-ass allegory. I also really enjoy dark stories and I liked the way the prose was written.
Jules Verne also wrote a story about a group of boys marooned on an island – Two Years Vacation. I don’t know if he was familiar with Coral Island or not, but Verne was a huge fan of the “Robinsonade” (He wrote two sequels to “The Swiss Family Robinson”, wrote his own sort-of SFR book, which he abandoned and wrote “The Mysterious Island” instead, and later wrote “The School for Crusoes”. He was obsessed). Of course, as in his other Robinsonades, the boys prove capable to building their own society and technology without destructive activities. The book was sort-of filmed as The Stolen Airship by Karel Zeman in 1967.
I’ve heard the theory that Robert Heinlein wrote Tunnel in the Sky (1954) as a reaction against The Lord of the Flies, which came out the previous year. I don’t know if it’s true, but, as Wikipedia notes:
As in Lord of the Flies, which had been published a year earlier, isolation reveals the true natures of the students as individuals, but it also demonstrates some of the constants of human existence as a social animal. Its underlying themes run counter to those in Lord of the Flies, however, in that it shows a belief in the inherent strength of humans as proto-adults who can self-organize rather than descend into barbarism. Some of the students fall victim to their own foolishness, and others turn out to be thugs, but that is a part of human nature, just as the counter-trends take the group as a whole towards the beginnings of a stable society.
… which fits Heinlein’s philosophy better
They should have called the book Johnny Deformed.
That’s really interesting; I didn’t have all that historical context when I read LOTF. Makes me like it even more.
The only two “kids marooned on an Island” stories I know besides that one are the Simpsons parody and Baby Sitter’s Island Adventure which showed how you can collect rainwater in a tarp while still providing excellent childcare.
We were assigned Les Miserables for our summer reading between freshman and sophomore years. I bought a copy of the book and settled in. I read all 2000+ pages of that absolute garbage. I liked the first part, but then Fantine, the only decent character, died. The rest of the book focused on that simpering idiot Cosette and that wet noodle of a Marius. I had to read 2000 pages about them. It took me almost all summer to read it. I lost faith in humanity. Everything that was good in the world died. Life became increasingly black.
When school started, I found out that there was an abridged version available and that’s what the rest of the class read. What. The. Hell. I’m still mad thirty years later.
I read it (voluntarily) as an adult, and liked it.
But that seems to be a common theme in this thread and other similar discussions: (1) the “classics” that some people hate and find deadly dull are the same ones that other people love or at least appreciate, and (2) when a person reads a book can make a big difference in how much they like it and get out of it.
Speaking of George Eliot, it’s sometimes said that no one under 40 can truly appreciate Middlemarch.
I had thought that myself, until I looked up the publication dates. It’d be quite a stretch for him to have written an explicit response that quickly.