# Books you hated in school but are enjoying the second time around.... **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [October 7, 2014, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691 "2014-10-07T21:52:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Poysyn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f4b2a3/32.png) [@Poysyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Poysyn)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/1 "2014-10-07T21:52:36Z")
I read _The Old Man and the Sea_ in High School, and even though I am a Reader, I did not enjoy it and swore off Hemingway. Recently I read _The Sun Also Rises_ and actually liked the tight prose-style, so I picked up _The Old Man_ and am giving it a re-read. So far, I like it much more. I guess age has mellowed me. Anyone else experienced this? …but I will never re-read _Heart of Darkness_. Hated it then, hate it now. ---
**Author:** ![janeslogin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/df788c/32.png) [@janeslogin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/janeslogin)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/2 "2014-10-07T22:21:08Z")
[Prufrock and Other Observations](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1459/1459-h/1459-h.htm) ---
**Author:** ![mbh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a6a055/32.png) [@mbh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mbh)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/3 "2014-10-07T22:26:07Z")
_Moby Dick._ Much more fun if you don’t have to write an essay on it. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2014, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/4 "2014-10-07T23:51:22Z")
I didn’t care much for **Great Expectations** when I read it in high school. I read it about ten years later for a college course and realized it’s a damn good novel. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/5 "2014-10-08T01:21:00Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > I didn’t care much for **Great Expectations** when I read it in high school. I read it about ten years later for a college course and realized it’s a damn good novel. I haven’t read Dickens since I was forced into reading _Great Expectations_ in high school. I don’t think I could go back to it, but maybe I should try some other Dickens stuff. ---
**Author:** ![LVBoPeep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/858c86/32.png) [@LVBoPeep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LVBoPeep)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/6 "2014-10-08T02:11:46Z")
_Wuthering Heights_ …I think I didn’t give it a chance in high school because I thought it was a romance :smack: I was a moody kind of teenager so really think I would have loved it if I had read past the first chapters. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/7 "2014-10-08T02:26:22Z")
_Little House on the Prairie_. We had to read that in fourth grade and I thought it was the most boring thing in the world. Nowadays I’m quite keen on old-fashioned kidlit and childhoods I never had. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/8 "2014-10-08T02:31:54Z")
We studied _Romeo and Juliet_ in high school. I don’t remember particularly hating it, but it just didn’t have that special spark. I later studied it at the university level, and learned that it is basically a nonstop parade of wang jokes told through characters who think with their wangs, act with their wangs, and are pretty much dicks. Oh, did I mention that it’s full of penis jokes? ---
**Author:** ![GrumpyBunny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bc8723/32.png) [@GrumpyBunny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GrumpyBunny)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/9 "2014-10-08T02:35:51Z")
How literature is taught in school is just awful. I’m surprised anyone ever enjoys reading. No one explains the jokes, and no one explains the social background. I’m probably the only girl who didn’t find Pride and Prejudice great. I “heard” all the speakers as snotty, and totally missed the humor. Now I think it’s hilarious and actually majored in 19th-century British Lit in college. ---
**Author:** ![Quimby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/22d042/32.png) [@Quimby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quimby)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/10 "2014-10-08T02:40:06Z")
I didn’t appreciate Macbeth when I had to read it for school but later I realized it was a pretty entertaining story. ---
**Author:** ![GrumpyBunny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bc8723/32.png) [@GrumpyBunny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GrumpyBunny)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/11 "2014-10-08T02:43:16Z")
King Lear is also great. And once you’ve read that, you can read Christopher Moore’s \*Fool \*and laugh your ass off. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/12 "2014-10-08T03:04:56Z")
> [@GrumpyBunny](#): > > How literature is taught in school is just awful. I’m surprised anyone ever enjoys reading. No one explains the jokes… Yeah. If you actually go and study a book’s history on your own, you’ll often find that they are filled with jokes of all sorts. Puns, parodies of other works, caricatures of contemporary politicians, everything. For example, most of the songs and poems in _Alice in Wonderland_ are parodies of songs and poems that appeared in school textbooks in those days. Contemporary readers could have quite a bit of a giggle over making fun of those poems that they had to memorize back in fifth grade or whenever. ---
**Author:** ![gonzoron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a6a055/32.png) [@gonzoron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzoron)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/13 "2014-10-08T03:23:45Z")
It wasn’t high school, but I tried reading the Foundation Trilogy fresh out of college. Couldn’t get into it, and stopped reading a few chapters from the end of the first book. I came back to it this summer, 15 years later, and couldn’t put it down. Read the whole original trilogy voraciously, and now I’m looking forward to reading the later sequels and prequels. ---
**Author:** ![Miss\_Mapp](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miss_mapp/32/369_2.png) [@Miss\_Mapp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miss_Mapp)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 10:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/14 "2014-10-08T10:46:16Z")
_Vanity Fair_. Reading it for the first time at 15 or 16, I found it an impenetrable wall of text. Reading it again in grad school, I was astonished to find it delightfully funny. Hard to believe it was the same book, but it wasn’t the one that had changed. ---
**Author:** ![TroutMan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/troutman/32/6721_2.png) [@TroutMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TroutMan)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/15 "2014-10-08T15:32:44Z")
> [@Baker](#): > > I haven’t read Dickens since I was forced into reading _Great Expectations_ in high school. I don’t think I could go back to it, but maybe I should try some other Dickens stuff. I slogged through _A Tale of Two Cities_ at the time and got very little out of it. When I read it later, I couldn’t put it down. ---
**Author:** ![purplehorseshoe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/purplehorseshoe/32/2996_2.png) [@purplehorseshoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/purplehorseshoe)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/16 "2014-10-08T20:31:41Z")
Turns out _The Scarlet Pimpernel_ is a pretty fun little book. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/books-you-hated-in-school-but-are-enjoying-the-second-time-around/700691/17 "2014-10-08T20:43:39Z")
> [@TroutMan](#): > > I slogged through _A Tale of Two Cities_ at the time and got very little out of it. When I read it later, I couldn’t put it down. It was the best of books, it was the worst of books…