Overachieving book readings

After reading this post where lawoot admits to reading Atlas Shrugged as recreational reading in high school, I got to thinking about the idea of books that you read that might have been a bigger bite than required.

When I was a freshman in high school, I read a book for a book report. Most of the kids in my class read things like “Of Mice and Men” or similarly short novels. I read a book which I believe was titled Adolf, which was a 1200+ page biography of Hitler (incidentally, anyone know what book this is? It isn’t immediately obvious on Amazon).

So what books did you read which were ambitious for the situation?

I did a project on Plato’s Republic in eighth grade. Didn’t read much of it, but I think I got a decent grade.

When I was in fourth grade, I saw the movie version of War and Peace with Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Mel Ferrer. I just loved it. So I decided to read the book. Oof. Too many words.

I read Gulliver’s Travels when I was 12, for some unholy reason. I couldn’t be bothered with Swift again until I was forced to read A Modest Proposal for class in high school. Still think the guy should’ve stuck to essays.

I read Les Miserables when I was 14. An unabridged version, including all the communist rants and random histories of random sects of nuns and the Paris sewers. It’s still one of my favorites.

I actually dug into some Ayn Rand in high school too, though in my case it was The Fountainhead. I liked it alright at the time, though I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t now.

I read and re-read both The Wizard of Oz and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe so many times when I was 7 that I effectively had both books memorized.

Over one weekend in college, I read 4 books for a Sci-Fi Lit class. 2 books a day for 2 days (one day was Frankenstein and Dracula). My butt ached.

Me too, all of Rand. I might like We, the Living now, but I’m not sure.

I was curious about the beatnik culture when I was a teen. I used it for a party theme once – candles stuck in soda bottles, issues of The Village Voice, Kerouac paperbacks, everybody had to wear black and smoke unfiltered cigarettes. As a 14-year-old girl in rural Iowa, I had no clue. Still don’t.

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer, perhaps? It’s considered the gold standard of Hitler biographies, and it has over 1200 pages.

We were assigned War and Peace in one of our classes. The teacher realized that we couldn’t do the entire book in the 2 weeks alloted for the “Russian Literature” part of the course, so she gave us the abridged version.

Of course, I wouldn’t stand for reading the abridged version of anything, so I read the whole thing. However many pages we’d be assigned, it was 2-4x as many for me. Craziness!

Still, I came out of it loving Tolstoy, so I guess it wasn’t too bad.

I read Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham when I was ten.

In my early teens, I read the articles and interviews in Playboy. I swear.

I read War and Peace (unabridged) in high school as well. Someone in my English class thought I was showing off and decided that he would read it too. He gave up about a week later.
More recently I read the unabridged version of Don Quixote. That one took a while, and is thus far the only book too big to fit nicely into my jacket pocket.

For a 4th grade book report, I read The Once and Future King. That was probably a bit more than was necessary, and more than I could handle at the time.

In high school, just out of curiosity, I started reading Marx. But while most people are content with reading the Manifesto, I went all out and read Das Kapital. That was quite a slog, but I was too stubborn to put it down. Read the whole damn thing, and now I keep the book around just because of the effort I put into completing it.

When I was eight - in third grade - I read Robin Cook’s Mutation, for some read-and-get-pizza-hut-coupons activity in school. To this day it’s the only novel I think I’ve ever read and actually retained anything. (The teacher didn’t believe me, for what it’s worth, but I received credit for it.)

When I was eleven my older brother bet me I couldn’t read The Lord of the Rings over a weekend. Alas, I got part of the way through Return of the King. Such a damned loser.

John Toland’s Adolf Hitler?

On an impulse, I read *The Grapes of Wrath * in six hours.

Timely, our bookclub just started a series “books we read too young” The first one is “Catcher in the Rye” which someone read in seventh grade or something. My own take on that one is that seventh grade is too young and that a bunch of women around 40 will find themselves too old.

My worse one is Anna Karenina in ninth grade - you know, there is so much more depth to that novel when you are an adult. Took me years to discover that, while I got the plot, and may have even picked up some of the subtext, I didn’t get the novel at that age. I tried Tess around that age as well. I read Atlas Shrugged in High School.

Yes, Dr. Rieux, I think that is it! This cover looks familiar: Amazon.com

Yeah, I read that when I was twenty, and just thought that Holden was an obnoxious whiny git that needed to be slapped a few times. However, I probably would have identified with him if I was just a few years younger… say, around sixteen or so.

I can’t think of any off the top of my head, except that when I was 8, I spent the whole summer trying to read Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood stories. I don’t think I understood much of it at all, but I finished it! I would have been much better off with Roger Lancelyn Green’s version…

I read Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and The Female Eunuch in grade seven and eight, because someone put them on our reading shelf. In retrospect it was probably a bad thing. 1984 scared me witless, and the other ones were puzzling.

I read Les Mis in grade nine. Unabridged. Also too much, but I felt damn smug.

I read William Shirer’s excellent door stopper of a book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was 14 just for the fun of it.

4th grade - Arthur Hailey’s “Airport”