Bravo!
I am genuinely surprised that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has been so derided here. I thought it had some of the best writing I’d ever encountered. And, whoever included Of Mice and Men, come on, it’s not bad , just, well, simple (and, actually, quite a good choice for high schoolers).
Sorry, the Board is slow so I missed the edit window.
I had wanted to say that I agree: everything I (tried to) read by Dickens was torture. In retrospect, though, I admit he gave me an understanding of why we say things like "“It hurts like the Dickens” or “A Dickens of a mess”. Might as well just say, “A Dickens”!
I suspect most people aren’t aware of it, but the Steve Martin mvoie a Simnple Twist of Fate is basically an updated Silas Marner. Martin wrote the screenplay and starred, just as he wrote the screenplay and starred in Roxanne, his updated take on Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac
If you’ve read the book and seen the movie it’s hard to miss. He does modernize the story. He fails to make it less boring.
I pulled The Catcher in the Rye off the shelf for the first time in close to ten years after reading this post today. It was my favorite book when I was sixteen, and I must have read it a dozen times in the year or two before I put it aside (and yes, I’ve read many other books since). I’m about a third of the way through it now, and, much as I was expecting to do a 180 on my opinion of Holden and his whining, I didn’t. I still really like him.
Granted, Catcher in the Rye isn’t exactly action packed, and if character studies aren’t your thing, I get that, but I never understood why people find Holden so loathsome. He never really does anything particularly hurtful to anyone. Sure, sometimes he thinks about how he doesn’t like someone, but whoop de shit. I’m actually surprised by how much I do still like him, even now that I’m in my late 20s. Wonderful illustration of a teen spiraling into a PTSD fueled breakdown.
Had to read it in three classes in college. And I mean read it; it was far too boring to remember from semester to semester.
thinking
Well, maybe not entirely boring. I despised Emma and anything that brings out a strong emotion like that must have something to it.
more thinking
No, much of what I despised about her was how she was an insignificant trifle who thought she was more than that because she put out. While I have always believed that women should be able to define themselves and got over (most of) my insufferable priggishness (no, really, I used to be WORSE) by college, I have always been annoyed by people who seem to define themselves by what they do with their junk. Which I think Emma might’ve done, though I can’t be sure because I slept through it.
That’s it! I disliked the book because it made catting around France seem boring, which I think is a crime against humanity.
But he was a pretty good poet. Surprised the hell out of me.
Kafka was born in Prague (then Austria-Hungary, later Czechoslovakia) and wrote in German. Nothing Russian about him.
No need to apologize – ol’ Edward Estlin actually used uppercase more often than not when writing his signature.
I couldn’t get through it, although one reason I resented reading it was that it was assigned for Spanish class. Sure, it’s set amid the Spanish Civil War, but we read it in the original English, thus not actually studying the Spanish language for about a month!
A special mention for West Side Story. After we read Romeo and Juliet in ninth-grade English, the teacher decided to “reward” us for slogging through the sixteenth-century tragedy by assigning the 1957 update “for the fun of it”. Only instead of attending a live performance or watching the Natalie Wood film, we got to read the script! Such dramatic works as Death of a Salesman and The Glass Menagerie work as literature. Musicals? Not so much!
I literally do not remember any of the books that we were assigned to read in school other than the horrific Dick and Jane type books in the beginning of first year. I was reading before I entered school and therefore found what we were given in school to be trite and silly. I remember in third grade a big battle between my teacher and my mother because I had brought a copy of the hobbit to school to read and the teacher told my mother that I was being pretentious and there was no way I could possibly read that book at that age. My mother opened the book and read a few pages prior to where I had bookmarked and then asked me what I had been reading about at the place I had stopped.
I then excitedly told her about dwarves inside barrels floating down a river escaping the elven prison and arriving in the human town. My mother had me stop speaking and proceeded to tell my teacher, " unless my daughter brings playboy into the school you will never again discourage her from attempting to read anything. If you do I will complain to the school board as well as go to the news media you should never suppress a child’s desire to learn."
The only book that I remember being assigned in class to read was in the seventh grade when lo and behold our teacher assigned as the hobbit. 
I could not help but starting to laugh. The teacher asked what was so funny and I explain to her what had occurred in third grade. She asked me to stay behind after class and I told her the whole story and she verified that I had read the hobbit, so rather than the hobbit I was assigned to read the following trilogy since I had not known existed. This is the only reading assignment that I can recall from all my time in school.
I don’t know if my schools simply did not have a habit of assigning books to read and do reports on and I have blocked it because the books were so terrible or if they simply chose to do other activities. I do remember endless days of having to parse sectional paragraphs :eek:from textbooks that were quoted from other books. It seems like that’s all we ever really did other than vocabulary and spelling but surely that can’t be right. It seems that absolutely all schools have an assigned reading lists I simply cannot remember having ever done it other than when the book was one that I had read before and enjoyed from the seventh grade.
I do remember in high school that we had clubs. I elected to join the book club and I remember that I did enjoyed the books that were chosen for us there. They were more contemporary and sometimes more adult oriented than that I would have expected from my school system but despite them not being my beloved science fiction or fantasy I still liked them. This was where I got my introduction into fiction that did not involve science or fantasy.
I suspect that the theory of ptsd is probably a sound one and it is sad that the school system does not choose more contemporary interesting work so that students have a love of reading. I think this is the reason why my mother other than for a very brief time in my life never objected to the fact that I like to read science fiction and fantasy type books or as the rest of my family referred to it " word shit".:rolleyes:
I believe probably the only books and I have absolutely not been able to read and indeed have gone through a bout of destroying are bodice rippers and Harlequin romances. Considering harlequin’s formatted writing demands I can’t even see how they can be considered books. They are more like reading stupid mad libs.:smack:
Of course the school should have seen trouble coming one in first grade when we were required to draw and illustrate our own four page book and a rather than my book being that about how we went to Florida or camping that summer it was about an alien spaceship landing in our yard. Really, what were they expecting after that?
To add to this post:
I’ve read Catcher in the Rye three times.
I read it when I was 14, a HS freshman, and I really liked it. No, Holden isn’t exactly a heroic figure, all his talk about phonies is annoying, and the swearing didn’t do anything for me, but it seemed fresh and funny, and there was something appealing about the fuck-you-world attitude that Holden has. Really, really liked it.
I reread it when I was 33 and doing some tutoring of a kid who was reading it for class. Didn’t think I’d like it as much, now that I was older and wiser, but I really liked it. Saw a little bit more clearly how he can’t get out of his own way, how he blames everybody around him for failings that are mostly his own damn fault, and it still seemed fresh and funny and somewhat ironic. Really, really liked it.
And then I reread it when I was about 47, just because, and I didn;t think it would hold up still, but this time I saw not just a whiny kid who’s convinced the world is against him, but in addition a troubled kid who really has been let down by a lot of the adults in his life and can’t put the pieces together, and it was fresh and funny and had an undercurrent of pathos. Really, really liked it.
I figure I’ll reread it “when I’m 64.” I’ll post about it again, when the time comes 
Does Paradise Lost count? I know it’s a poem, but it’s as long as a book. We had to read that in my senior year and omfg, I wanted to throw it in a fire. I’ve never read such a boring book. It didn’t help that the sentences just went on and on and ON and I often forgot wtf I was even reading about.
That made me remember
Dante * Inferno*
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. I only kept reading it because I was waiting for it to get good.
That reminds me: in elementary school we had to read I, Juan de Pareja, another book where not much happens. The only reason I remember it at all is because I liked how it sounded kind of like “I want a parade”.
Three come to mind for me:
Tess of the D’Urbervilles: As gigi said earlier, Tess gets raped early in the book and has a baby as a result. Pretty dramatic, right? The problem was, I had NO IDEA that had happened until the author tells us that Tess is working in the field one day and nonchalantly stops to breast-feed her baby. At that point, I realized I was never going to understand this book, and bought the Cliff’s Notes.
Last of the Mohicans: Somebody else in this thread said that the only good thing about reading this book was being able to appreciate Mark Twain’s complete disemboweling of this physical manifestation of boring. Spot on.
The Good Earth: I didn’t care about Chinese peasants at the turn of the 20th century when I was in high school, and I cared even less about them after reading this book.