Heart of motherfucking Darkness.
I’ve managed to slog through or even enjoy almost everything else in this list. But fuck me running. I was assigned that bastard no less than four different times, in both high school and college, and I tried, I really tried, every time… still haven’t been able to finish it.
And yes, username/post combo. Make of it what you will.
I think I hated everything I ever had to read for an English class – and I am an avid reader, even when a small child. The ones that stick out as gawd-awful are Moby Dick and The Red Badge of Courage. For a point of sacrilege I’ll also mention The Catcher in the Rye - pointless, stupid and boring in my opinion. And I already knew all the curse words in the book, so I wasn’t too impressed with any supposed controversy about it.
I think I love you!
Maybe it’s because a lot of these books were products of their time, and there were fewer things to do with leisure time. ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ was very important to the girls in ‘Little Women’ (and that book was tough sledding for a 12 year old, when I first read it - all that slang, their strange social customs and living habits. But I loved the book and persevered. There were no Cliff notes or internet discussions back then.) Didn’t fervent Charles Dickens fans go down to the docks when a ship from England was due to arrive, with the latest chapter of one of his books? And they would yell, “what happened to Little Nell?” or something, before the ship was even tied up yet?
Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street to show how boring and lame small-town life is. And over 400-plus pages, that’s precisely what he did. Gaaah.
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. Makes Heart of Darkness feel like an Ian Fleming book. I also was really bored with Catcher in the Rye probably because I read it so late in my life I was expecting something, anything interesting to happen. I read on only because of the anticipation. It never happened. When I finished I was, “Wait? What?”
My Antonia by Willa Cather.
It was during the study of American literature versus British literature, and my teacher didn’t like my comment that maybe we should send our authors to train in Britain (yes that’s how bad I think the book is!)
This was the only book I refused to finish for school. I listened in class while doodling to pick up enough to get a ‘C’ on the test and consider myself lucky.
I ran into **Young Werther **and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in college. I never finished either book just for your exact reason. Ugh!
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
As I recall, it was dark, cold, and depressing, and there was absolutely nothing that made me want to turn the page to find out what happened next. Maybe it got better in the second half of the novel, but I don’t know because I never made it that far. In fact my entire English class hated it so much that the teacher agreed to abandon it halfway through and we moved on to the next book on that semester’s list.
This is easy! o many, but the worst:
Man, I wish I had a list of stuff we had to read in high school… so many bad ones already mentioned here.
Heart of Darkness
Madame Bovary
Jane Eyre (twice)
A Separate Peace
The Great Gatsby
Great Expectations
The Pearl
The Scarlet Letter
Crime and Punishment too, but I wouldn’t call it boring, just really bizarre and hard to get through.
And people wonder why kids these days can’t read. It’s because school forces them to read shitty books and doesn’t instill any association of fun with reading!
I was assigned only a few of the books mentioned here. They must have been trying to give us stuff that we’d “relate to” or something. The less well known stuff, as it turns out, is every bit as boring and irredeemably inane as The Catcher in the Rye.
As a result, they succeeded in making a great many people hate books (which is the point, right?) and also made the rest of us look like total fucking ignoramuses whenever someone makes a joke about the high school classics.
The Old Man and the Sea. Gah! I was never a reader in school. I had this reputation as being very studious, and I did well, but reading was always a chore. ALWAYS! When we had to find a Gothic Novel to read in British Lit in High School, I located The Castle of Ontronto, about 79 pages long. STILL couldn’t finish it. Ugh!
Sorry. It’s Otranto. When standing at the front of the class to give my oral book report, I told everyone NOT to envy my short book. It wasn’t worth it.
These days I LOVE to read. I LOVE to learn! I can get lost in a book & miss the characters when it’s over. High school was wasted on me.
The Iliad
The Summer of 42. Herman Rauchert.
Maybe it was the time I went to school but I seemed to have been lucky enough to miss most of what everyone else lists.
The worst, bar none, was Billy Budd. The second worst (by the same author) was Bartleby the Scrivener.
The moral, boys and girls, is that if your teacher ever asks you to read ANYTHING by Herman Melville, tell her, “I would prefer not to.”
I never knew there was so much Heart of Darkness hate out there. Why get worked up over something so short?
For longer-lasting torture, you need Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. It’s the first romance novel, sort of like bubonic plague was the first pandemic disease.
Withering my brain - couldn’t even get past the CliffNotes. I only passed literature that year by doing two extra book reports - I had to beg for that.
I see that people here hated A Separate Peace - as did many of my classmates but I never understood why. Is it the dated irrelevance? Is it the contrived conflicts? Is it the undertones of self importance contrast with what in reality would be relative triviality? The “ersatz homosexual relationship” argument?
It all rolls off the back in relation to the mind numbing nothingness of** Heart of Darkness.**
As for the length of HoD? True. It was a thin little thing but never has 94 pages (or whatever it was) seemed so arduous. It was worse than reading the terms and conditions of some frivolous online agreement. In pig latin. In dim lighting. On 4 hrs of sleep.
Chalk up one more on the big board for Old Man and the Sea. Actually, anything by Hemingway. I cannot stand his writing style. Even the short story, Hills Like White Elephants. I know good ol’ Ernie was big on symbolism, but goddamned if that wasn’t one helluva stretch. Who the fuck thinks hills look like “white elephants?” Oh, that’s right, the woman in the story who doesn’t want to get an abortion. sigh
Also, *Siddhartha * by Herman Hesse. Holy crap was that a boring pile of dung.
Heh. You kind of have to though – the way it was written I would have had no idea she was raped if I hadn’t seen the movie first.