The Red Pony by John Steinbeck was the worst book I ever had to read for school.
The thing is pointless. The red pony dies at the end of the first chapter and the rest is scenery.
BLEAH!!!
I hated Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Never tried to read it again, though I know I probably should, since I was too young.
I keep meaning to go back and give Moby Dick a try, too.
Old Man and the Sea. I can’t believe that this book is seen as one of Hemmingway’s greatest. I used to hate the man until I had to read one of his short stories for my Intro to Fiction class in college. The story was good, but Old Man was a horrible book. I think that’s why I loved Animal Farm so much. We read it after Old Man and the Sea. I’d rather read the back of a cereal box than Old Man… again. It’s only saving grace is that it’s really short.
The Pearl, by Steinbeck. God, I hated that story.
Heart of Darkness. Yep, take overblown yet strangely boring prose and mix it with blatant racism and misinformation and call it a classic. Second-semester freshman English in college. Lord, I hated that miserable excuse for a book. It wasn’t even INTERESTING.
I did get an A on the paper about why I hated it so much, though.
I read a LOT, but I still don’t understand the reason most of the books we read in school were assigned. Old Man and the Sea. Ethan Frome. O Pioneers. Oh god – The Scarlet Letter. Tons of descriptions – pages of them! How can anyone be interested in a four-page paragraph describing the trees alongside a farmhouse or someone’s walking stick. And the conversations – who talks like that?! You know who’s the worst? Faulkner. What a long-winded bastard.
Grade 8 - The Crysilids (I couldn’t find the book to get the correct spelling).
Grade 10 - Fifth Business
The grade 8 book turned me off from reading so much that I almost failed grade 9 english because I just couldn’t believe books could be “good” until I started reading sci-fi.
School books just suck. Most of our books had to be “canadian” which ment margaret atwood and BS shit like that. Made me want to give up speaking english.
Yeah, try Tess again, now that you’re older - you’ll probably change your mind.
On the other hand, I can’t tell you how many people I know who’ve never made it through Moby Dick! Some have even tried it several times. I’ve certainly never succeeded, and not even James Joyce’s Ulysses stopped me.
I had one of the high school english teachers who had a fetish for “hidden meanings”. He was sure that they lurked behind every sentence and tested us on them. If ever anyone could bleed the joy out of a book, it was this man.
On of the books I had the displeasure of reading in this class was "of Human Bondage" by W. Sommerset Maughm. A horrid book by any standards. Made worse by such interpretations as
" the lead character does not seem to be a homosexual, however the book is semi autobiographical, and the author is a homosexual, therefore the main character is" such logic makes my head hurt to this day.
The other book that this teacher ruined for me was "The Great Gadsby" any mention of either book causes me to cringe.
And no, "Of Human Bondage" has nothing to do with S&MI read Tess of the D’Urbervilles for a college class and loathed it. As I said before in another thread with a similar topic, I would light myself on fire before subjecting myself to that book again.
Another college class had me read Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was a bunch of poorly written shite.
At age 13 – Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Could not read it!
Scarlett Letter at 15 – just as I started this hellbeast, my mum said, 'Oh, you know it’s the minister’s kid. AUGH!!!
Hands down winner: Billy Budd. None of us but one girl in the whole read it. And she loved it so much she went out and got the rest of his works! We weren’t even tested on it as the teacher found it a colossal bore, too.
As for Tess of the d’Ubervilles…I will never, ever be able to read it, as I squandered much of my last term at school writing a chapter by chapter parody of it starring my classmates…20 years later, this day, the parody still makes me laugh! It’s like a time capsule of early 80s pop culture and in jokes…I think more of the students read my knock-off than the actual book…
Btw – since school, and away from English teachers, I have re read every assigned book, including many of the ones vilified here, and have found them actually jolly good, wonderful reads * as stories*…nothing like that line by line, take 4 months to read the book to make it a horrific experience & turn people off the classics forever… I had a partner who hated anything what was ‘assigned reading’ or ‘the classics’ or whatever, until I started to tell him, book in hand to paraphrase and to read aloud dialog, Pride and Prejudice – he loved it! Really got caught up in it as a story, and then read the book on his own, and then we looked at the video – he now believes me when I say that stories like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are good stories!
Someone didn’t like Fifth Business?! Man, that was the best book I read in high school…
Anyway, Ethan Frome was mighty bad, as was Madame Bovary, but there were only two books so awful and boring that I never even finished them. Those are Death Comes for the Archbishop and The Scarlet Letter. Bad bad bad. The Scarlet Letter is a bad 20-page short story stretched out into a novel by vast expanses of nothingness.
You took my answer. I got off easy, though. My teacher made the mistake of allowing us to do a report on Apocalypse Now instead. I never finished the book. I could not even look at a PARAGRAPH of the book without feeling my eyelids droop.
It wasn’t worth finishing. I took out a lot of the pain writing the paper, though. I have never written a less bullshit-filled English paper than that one. (Face it, English teachers and professors of the world, it’s all bullshit. If a “Great Book” is so “Great” that NOBODY CAN STAND READING IT, or NOBODY UNDERSTANDS A DAMN THING ABOUT IT, or NOBODY EVER READS THIS WITHOUT THEIR GRADES BEING ON THE LINE, then it’s not a “Great Book.” It’s a “Godawful Terrible Book.”)
What hurt the most was when my own mother said she’d thought that Heart of Darkness was good, and she had no idea why I had a problem with it. banging head against wall
If it wasn’t for the stuff I’d have to read, I could be an English major with no problem and pull off stellar grades. But I don’t want to risk ruining my already-existing deep love of books.
Cynical? Heck yeah.
Oooh, here’s another for Scarlet Letter, my god! Sentences as long as paragraphs! The random details about people who didn’t matter. God, what a pain!
Nearly everything. I was and still am a really keen reader (up to 100 books a year) but hated my assigned books in school. A standout piece of crap was Nobel Prize winner Patrick White’s Voss.
Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Both have a similar style and we had to read them one after another. They are the only books that made me want to literally beat my head against the wall. I actually threw one of them across the room at one point.
I tried reading some of his stuff when I was in his SF class at UMass, but didn’t like it at all. He was actually a pretty good teacher if not a bit umm eccentric. What I did think was neat, since I was a freshman, was that when we had a question about something in “On Wings of Song” he called Thomas Disch after class and got an answer to our question. I thought that was cool.
I would say the Oedipus Tales, Saga, whatever. . .
. . . but I didn’t read the whole thing. After 8 pages at the beginning of a summer vacation I said “Aw f*ck it, I’m going to the beach. . .”.
Tripler
I got a “D+” on the paper we had to write on it. I must have learned something.
The Red Badge of Courage
I know it’s supposed to be a classic, but I had never read anything so boring at that age (14 or so?)