What's the worst book you had to read for school?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
101

Personally, the nadir of wretched school-assigned books had to have been ** East of Eden ** by John Steinbeck. LONG… boring, depressing, and ultimately unrewarding.

I slogged through the entirety of that damn book in the summer before my sophomore year of high school(we got assigned summer readings), and got to the end thinking “Man… that sucked. I can’t believe anyone would pay good money for this.”

Beyond ** East of Eden **, I recall ** The Pearl ** and ** Sons and Lovers ** being just about as awful.

** A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ** and ** Heart of Darkness ** didn’t strike me as much as bad, but instead very hard to read/pay attention to. I got about 2/3 of the way through both of them and said “To Hell with this!” and did something else.

102

English teacher weighing in here.

I like too many of the books listed so far to mention, but I hated most of them when I was young. As a kid I read Hardy Boys mysteries, and stumbled from there into Tom Sawyer, and from there Steinbeck, Hemmingway, Heinlein, Sallinger and many of the authors dissed above. I didn’t love it all, but in general I liked the shorter, easier stuff when I was a kid, and in college was able to see a bit of good in the longer stuff.

But how can this thread be two pages long with no mention of The Color Purple? What a steaming piece of crap! Did I hate it because I am a white male and can’t possibly understand the story of a poor, miserable, abused set of indistinguishable black women? Or was it because the prose was so tepid? Or maybe it was because of all the awards and attention heaped on this lightweight piece of drivel? I read it because it was supposed to be so good, and it warnt. It warnt at all.

And while I’m at it, I’ll mention A Handmaid’s Tale, or whatever that empty book by Margaret Atwood was called. Is it allegorical? Oh, okay, I get it…like by page seven or so. What is the point of the rest of the book? I GET IT!! Men are BAD. Men are EVIL. OKAY!! I GET IT!!

One theme I’ve noticed in these posts seems to be that long=bad. Long sentences, bad. Long books, bad. Does that mean that short is good? Then, run out and read The Color Purple! It’s short; you’ll probably love it.

I think long can seem bad when you are a young, impatient reader; but decisions you make in 8th grade and high school need to be challenged some time, don’t they?

103

I, too, teach English (high school). Total agreement about “The Color Purple.” Total dreck.

I have read most of the books being dissed in this thread, and have to weigh in with the basic truth that…the dissing is mostly deserved, if only because the times have changed, and the “classics” don’t resonate they way they used to resonate.

The sad trend is to replace bad books by dead white males with even worse books by minority writers. Hate to break it to those who do the book selecting, but being female or black or both doesn’t make you an author worth reading. There are some TREMENDOUS books out there by minority authors. Why can’t the kids get to read those, instead of the crap?

I do support the preceding suggestion that you give the books you hated in school another chance when you are older. They might surprise you. YMMV

104

Really?

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105

Early Out said:

I don’t think it is. Children are mini adults and therefore are a useful allegorical tool in representing them. It’s a bit easier to take a bunch of boys killing pigs and each other then it is a bunch of grown men. The animals in Animal Farm are given human intelligence and foibles, again representing humanity accurately. But you cannot represent society by taking half of it away. Women make up an important part of society and, I would argue, they create society. They have babies, they want their babies taken care of and they convince their men to build the huts, hunt the game and come home every night. Do I think Lord of the Flies is a bad book? Not really, I feel it’s badly taught. I had to read it three times for three different classes and each time I was told “this is what society is, at it’s root. This is human nature” If any teacher had told me “this is what happens when society is taken away, civilization breaks down.” then I wouldn’t have hated it. Instead, when I suggested this point of view I was told I was wrong and “didn’t get it” What kind of educational system tells a child she’s wrong for having a vaild, arguable opinion that happens to differ from the teacher’s? And before anyone screams feminism at me, I don’t think a book titled Lady of the Flies in which a group of Catholic school girls are marooned on an island would be any more accurate in depicting human nature. It would be, like LotF a fractured view of society, telling only half the story.

N. Save - Pleasure to meet you. Since I also consider myself a book geek and appear (judging by this thread) to be in the minorty who enjoyer Great Gatsby and Watership Down I will stand beside you in defense of the written word.

Nightime - Maybe I didn’t “get” Catcher and I don’t judge all of Salinger by it. I just find it an unpleasant journey with an unpleasant person. I want to enjoy the time I spend with a book. I also hate it when I’m informed a book is supposed to represent me (as a teenager, when I read it in HS). I do not want to be represented by a foul mouthed 17 year old boy trying to get laid and failing. This might go in the “badly taught” file.

106

Been there, done that - except it was Tess of the D’Ubervilles. I wasn’t too picky about the kids reading the Cliff Notes, as I was using them (albeit at home) as well!

107

A total OT aside - but “Politzania”? Is that from the Klaatu album “Hope”?

I haven’t heard that in years and years! I loved it as a kid! :cool: :smiley:

108

I think when the posters here say that long is bad they mean that long, boring, overwritten books and sentences are bad.

There are plenty of long books I liked even as a kid. I read voraciously all through school. No kid wanted to be up against me in a reading contest. But long tedious books about a time long past that I simply couldn’t relate to? Hell on earth.

I was the kid hiding IT and the Dune series under the desks in high school so I could read during class while the teacher droned on about The Turn of the Screw and A Catcher in the Rye. I was also the kid who hid under her desk in elementary school so I could skip recess and read a few more chapters of Little Women or Heidi or some other story the teachers gave me since I had read all our small library had to offer.

I loved Lord of the Flies because I read it first in the 5th grade (it was 7th grade curriculum material) Oh and children are not miniature adults and it is their differences from adults that makes them useful in such an allegory.

One other thing that wrecked some books for me was when a teacher would demand that their interpretation was the only one available. I always felt that books spoke to everyone just a little differently and as long as I wrote a coherent essay with examples from the text about why the book meant X to me then the teacher should have at least given my opinion some thought instead of demading I just parrot back how she felt I should view the book’s symbolism/message/whatever.

109

I was traumatized in high school in English class. The list of despised books:

The Sun Also Rises
Studs Lonigan trilogy
Moby Dick (tried to read it again recently and it’s still unreadable)
The Great Gatsby (the movie is OK though)

No wonder I went into engineering…

110

I was reading Dune in seventh grade, so long books didn’t faze me. A Tale of Two Cities put me to sleep that same year, but to be fair, I haven’t tried it again since because I found it so deadly dull at the time. I can’t do Tolkien, either; I only got through the trilogy once. I might be able to do it again after the last movie comes out (EEEEEEEEEEK! TUESDAY!!!) but I tend to get bogged down in the middle.

And I was 22 when I had to read HoD, so I wasn’t an annoying teenager anymore. Long INTERESTING sentences, good. Long BORING sentences, bad. There is a difference. And it’s not even a long book.

111

You didn’t fall asleep reading Dune?

That’s another one I would add to the list of un-readables. [amarone, is that a word?]

112

I didn’t come across anything too terribly boring in high school–or perhaps I just can’t remember–but there were some really dismal things in college. In a class on Crossdressing in Literature and Film we read Belinda by Maria Edgeworth, which I thought a ponderous, dismal attempt at social satire. I can’t even recall where the crossdressing took place, and I read the whole damn thing. In another class called Passionate Expression (basically light erotica and a lot of gay and lesbian literature) we had to read Love Story, but then got to demolish it in discussion.

113

I think that it’s not so much that long = bad, but instead boring = bad. Short and boring is better than long and boring any day of the week.

Another thing is that I think it takes a certain literary bent to really get into these books. I’m a pretty voracious reader, but I still can’t excite myself into reading Thomas Hardy, John Steinbeck, James Joyce or Charles Dickens. To me, reading is about the story- I get a kick out of the way the story’s told, how original it is, and what thoughts it raises, among other things. And it has to be interesting and out of the ordinary. I hated ** East of Eden ** because everybody save the Chinese servant guy was a total piece of s**t, and I couldn’t identify with any of them/root for any of them. Plus, the story wasn’t that interesting or exciting either.

I’m not that concerned about a writer’s “style”- if he has a good story to tell, that’s the main thing I’m interested in. Sure, good style makes for a better book, but I’m not like friedns of mine who say they can’t read certain authors due to their writing style.

I think that to a great degree, many English class books probably require this literary bent to appreciate. Most people don’t have it at all, and those that do, probably don’t have it in high school at any rate. Hence the loathing of D.H> Lawrence, James Joyce, John Steinbeck, et al.

114

Long never equaled wrong to me, needlessly long did. For instance, Atlas Shrugged is needlessly long. I always say that Ayn Rand has the amazing ability to tell a 300 page story in 1200 pages…

115

Nope. It took me several tries over a couple of years to be able to get into it, but it’s never BORED me – it just went over my head. I get the feeling that some of it still does, just because I wasn’t around in the 60s.

If all these classics are so great and timeless – given that, in their time, they may well have been revolutionary and all that – then why do so many of us have painful memories of being made to slog through them? Because, maybe, they aren’t relevant enough to modern-day life for a teenager to be able to get into them enough to even halfway enjoy the experience? I’ll grant that there may be books I read in school that I hated that I’d like now, but it’s hard to make myself try.

116

On the topic of whether long books are boring, one of my literature instructors told us a joke once:

– In an English novel, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again, and they get married. Everybody lives happily ever after.

– In a French novel, boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy takes a mistress. Everybody lives happily ever after.

– In a Russian novel, boy meets girl, and they anguish over it for 800 pages. Nobody lives happily ever after.

Thus it is that I toss out for consideration the book I absolutely loathed during my college years: Doctor Zhivago. I tried reading it. I tried watching the movie. Heck, if I could have found it, I would have tried the Classic Comic. Nothing worked. This was college and the book was required for a class and I wanted to do well, but this book just held no interest for me. It was torture to read, it was torture to discuss in class, and it was torture to study when it came time for the final exam.

I will say that many of the books mentioned I eagerly devoured and enjoyed. But Doctor Zhivago was one I simply couldn’t, and so deserves a mention in any list of “most hated books read for school,” I think.

117

I read 10 book series, it’s not that long is bad. It’s that when the books already a steaming pile of crap, 800 pages of that crap is just torture.

118

Madame Bovary, in French.

119

When you read something about a time period you have no knowledge of, it can seem stupid and pointless if you approach it with that preconception.

If you pre-judge a book, “I hate Heart of Darkness,” you won’t ever get on that ship with Marley, as the sun is setting and he is reminded of a story about colonialism run amuck, and that’s too bad. You have to let yourself climb into it, and forget the English teacher stuff that aggravated you in high school. Many of the books mentioned in this thread are not easy. But go to a museum and you’ll see that a great deal of the artwork we appreciate today was considered stupid and pointless when it was created, and it’s taken years for the general public to catch up to it.

In discussion my students will frequently say, “Why didn’t they just…” and the rest of the question has totally modern sensibilities that just weren’t available back when the book was written. It’s so easy for us to dismiss people in the past for being idiots, without ever really grasping a thing about their understanding of the world.

So, yeah reading Dickens can be a draaaaaag, I agree, but if you let it be a glimpse into a time in history that you’ll only be exposed to through that literary timepiece of a book…I don’t know…you make allowances, and you learn along the way. Do you have to read every page? No. Are you cheating if you skip, scan, browse, or otherwise skim through a book? I don’t think so. The last time I read a Dickens novel, I started out intending to skim it, and then got caught up in in, and read way more than I ever thought I would. That kind of stuff is daunting, but it isn’t bad literature, just because it’s difficult. I think bad literature is more likely to be found in the present-day best seller lists than it is in the past.

Somebody a while back described a book they had read in high school about a kid who wouldn’t say the pledge in school. I don’t know the name of it either, but it’s by a guy who calls himself AVI, and it is, I agree, a horrible book. Unfortunately, this stuff, “young adult literature” is all the rage in education circles because kids like easy stuff. Another one somebody mentioned was “The Giver.” Again, a clunker IMHO.

Shoot me, but I’d rather try to lead somebody through “The Heart of Darkness” any day.

120

While I do understand the concept of learning history through reading books written in other centuries… I am a 30 year old woman and not a 15 year old girl. If teachers want to really engage their students they have to think beyond ‘this book was good enough for me in high school it is good enough for them.’