So nobody has had to read Remembrance of Things Past? The memory is still too raw and painful to go into in any detail, but Swann’s Way, the first novel of the series (which is seven freaking books) just about deprived me of my will to live.
tanookie wrote: “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.”
Well, this teacher has trouble getting beyond, 'this new book I’d love to teach, and that I think the kids would get a lot out of, costs $7.50…times my 125 kids equals…my principal saying, “Those old copies of Tom Sawyer are still in pretty good shape…why don’t you teach that again? It’s a classic.”
Sorry if I am digressing. I’ll shut up for a while.
I guess it’s unfair to say that it was the ‘worst book’ but it was certainly my most disliked book. I’m not a huge fan of talking animals so Watership Down didn’t stand a chance.
And I’ve also found that putting the novels into historical context makes the classics readable for me. I would’ve hated Heart of Darkness if given it in high school English, but got through it when required for a collge history course.
As for one that may truly be the worst book I had to read … Member of the Wedding, or something like that. Both the novel and the play. I read 'em both and couldn’t tell you the first thing about them.
Malthus
(From Page 2)
You said adolescents have the attention span of a mayfly and that is why they can’t appreciate fine literature?
Well, having been an adoloescent myself at one time, it is not attention span (or lack thereof) that causes high school students to lack an appreciation of (alledged) fine literature.
Do you remember your high school days? Remember each teacher thought his (or her) course was the most important subject you’d be studying that year? Remember how you’d be bombarded with all kinds of homework, projects, tests, term papers, etc?
It was rather difficult for me to be concerned about the welfare of Charles Darnay when I also had to complete the square, determine solubility product constants, and remember that William Henry Harrison was known as Tippecanoe.
Perhaps this is the reason I would despise being assigned a bloated boring book. “Gee, my schoolwork wasn’t tough enough. I am so glad that I’ve been assigned a boring monstrosity that I’ll have to finish in the next 2 weeks”. ARRRGGGGHHHH !!!
Not only that, didn’t you have to go to a part time job? Also, isn’t adolescence the time when you are learning to function in the adult world? Weren’t you concerned about your appearance, getting the nerve to date that cute little redhead, trying to be one of the “in” crowd, etc.
So, forgive me if I really had no sympathy for Charles Darnay as to whether he got his head chopped off or not.
mailman, you’ve said everything that I was thinking as I read this thread. I failed to appreciate so many of the greatest authors the first time that I read them just because I didn’t have the time and patience to sit back and let the text flow. You can’t simply skim and fly through great books, you have to let the authors work their magic. I liked Austen and Dickens so much better the second time I tried them because I had learned to actually pay attention to the language, rather than just trying to get the plot.
Now on to my nominations for pure shit:
A Seperate Peace. I think this one gets assigned in high schools because it has instances of all the voacb words for literature that students are supposed to know. This is an example of symbolism (a blatantly obvious one), this is what we call forshadowing (unnecessary), this is an allusion to Greek mythology (a pointless one), etc…
Ratner’s Star, by Don DeLillo. Assigned in a sociology class my junior year of college, by a professor who wasn’t much for dissenting opinions or even mild criticism. I made it to the two hundred page mark, then decided that I could skip the rest because it was apparently all incoherent and meaningless conversation. I wrote an essay saying that there was no plot, the characters had no distinct personalities and couldn’t be kept straight, the dialogue was nonsense with no relationship to the supposed story, the humor was stale and lame, and the book was far too long. The prof responded that I was projecting my own flaws onto the book. To this day, I haven’t met any other person who doesn’t physically recoil at the mention of DeLillo’s name if they’ve been forced to read any of his crap. The guy is so obsessed with his own cleverness that he can’t be bothered to tell a coherent story.
It’s called Nothing But The Truth, and apparently has a few fans.
Hated Member of the Wedding, don’t know who wrote it, but it is God awful.
I also hated Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Like Fitzgerald in Gatsby, Hemmingway can’t write decent female characters.
I also hated the Hobbit, which I never finished.
I got stuck reading a 1,000+ page monster Sarum in high school. As a teen, I thought it was sucking the life out of me, as an adult, I’m thinking the story was actually pretty good.
I did however enjoy Brave New World, but it was a bit sci-fi for me.
The Scarlet Letter: Absolutely horrible. I kept falling asleep while reading this, and it wasn’t due to exhaustion. The whole class agreed with me on this one… Worst book I’ve ever read in school.
The Red Badge of Courage: Again, I struggled to just get through and onto the next page.
I’m a very avid reader but these two books just didn’t do it for me.
Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony.” Out loud. In 6th grade.
If there was a point to that other than getting the kids to giggle at every “damn” and to watch the girls turn green at the graphic descriptions of animal cruelty, I’m not sure what it was.
Heck, I’m still not even sure what the point of the book was.
The Old Man and the Sea sucked bloated, dead-for-a-week goatbutt!!! Talk about annoying, boring, and “why the FUCK do I have to read this anal pimple of a book?”
I honestly cannot stand Hemingway. Or Dickens, for that matter.
I am such a great and loyal friend that I read 1984 for a good pal of mine and told her what to put in her book report. That was boring, too, but I know it’s got an important message.
This is the same good pal that later screwed me over royally when I moved into her apartment to help with the bills.
bitch…
ANYTHING by James Joyce! I think this guy had nothing but contempt for his readers…ULYSSES wasjst awful! Not one word wriiten by Joyce makes any sense, and the idea that he was a brilliant writer seems to me to be a colossal con job!
The Giver, a stupid, snowy book about a fairly generic dystopia that outlaws…something that a generic dystopia would outlaw because they’re, like, a dystopia and shit. Dystopia’s are bad! My friends and I all hated the thing.
Siddhartha - Jesus Christ! A psuedo-spiritual pile of steaming iguana shit masquerading as book about enlightenment.
Dystopias. Why did a put an apostrophe there?
Oh, my, the repressed memories this thread is dredging up…
Hated A Seperate Peace. Hated The Pearl, The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men (okay, I guess I just hate Steinbeck). Hated The Scarlett Letter.
But I can’t believe this thread’s gone three pages and not one mention of Last of the Mohicans. Read it for an American Lit class in college. At one point a classmate stood up and (referring to a scene in which Chingoochiekoo or whatever his name was put on a beaver skin to hide in the bushes) shouted “Did none of these numbnuts notice the giant fucking beaver watching them?”
I have a fond vision in my head of Mark Twain up in heaven pelting Cooper with copies of The Elements of Style and then looking innocent when Cooper whirls around to see where they’re coming from.
Plug for my favorite Mark Twain essay.
I took a college course on Twain in college, the professor read excerpts from this essay.
Ah, yes, Michael Ellis, as I recall I quoted extensively from that essay in my final report on Mohicans. Got an A, too.
I loves me some Mark Twain.
The Mayor of Casterbridge
What? Not a mention of Wuthering Heights? The Scarlet Letter was fun just because we all got to make and wear our own scarlet letters, and I enjoyed the complexity of Crime and Punishment, but damn if I didn’t want to reach into the book somehow and slap some sense into the entire cast of that godawful story.
If Heart of Darkness had actually happened in REAL Africa, in a REAL time, I might have enjoyed it. But it was set in this stupid European racist version of “The Darkest Jungles of Africa.” Plus, it was BORING.
Your opinion may differ. Fine. YOU read it. 
It was based upon Conrad’s own experiences working on a Congo river steamer in the last decade of the 19th Century. Before you beat the book about the head and shoulders, you should read some of the appalling history of King Leopold’s dominion over the Congo. “Grim” doesn’t begin to do justice to that history.
Second, I think you may be missing the point of the story. The “darkest jungles of Africa” represent the darkest recesses of the human mind. It’s not the Africans who are the savages - it’s the European exploiters. The Europeans’ characterization of the Africans as brutal cannibals is an example of the use of irony.
Please rewrite your essay, and be sure to turn it in before the semester break. 