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

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
141

That was my thought as I was scrolling through this thread. So much of whats on those reading lists was never intended to be read by kids. Why the education system in this country doesn’t look att hat issue is beyond me. there are a great many books I tried to read when I was much too young that I have retried as an adult and enjoyed immensely.

This does NOT mean however, I plan to go off on a Steinbeck binge. He can stay in the literary trash can for all I care.

norinew I suspect with the wisdom of nearly 40 years, that Flowers for Algernon hit to close to home at an age when I was unable to emotionally distance myself. MY mother worked with handicapped children and my brother was severely learning disabled. I dont think at 17 I was emotionally mature enough to qualify the larger issues of that piece of dreck. shrug It was still a rotten book to hand to a teen.

142

Yea! I mean, what the hell were they against? No one sets up a dystopia in the middle of nowhere just cause it’d be fun.

143

But books like A Separate Peace, and Death Be Not Proud (dammit, someone else must have suffered through that one!) are targeted towards teenagers… and they still elicit negative emotions from them.

144

I’m not in school right now, thank goodness.

Look, I hated it, nobody’s going to be able to convince me otherwise. Just because it’s “great literature” means everybody’s going to like it, right?

145

I hated Tess and The Pearl.

Why are so many of the books foisted off on kids so miserably sad? Are they trying to teach kids something about life?

If so, all they are doing is teaching them about literature–that literature is dreary.

Which is such a crime.

146

And then we complain that the kids don’t read enough.

And yea, when I’d wander through the Young Adult section in the bookstore where I worked, everything was so depressing. Someone lost a parent, all their parents, was lost in the woods, destroyed their lives on drugs, got pregnant, lost a boyfriend/girlfriend/platonic friend in a horrible car accident/plane crash, stood up for themselves and had bad things happen as a result, or some combination of the above.

147

Oh, preach it. I read that for senior English in HS, and we only had to take a comprehension test (no essay). So, I read the entire book on the Sunday before the monday test. On that sunday, I accidentally dropped the book in the (unflushed) toilet, but had to clean it up as best I could to finish reading. After I was done, I wanted to send it back there, but Dad didn’t want me to screw up his plumbing.

The only good part was that some turkey tried to leech a precis from me just before the test started, and I spun some characters and scenes from whole cloth from the “2nd half of the book” which I knew he had not read… ;>

148

huh. This was the only Shakespeare we did that I liked. Different strokes and all that…

149

Another vote for Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It’s the worst book I’ve ever read.

150

Then you will just love Jude the Obscure.

151

Oh, I don’t mean to say that you have to like it. It’s just that your remarks seemed to indicate that you approached Heart of Darkness as if it were some sort of extended National Geographic article, intended to tell you all about what Africa was like! It ain’t a travelogue.

152

I don’t like reading Dickens, but most of what he writes works very well on stage. I hate * Romeo and Juliet* But my absolute hands down vote for most useless book in school was the Brockett edition of The History of The Theatre. I realise this isn’t a textbook thread but I hated that book with a passion. I hope Brockett is burning in hell for how dry and ugly he made what should have been an interesting topic.

153

Well, yeah, I know, but I do hope that if I read a book set in some time and place, it actually happens in that time and place, instead of some imaginary version of it that never happened. Besides, the racism in it just grated until I couldn’t forgive it. ESPECIALLY if Conrad had been in Africa. You’d think he’d realize the native people weren’t idiots. I know it’s an old book, but it was a very hard slog largely because of that.

154

Sigh. I’ll give this one more try, and then I surrender. First, it’s fiction, not a work of history. It’s supposed to be an imaginary version of events that never actually happened. That’s what fiction is. It’s not supposed to be an account of any real journey taken by any real person at any real time.

Second, Conrad isn’t the racist. The European exploiters, of whom the narrator is one, are the racists. That’s Conrad’s point, don’t you see? Conrad was appalled at what the Belgians were doing in the Congo, and he’d seen it first-hand. In this novel, he has his narrator describing the way he, the narrator, views Africa. Conrad means for you to condemn this attitude, by revealing it to you for what it is. The racism of the narrator is supposed to grate on you. The narrator isn’t Conrad; the narrator is a character created by Conrad, a character that isn’t supposed to be sympathetic, a character who isn’t voicing Conrad’s opinions. The uncomfortable fact is that the narrator voices the opinions of many of the European colonizers of the period. If Conrad didn’t want the reader to face up to those unpleasant truths, then he probably would have written a book about kittens.

This is the danger of writing first-person narrative. Literal-minded readers inevitably confuse the narrator with the author. Sometimes, they’re the same, but other times, as here, they’re manifestly not.

Feel free to condemn a book because you don’t like it, but don’t condemn it because you’ve simply misunderstood it.

155

I didn’t mean to completely derail this thread.

Fine. Whatever. I still hated the book because I found it boring and very slow-moving. Maybe my growing up in the 80s and early 90s screwed up my attention span permanently. I see no reason to read, supposedly for pleasure, about a boring depressing shitty time and place – whatever really happened or not.

156

I was going to climb on the Great Expectations manure wagon, but I had forgotten about A Separate Peace.

I…can’t…choose.

I think Great Expectorations was the first book I threw at the wall upon completion, but A Steaming Piece was just as despicable.

I’d gladly let my son use Cliff’s Notes or whatever other kind of shortcut he could find to complete the necessary homework as regards those books. I couldn’t, in all fairness and honesty, force him to read that crap. His time is more valuable than that.

157

Scott O’Dell I just don’t like.

He is so boring.

158

Steinbeck always makes me feel like one of those naps that you take on Sunday afternoon, and you think you’ll just lie down for a few minutes but then you wake up hours later and it’s dark and you’re groggy and you haven’t gotten anything done and the day is shot all to hell. Sorry that it’s an abstract description, but that’s how I feel: The Pearl, The Red Pony, The Grapes of Wrath… blegh. Nobody wins, ever.

I liked Watership Down but I don’t think it’s worth studying in a class. It’s a book about rabbits and they do some stuff, and it’s exciting, but it doesn’t have a ton of deep themes.

Same with Romeo and Juliet. Why do they keep assigning this one to teenagers? It’s fine in performance, but why not teach something that has some layers to it?

Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is so hopelessly dull, I don’t think it would be exciting even if you had lived through the damn war and were reading the book to see if he included your name. Same with Josephus and The Jewish War, except when he veered off into gruesome atrocities for a few pages here and there. Herodotus actually is okay in small chunks, especially his more random stuff (like the concubine that gave birth to a lion).

I dig Margaret Atwood, I’m sorry you guys had her forced on you.

A Tale of Two Cities worked once it picked up stride (about halfway through), but it reads like the author was beta-testing the concept of foreshadowing. The storm is like the war. The storm is the war. Okay. Yes. Stop giving the storm more pages than the characters. It’s a freakin’ meteorological event.

Heart of Darkness didn’t work for me either, but I didn’t get very far into it at all. My teacher let us watch Apocalypse, Now instead.

Finally, The Iliad. I’ve had it taught to me at great length, twice. I seriously think that people should only teach books 1-10, then 20 to the end, and maybe the book when Hera sexes up Zeus if the students are looking bored. Most of the important stuff is in those chapters, and then there’s this long dry stretch that reminds me of when television shows are doing filler episodes in order to save the good stuff for sweeps.

159

I wish I had read Watership Down before I took a class on world mythologies in college. The book is crammed with mythological archetypes that would have been a lot more fun to ferret out and write about than the Celts, which was what I ended up writing my final paper on. I love Watership Down.

160

I’m torn between Moll Flanders and Mill on the Fucking Floss.

Now I like the vast majority of the titles mentioned in this thread. I scoff at Jane Austin and Dickens. You might say that I have a high tolerance for long, outdated snore-fests. It takes a higher quality of awfulness to shake me.
While Moll Flanders certainly bored me to tears, I have to admit that I at least found parts of it mildly interesting.

But Mill on the Floss… dear god. What would possess someone to write this story? Congratulations Miss Eliot. You’ve created a stable full of bland, unlikeable characters, an uninspired setting, and a plot so dull I can’t even impale myself on it to end the pain.

To make things worse, my professor also showed the Mill on the Floss movie in class. Yes, there’s a movie.