Last year, I would have voted John Steinbeck. In high-school I was forced to read The Pearl and thought it was about the worst load of camel crap I’d ever been forced to consume. “I am a man!” God help me. I swore off Steinbeck forever.
Then, for no good reason, I read Of Mice and Men and loved it. Now I’ve read half a dozen of his books and loved them all.
So, my vote goes for Timmy James, the little kissass in my 10th grade English class who wrote all this tripe that the teacher liked to share with us. I’ll see you in hell, Timmy James.
I hate to say this since she’s the most famous alum of my college, but Pearl Buck, despite the Nobel prize, just isn’t good. I am not sure she’s on any school’s hot list these days, but she is considered a “classic.”
I loathe Faulkner, too, but I realize some literary scholars think he’s the bees knees so I attribute this to personal taste on my part.
I would have to say Charlotte Bronte. I can’t stand how she keeps hitting you over the head with the whole moon/mother thing! And all those convienent coincidences. (By the way, it turns out that the house you happened to stop at contains your only living relatives that you never knew existed!) Meh.
Another vote for Faulkner. My god, if a student handed in writing like that they’d flunk… yet because he’s famous, it’s “stylistic” and “poetic license” and all that crap. NO, SORRY, IT IS NOT. The guy just doesn’t know grammar rules for crap and can’t write to save his freakin life. It’s especially a bad idea to show it off as good literature to kids you’re trying to teach to… I mean you don’t hold up an example of writing and say “this is marvelous… only don’t do it like this, because technically it’s mostly wrong.”
Why all the war stories, people?? Come on, after a while, disembodied heads and bloody limbs start making you a little depressed, no matter how eloquently they’re described. We had to read “Night” (about the Holocaust) and “All Quiet on the Western Front” in the same few weeks. Is this fair?? I know that’s not about a specific author, but I just needed to vent. By the way, Charles Dickens is ridiculously boring. I do not want to hear food decribed for 10 pages, as delicious as it might be when you’re actually eating it. Sorry, I hope that doesn’t send me to hell.
Oooooh, I don’t like hijacks, but I have to do this.
stormy, sometimes coincidences really happen. A friend recently made a couple of e-bay sales to people who live in two little teeny towns, one in Minnesota and one in South Dakota. (Friend lives in Washington state.) One of the towns is populated mostly by her paternal relations, the other by the maternal side. She was flabbergasted.
I’m talking little teeny towns. Full of her relatives!
I told her that just proved that the buy/sell addiction was genetic. They were bound to find each other.
As for the OP, I never read anything in school that I didn’t like. We weren’t taught critical judgment. I still can’t explain why I like some books and not others.
I had a relatively cool Senior English teacher. He introduced me to people most High School types ignore or fear: Tom Stoppard, D.H. Lawrence, Phillip Larkin, and Samuel Beckett; he even let us view Roman Polanski’s “MacBeth” in lieu of having to read Shakespeare from some crusty old book (and man, wasn’t Francesca Annis hot!). But I still can’t forgive the guy for assigning “Silas Marner”, and assigning a 5 page essay on that dreck.
As you could guess from my grammar, I got a
“gentleman’s C” in High School English.
I’ve actually liked everything I’ve ever read. Usually I figure if I dislike a book, it’s MY problem, not the author’s. Keeping this in mind, I try harder to understand the theme, symbolism, and characters. Usually that works, and the books open up whole new doors of thought for me. Even Frankenstein. The first time I read it was very difficult, because I thought it was so boring. So I stopped, stepped away, and approached it from a different angle. And that worked.
Personally I think high school students who bitch about certain books (Including anything by Hawthorne, Steinbeck, or Faulkner) just don’t get “it”.
Hell, even if you can’t enjoy the work itself, you should at least try to evaluate it for it’s impact on future authors. I couldn’t stand anything by James Fenimoore Cooper until I accepted that he did impact later American authors to some degree.
I’m so sorry all of you people were turned off Shakespeare by bad teachers. If we ever get to meet, give me half an hour and I’ll give you an impromptu performance-based deconstruction/explanation. Partly to see how much verse I actually have in my head, and partly to… ahh, never mind, it’s probably too late. Tragic.
Anyway…
You may not believe this, but my high-school Honors English class studied… drum roll please… S.E. Hinton. Gag me with a marathon runner’s used insole.
Okay, so that’s not strictly covered under the terms of the OP, because Hinton is far from a classic writer. I’d go with Charlotte Bronte, in that case. Reading Jane Eyre was, for me, like enduring dental work. In Nepal.
I agree with whoever said Pearl Buck. “The Good Earth” was terrible. Maybe that’s because i don’t understand Chinese culture, but it certainly didn’t help me any. Also–maybe i’ll get crap for this, but “Frankenstein” was totally disappointing. It was tedious, redundant, and written in the really confusing way. At least the black and white movie version was good for a few laughs.
I didn’t have to read it in high school, but I went to a puplic college where I had to read Madame Bovary in three, count 'em, THREE different classes. Man alive, that Flaubert sucked.
I actually LIKE a lot of the authors people here seem to hate. I lov Twain. Dickens is GREAT when he’s good (Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities), but (I’ll agree) terrible when bad (Hard Times). I liked Frankenstein.
But I’ll also agree that The Scarlet Letter bored me to tears. I barely pushed myself through Pride and Prejudice. But these are nowhere near the worst.
I hated John Knowles’ “A Separate Peace”. And I ad to read it TWICE (dfferent classes). I also hated James gee’s “A Death in the Family”. But the author I truly loathe is Henry James. I’ve listened to Literature professors go into raptures over the elegance of his writing, but even his contemporaries thought he was a pretentious and wordy bore. His “Turn of the Screw” manages to be a boring ghost story. The pont of “The Beast in the Jungle” is that nothing happens. But it takes so damned long not to happen!
Sorry, Pepper. I’m hardly high school anymore–in college I read some truly remarkable literature and learned to analyz it. I know how. I’ve done my best to apply that to Faulkner, and come to the same conclusion I did in HS: The stupid **** couldn’t write his way out of a wet wad of toilet tissue. He had nothing to say, wouldn’t have known how to say it if he did, and tried to conceal those facts by saying it in the most abominable mangling of English I’ve seen past 3rd grade.
Cal, I don’t think anyone here has said that they disliked Twain–so far he has 3 positive comments and 1 reference that strikes me as probably positive. As for Dickens, I will admit that there are really good books lurking somewhere in ACC and ToTC. Dickens could turn a fine phrase at times–the opening and closing lines of ToTC have always struck a chord with me; I just wish that what lay between them was as clean and profound.
My vote has to go with Dickens. I personally liked Great Expectations and I’m currently enjoying Pickwick Papers again but the difference is that I’m not critically studying every line and tearing the book apart in a desperate search for underlying meaning. I think Dickens should be nominated solely on the basis of Hard Times. Some sections of this book are so awful that they are outright hilarious. Having to wade through that particular mess of pedantic, prosaic, political proseletyzing was one long nightmare of skull crushing boredom and I’d cover my genitals in raspberry jam and sit naked next to an ant hill before I open it again.