Books you had to read for school...and hated!

Oh my school was torture. I swear I ended up having to read every fuckin Shakespeare story out there and half the time the dialogue made no sense to me :banghead:. Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Beowulf. About 98% of the stories we had to read bore the hell out of me . The Odyssey was another story I remember we had to read. I remember in my freshman year of high school when we were doing the big thing on Romeo and Juliet, we also had to watch the movies and we ended up watching both the 1968 version and the 1996 version also. To make matters worse we also had to watch West Side Story. I will be honest I did use cliff notes for some of the stories :giggle:. I couldn't stand reading some of it. I don't know why but school thoroughly made reading boring, it's like "How can we bore kids so bad from ever reading again" either that or they just pick the most boring stories. I'll be honest, when I graduated I didn't touch another book until Forrest Griffin's "Got Fight" was released, which gave me hope that not all books were as boring as school made it out to be.

I do remember in my Junior year we read Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, which was kind of interesting, although I thought Bram Stoker's Dracula might be a little more interesting, but Dracula wasn't allowed. which was odd to me because in my 8th grade year we read just about every Edgar Allen Poe poem, from The Raven to The Cask Of Amontillado etc.
 
The Guide by RK Narayan.

The plot's fairly hard to explain. The main character Raju, starts off as a tour guide but ends up seducing the wife of a professor who he takes on a tour of sorts. He manages her career as a dancer and she becomes very successful, but he's no manager, so he goes to jail for fraud. When he is released he goes to live in an empty temple, where the villagers come and visit him. He solves their problems by using common sense. Then there's a drought in the village and through a misunderstanding he starts fasting. He tries to run away but he can't morally and physically. The book ends ambigouosly, the drought might have ended, and it might not. Raju may have starved to death, and he may not have.
The ideas are interesting, put the pacing of the novel was terrible. It was quite well written, and quite funny in places, but most of the time it was far too slow.
 
Of all others, this was the one book in my english class that I hated:

The Catcher in the Rye: I'm sorry, but I honestly didn't like this book. The plot really wasn't good (and half the time it wasn't even appropriate) and I didn't like the main character Holden that much :/ I honestly found no good moral in it for people who read it.
 
Hmmm....what horror stories should I relate?

To Kill a Mockingbird: Yay another book detailing the black man's plight. All well and good concept wise, but write a good book. Don't throw in random scary man Boo Radley and don't try to get me to relate to a shittily written character who I can't remember was male of female. Seriously.... I hated this book with a passion. Thankfully I was able to stop the quizzes so I wouldn't have to read it.

The Education of Little Tree: What...the...fuck... Had to be the shittiest book I have ever read. And the inane questions I had to answer about it. House, I hated my teacher for that. And some 12 year old kid running around with two damn dogs.... Making whiskey...

...Whatever.

Maybe I'll share more later.
 
To Kill a Mockingbird: GRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHHHHH I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT, ATTICUS DAMN FINCH NEEDS TO BE SHOT!!!!!!!! I couldn't stand reading this, and in school, once we had read it, we had to re-read it so the story was burnt into our minds, I Can't stand it, i want to kill the book, i want to kill all copies of this book. I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT. We had to do Coursework on it as well which was depressing.

Macbeth: Shakespear, Shakespear Shakespear, Why Cant thou write a bookth that maketh Sense, Seriously, the only line i understood from this Entire book and movie was infact "out damn spot" which to be perfectly honest, just made me giggle, i was like "your hands are clean ya stupid beer wench" even though she was going mad and wasn't actually a Beer wench, but hey thats not the point.
 
Of Mice and Men. Seriously, what's the hype about this book? It's so banal.
Romeo and Juliet. I love Shakespeare, Henry V is a firm favourite of mine. But Romeo and Juliet? I never got the attraction, it's dull, with nothing really happening. I dunno why it's hailed as a great work of art, he had many greater plays than Romeo and Juliet.
 
When i started 5th year we had to do romeo and juliet. Ive never been a fan of anything romantically tragic. I found it even more pathetic upon hearing that romeo is like 20 and juliet is like 13. Its basically about a peedo who falls in love with an almost preteen then they die. I already knew the story but i got around about 15 pages in to the book before quitting english class. Higher was too much for me anyway. There was no way i could write an essay on something shit like that. I quit english then i think i left school around about a month after that aswell.
 
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Without a doubt, The Giver. I didn't particularly hate it, but it was just sooooo fucking boring. What kind of monster makes us read this book during Christmas vacation? My 5th grade teacher. What a bitch. Anyway, I managed to get through it, but hardly anybody else did. I felt like a ancient god that could rule the world after that. I got to keep the copy of the book we were given. I still have it to this day. It was just... Not very interesting. A book has to grab my attention instantly in order for me to really get into it, but this book just didn't do it for me. Reading through it was a chore.
 
Oh, good GOD was there a long list of books I had to read that I hated to read. Just a few required reading was: The Scarlet Letter, The Sun Also Rises (Hemmingway only wrote about mundane everyday stuff so was boring), Their Eyes Were Watching God (written in dialect so VERY hard to read), Death of a Salesman, and so much other crap, but that's all I can remember at this time.

I DID get required to read one book that WAS good: Murder on the Orient Express. However by the time, the damage had been done. I had already acquired a deeply ingrained hatred for reading books that I don't think I can ever go back.... even though I have tried many times.
 
Pride and Prejudice, which I had to read around the age of 12/13. Even now, after passing an English degreewitj a high 2:1 and teaching English, I find it hard to enjoy Jane Austen! I'm not fond of her writing style. :/ I also had to read books like 'The Day of the Triffids' and 'Buddy' at the age of 11/12...

I was not too fond of Shakespeare's plays 'Measure for Measure' and 'Romeo and Juliet' at the time, although I very much like Shakespeare now. :) I enjoyed 'Macbeth' and 'The Tempest' at school. :)

'Tess of the Durbervilles' by Hardy was a nightmare! As was 'The French Leitenant's Woman'... I also disliked 'Cold Mountain'.

My school was a bit old fashioned with its texts! I get to TEACH 'His Dark Materials,' 'Harry Potter,' 'Noughts and Crosses,' and 'The Hunger Games!' I wish I had been able to study these!
 
I didn't like any of the Shakespeare stuff we did. I think we only really covered Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth in any detail, but I didn't enjoy them.

Then we did an awful lot of work on William Golding's Lord of the Flies, which I didn't appreciate at the time, but in hindsight it wasn't too bad, so I wouldn't mind giving it another go one day.

Another one I couldn't appreciate for a few more years was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. We never actually covered this at school, but my English teacher actually brought this from her home for me to borrow. She saw potential in me, but was concerned that at 14 my reading experience was limited to Harry Potter and a handful of Star Wars novels. I only read it out of politeness at the time, but now it actually had a big effect on the books I read now.
 
Personally, I loved the Shakespeare we had to do for English lit. class: Hamlet. It was for the Leaving Cert, so I guess I was mature enough to understand and enjoy it. The dialogue didn't faze me much: Not only did the text I read it from have explanations, but when I saw both the film and play, the way in which it was acted out filled the gaps. However... I don't think I would've liked doing Romeo and Juilet for the Junior Cert though...

The text I hated the most for school was "How Many Miles to Babylon", Jennifer Johnston. My teacher chose this book specifically due to the fact it was:

1. the shortest book on the list.

2. the easiest book on the list.

3. Was a text available to both higher level, and ordinary level exams(You can drop down during the school year here).

Needless to say, it was both boring and lacking. It's an utterly depressing novel. The protagonist is unlikable- as are most of the cast. Do yourself a favour and burn the book, should you come across it... :wacky:
 
I wasn't too impressed with To Kill a Mockingbird. My English teacher thought it was the greatest work of literature out there but I remember being thoroughly bored and not too pleased when asked to do a 2-page write-up on Atticus (she was a walking Atticus fan club).
 
Right... Wherever to start?

My most hated books are both pretty disturbing. The first was A Child called 'It'. My first problem with this was that I was made to read this at the age of thirteen by my English teacher. If that wasn't bad enough, we spent basically the entire term on it, analysing it, writing commentaries and reviews and all sorts of other stuff to dissect it to death. I had real problems reading it and I couldn't seem to get through more than one chapter at a time. My mum, who is a mental health nurse, had to help me read it - it really upset me. This and the next book on the list are not allowed in my house. End of story.

Lolita: My God. I had to study this in depth for a university class on its author, Vladimir Nabokov. Having read most of his other books before this one, I knew that it was going to be weird, it was going to be full of references to himself and his family and packed with headache-inducing references to a fallible narrator. But concerning the plot, I went in completely blind. Our lectrice had said that this was going to be difficult and we'd have to pay abnormal amounts of attention looking for fallible references by Humbert Humbert, one of the most confusing narrators in the world. Even Humbert's name is a reference to another nutcase of Russian literature. After delivering a 50 minute presentation on this book, I put it down and I will never pick it up again.
 
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