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[ SECRET POST #6584 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6584 ⌋

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What was your favorite book you read for a high school English class?

What assigned reading in school proved to be the least enjoyable and most painful to get through?

War and Peace. For AP English we had to read 2 things the summer before: War and Peace and Wuthering Heights. I only enjoyed one of those.

And honestly, AP English was the first class where we read whole books. So it was really fun.

My favorite non-full book thing is a tie with Julias Caesar and Macbeth. The year we read those was what started my Shakespeare love.

I hated Wuthering Heights. I had to remind myself that I was doing this to get into AP English. And it still took me far longer than it should have because I could only stomach a little at a time.

"And honestly, AP English was the first class where we read whole books."

Really? You didn't even read full books in middle school classes? This is a surprise to me (and I went to school in Florida). I actually got in Joan Lowery Nixon books due to middle school assignments that required reading full books.

I went to an overseas missionary school. And it really sucked.

Honestly, I loved most of the assigned reading. The Scarlet Letter, The Good Earth, To Kill A Mockingbird, Animal Farm. The thing I mostly hated was Shakespeare. I still hate Shakespeare, lol.

Favorite: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. If that doesn't count because it's a play, then To Kill a Mockingbird.

Most painful: The Grapes of Wrath.

Favorite: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Least Favorite: The House on Mango Street

My heart! I loved The House on Mango Street. It sent me down a path of writing vignettes.

There was a great outcry by parents targeting the English department for being "too feminist" and wanting more books "for boys" at my school, so they added some braindead YA stuff with male main characters. I don't know if it was the teachers being pissed off at having to do it, or the parents really wanted simple books for boys to understand (many boys were deeply insulted by this!) but they were uniformly bland and terrible.

Oh! Plus, "The Old Man and the Sea" because it was about a man, short and used simple language.

Most reading material kind of sucked for me, because I wasn't really a reader unless it was terrible YA books. I honestly don't remember enjoying any read in HS. Yet I'm glad I was forced to read everything I did, because some of that stuff has been getting banned in places these last few years (To Kill A Mockingbird, A Separate Peace, Diary of Anne Frank, etc).

I moved each year so had a lot of repetition. To Kill a Mockingbird was assigned reading every year from 8th through 11th. I still really like it but it did get a bit boring.

My only other assigned books were Tess of the dUrbervilles in 9th grade but we moved right as my class started reading it. And then senior year we spent the ENTIRE year on Oedipus the King. It was painful. It wouldn’t have been bad if we’d spent a quarter of the time on it, but the entire year was squandered on that one little book.

I would have had a better mix if I didn’t struggle in math, because then I could have taken AP English. But I’ve always felt like moving all the time just totally screwed me because I’d miss all the usuals except TKAM. I read a lot of them after graduation just because I felt like I was the only person I knew who hadn’t read certain books.

Who even does the assigned reading? I only bothered with these books for my college enterance exams. I think no one really read anything longer than a short story in my class.
I liked Dostoyevsky tho. His sentences are short and simple, his dialogue is organic and his look into character's head is intimate. The thoughts about life and death in Idiot are thought provoking, the ones about the hanging in Swizzerland. I'm still wandering about Knyaz Myshkin's diagnosis in modern terms.

"Who even does the assigned reading?"

IB students for sure. We had to do the reading because our exams involved answering pretty detailed questions about the piece. The oral commentary portion of the exam was actually kinda of stressful, as you did not know what section of a piece you would be discussing until the day it was recorded and you picked it from a selection of file folders roughly 15 minutes prior.

I don't think there was an English lit book that I hated throughout my school years. In fact I remember getting really engrossed in the books and would get in trouble when it was obvious that I was reading ahead of the class instead of chapter by chapter for each class.
I remember Adeline Yen Mah's memoir Chinese Cinderella having a big impact on me when I was 13 years old. Then there was I'm the King of the Castle by Caroline Woolfe that made me cry buckets because the bullying themes of the story and tragic ending hit way too close to home, but also made me love it even more.
Also C.S. Lewis's Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe.

People actually read the books they were assigned in high school. Let me see if I remember.

English 1 was A Separate Peace. Didn't read it.

Basic English 2 (or was it 1, I can't recall) was The Pearl. The teacher read the whole thing aloud, so that really doesn't count.

English 2 was To Kill a Mockingbird. I had already read it so that didn't count.

English 1 was The Chocolate War. Didn't read it.

English Lit was Great Expectations and Wuthering Heights. Didn't finish either one of those.

Ethan Frome. uggghhhhh. This guy who's married falls in love with this shallow little airhead woman and they spend the whole book doing nothing about it except moaning, the closest they get to a sexy scene is washing dishes, and then they decide to do the dumbest thing possible which is commit suicide, in the dumbest way possible, which is run into a tree with a sled. They both wind up paralyzed and the guy's wife, who we're obviously not supposed to like but who is the ONLY sympathetic character, is stuck taking care of both of them for the rest of her life.

My favorite was probably Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (I had already read The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott before I got to high school so I'm not counting those). Honorable mention to The Crucible by Aurthur Miller.

I really disliked The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. I thought Grapes of Wrath was really, really bleak, but it was very well-written - it painted such clearly defined scenes in my head and the symbolism was very on point, so I can't say I truly disliked it. I did roll my eyes nearly all the way through Beowulf, but I don't know if that counts.

I enjoyed The Scarlet Letter and Catcher in the Rye. Hated Julius Caesar and never did finish reading it.

I don't know that I enjoyed The Lord of the Rings trilogy + The Hobbit the most out of my assigned reading in high school, but it stood out against the standard "improving" classics that were usually assigned. I think I would've liked them better if they hadn't been assigned reading, being forced to read them made them less fun.

Probably my least favorite was Madame Bovary; we could pick any classic novel and I picked it despite knowing almost nothing about it except that it was French. Turned out I was annoyed by every single character.

Loved Ganglands by Maureen Mc Carthy (read for Year 10 English, read all of Maureen's other books as well)

Didn't like The Outsiders (read for Year 9 English, it's funny because I just watched the movie over the weekend), didn't like reading Looking For Alabrandi (Year 9) and Tomorrow When the War Began (Year 10, which is odd because I normally liked John Marsden. Was so sad that he passed away recently),

Favourite: Krabat. If we're talking English only, I did love Macbeth.
I hated a lot of our books in English class (like The Giver) but the one I hated the most was Stargirl. My teacher was a young woman who just got back from a trip to the US where she fell in love with that book, originally because she loved the cover image so much. And then she decided we totally had to read this manic pixie dream girl bullshit.

Adding an English novel I liked:
Cold River by William Judson

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[ SECRET POST #6584 ]

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