fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2083 ]

[ SECRET POST #2083 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2083 ⌋

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I actually never understood when people complained about the books (or plays or short stories) they had to read in high school. I actually thought most were pretty good. I'm curious to find people's favorites and least favorites.

For me:

Favorites: *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (my all-time favorite)
*Lord of the Flies
*To a Kill a Mockingbird (I have yet to meet anyone who disliked this book)
*Of Mice and Men
*Night

Least Favorites: *The Scarlet Letter (my all-time least favorite. I got nothing out of that book. I found it pretentious and difficult to read. I think it turned me off to Hawthorne forever).

*The Jungle (I hated this book too. I guess it succeeds as a socialist critique of the meatpacking industry in the early 1900s, but I found it boring as a novel. It was just Bad Things happen to two-dimensional characters without any real substance).

*Things Fall Apart (I also felt this a pain to read. It didn't help that the protagonist was unlikeable).

I want to know about other people? What did you like/dislike?

Favorites:
+Catch-22 <3 <3
+Grapes of Wrath
+Lord of the Flies
+Animal Farm
Idk if this counts since it's a play but: +A Midsummer Night's Dream

Least Favorites
+Scarlet Letter (ia with all your points haha)
+Wuthering Heights
+The Jungle (ia again)
+The Sun Also Rises

Catch-22 is also a favorite of mine. I couldn't list it because I wasn't required to read it, but I did choose to give a book report on it. At first I wasn't too sure about it when I started reading, but I just love the way everything ties together, and the use of absurdism makes a really good commentary...and...and Snowden. :(

Re: Favorite and Least Favorite Works of Prose You Had to Read in High School

(Anonymous) - 2012-09-15 23:49 (UTC) - Expand

Favorite - Shakespeare's MacBeth

Least favorite - A Prayer for Owen Meany

As far as I recall it was never the stories themselves that were bad or hard to read. It was the intensity of having to analyzable EVERY SINGLE DETAIL of every page of the story to pick out all the hidden meanings. And when it came time to do a test on those books it didn't matter how you had interpreted it personally the ONLY correct answer was whatever the teacher insisted was correct, like I don't know Simon in Lord of the Files being a "Christ" figure or something - what ever the heck that actually meant.

Yeah I know there has to be some stuff set in stone so you can test that someone actually read the book completely but it still felt like there wasn't any room for other interpretations or flexibility.

*analyze not analyzable - I selected the wrong word from the corrected spelling list and didn't notice... oops.

(Not American by the way)
Favorite: Pedro Páramo
Least favorite: uhh, I'll go with The Prince

Favorites:
Catch-22
The Name of the Rose
The Picture of Dorian Gray

Least favorites:
Eugene Onegin
Father Goriot
and this will sound strange The bible

Least favorite:
-The Scarlet Letter (it was just a pain to read and I didn't like any of the characters. It didn't help that my teacher assigned us multiple papers over break for questions she stole from Sparknotes that had about a paragraph answer each)

-The Pearl (after the analyzing my class did, I actually hated Steinbeck for years until I read Of Mice and Men)

-The Great Gatsby (the prose didn't click with me for some reason; it was a bit disappointing because I was excited to read it)

-Huckleberry Finn (I couldn't even finish this because of the way Twain wrote their dialogue. I suppose I'll try it again later, eventually)

Favorite:
-Night

-Of Mice and Men

-Jane Eyre (I actually read it before it was assigned, though)

-Animal Farm

-Fahrenheit 451 (we were forced in sixth grade to read it and no one really understood what was happening, but I read it again in eleventh and loved it)

-The Outsiders

In my school, we would do the analyzing in class discussions or in papers, but the tests would ask about the most minor details to make sure we actually read the book (no, I don't remember the specific smell of Ponyboy's deodorant, yes I read the chapters).

I liked most of what we had to read. I got pretty sick of John Steinbeck as we read something of his every year from 7th to 12th grade (except 11th grade which was Brit Lit), although the last one we did was East of Eden and I liked that one best of his work.

Favorites:
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern (but I was already a theatre obsessive and Stoppard fan who had read RAGAD before I was actually in AP Lit where the play was assigned)
As I Lay Dying
Lord of the Flies
Brave New Word
Heart of Darkness (everyone hated it except like 3 of us. I think it's fascinating.)
Ceremony (Underrated piece of magical realism by a Native American author, Leslie Marmon Silko.)

Least Favorites:
The Grapes of Wrath (seriously, Steinbeck overkill)
White Teeth
White Noise (I got this book from a friend in the grade above me. She had actually torn the book in half in rage. Now I'm against violence to books, but this one aaaaalmost deserved it.)

favorites:
one flew over the cuckoo's nest, song of solomon, the picture of dorian gray, 1984, and the scarlet letter (i admit it's pretentious but FORBIDDEN LOVE! CORRUPTION IN THE CHURCH! yes i know shut up). if plays count, huis clos and the tempest were my favorites

least favorites:
things fall apart, catcher in the rye (fuck holden caulfield), a tale of two cities, the stranger

Ugh, Catcher in the Rye. Seriously, fuck that guy.

Favorites:
Animal Farm
To Kill a Mockingbird
A Separate Peace
A Tale of Two Cities
A Farewell To Arms
The Poisonwood Bible
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Least Favorites:
The Crucible
Scarlet Letter
Madame Bovary

Capslock HATE:
AS I LAY DYING
THE STRANGER

Edited 2012-09-16 00:11 (UTC)

I liked almost everything I had to read (even The Scarlet Letter! i finished that weeks ahead of time. The Great Gatsby too) but my favorites were probably:
Childhood's End (ngl probably one of my favorite books of all time)
Anthem
Animal Farm

The ones I actually really hated and struggled to get through were:
Tarzan (omg so boring)
The Odyssey (sooooo boring ugh)
House on Mango Street (thankfully we didn't have to read the whole thing)

OH god... we did where I was.

House on Mango Street: it's made of clown rape and HORRIBLE.

Re: Favorite and Least Favorite Works of Prose You Had to Read in High School

calaidi - 2012-09-16 19:59 (UTC) - Expand

I liked pretty much everything I had to read in high school! Except Jane Eyre, which dragged on and on and on forever for me. Of course, I was in the English class that took three months to get through Animal Farm in Grade 11 somehow. So. Yeah. Painful.

Stuff I liked included Romeo and Juliet, Lord of the Flies, Hamlet, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, MacBeth, The Tempest, and Le Petit Prince which technically we read in French class but I'm counting here because I loved it.

As much as I love Antoine de Saint-Exupéry I can't stand Le Petit Prince, but I love all the others you wrote.

I don't remember very many off-hand but:

Favorites: The Taming of the Shrew, Moby Dick (the latter was abridged)
Least favorites: Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath (both so dull)

Favorites:
Pride & Prejudice, but only the first time (due to changing schools, I had to read this three times for different grades/classes, and by the last time I was bored with it)
Lord of the Flies
1984 (although I found out much later the one I read in high school had had most of the sex cut out - yes, I read a censored version of 1984!)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (what can I say, my 12th grade teacher thought we should read some SF)
pretty much all the Shakespeare
Huckleberry Finn (although my teacher and I fought about it, a lot - he was more interested in the bildungsroman aspects than the social commentary)

Hated:
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (which I also had to read three times for the same reason, and by the last read-through I wanted to throw it through the window)
Billy Budd (don't really remember why)
Everything by Dickens except maybe Tale of Two Cities; Great Expectations was particularly bad

I never had to read Grapes of Wrath in school; I ended up reading it a couple of years ago because it was the assigned book for Academic Decathlon (I'm a coach), and I really liked it, but I suspect I would have found it less fun if it had been for a grade.

I neither liked nor hated Scarlet Letter, but I think Hawthorne was a better short-story writer than a novelist.

Favorites:
The Things They Carried
The Road
(actually middle school but:)
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Catcher in the Rye (yeah, he was irritating as hell but the themes were so good)

Least Favorites:
Things Fall Apart (also hated the protagonist)
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Bluest Eye
(and middle school:)
October Sky

hell yeah the things they carried!!

Re: Favorite and Least Favorite Works of Prose You Had to Read in High School

inkdust - 2012-09-16 03:27 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Favorite and Least Favorite Works of Prose You Had to Read in High School

rosehiptea - 2012-09-16 04:37 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Favorite and Least Favorite Works of Prose You Had to Read in High School

inkdust - 2012-09-16 13:12 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Favorite and Least Favorite Works of Prose You Had to Read in High School

rosehiptea - 2012-09-16 15:37 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Favorite and Least Favorite Works of Prose You Had to Read in High School

inkdust - 2012-09-16 15:48 (UTC) - Expand

hey now i loved the jungle. then again, i read that on my own time, so maybe that helps.

anyhow, my favourites consisted of:
-animal farm
-a seperate peace
-to kill a mockingbird
and this other book that i cant fucking remember. but it was really good, i assure you

then my least favourites were undoubtedly dracula and great expectations. i hated them both so much that i just gave up trying to read them and took the F instead

Yeah, I always liked To Kill a Mockingbird too. X3 It took ages for my to go through books though because I was always impatient graaah

Others I liked:
- Pride and Prejudice (I laughed all the way through it, okay?)
- Waiting for Godot
- Shakespeare plays in general

Hated, mostly because it gave me nightmares/I was really depressed at the time, although I really liked the themes in them:

- Disgrace by JM Coetzee
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

I also did not like Death of a Salesman. It was boring to me.

I had a really bad experience with Lord of the Flies because the teacher that taught it to us was spewing crazy religious bigoted crap about the whole thing and it cheesed me off. I still haven't been able to reread the book, tbh.

Re: Favorite and Least Favorite Works of Prose You Had to Read in High School

inkdust - 2012-09-16 15:52 (UTC) - Expand

I really liked English Literature so I have to say that I actually liked almost all the books we did. The Crucible, Of Mice and Men, Frankenstein and Macbeth were all pretty awesome.

Romeo and Juliet, though, was the one I didn't like. I just didn't ever gel with it.

Enjoyed:
Misery
the lovely bones
to kill a mocking bird
tomorrow when the war began

did not enjoy:
Maus
Bible
Animal farm
Anything I cannot remember the title of ;)

Re: Favorite and Least Favorite Works of Prose You Had to Read in High School

(Anonymous) - 2012-09-16 14:50 (UTC) - Expand

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