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which classic literature you were forced to read in high school did you hate the most
In high school the thing I hated the most was some sort of Hemingway excerpt. I don't even remember what it was from.
I have a suspicion that it was The Old Man and the Sea. It's short so teachers try to sneak it in as a short work instead of a full novel to assign, and it's just so pointlessly bleak. "Sometimes you need to catch a fish, but you can't, because the universe doesn't care. So you fail, and then you die." It's the nautical version of "To Build a Fire" except the old man gets to go die in his bed. Not bad to read, but there's not much meat to pick off those bones so class discussions just get tedious and go on forever and suck any interest out of it forever.
Oh in AP English Literature in 12th Grade we got a writing prompt based off a reading from Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing. I had just read The Road and No Country shortly beforehand, and done a lot of reading up on McCarthy's writing style, but that was my first taste of his Westerns. To this day I outright love most of his greater body of work thanks to that one reading tipping me off to The Crossing being real good
This was also most of that class's first experience with McCarthy and hoo boy, hitting a bunch of 17-year olds with having to read that shit cold in only a few minutes is, uh, brutal. Especially since that was probably the single headiest passage out of that book, and thus contained some absolutely tremendous McCarthy sentences
here's an excerpt from that passage to give you an idea, some decently sized spoilers for The Crossing within
‘He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But what cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.’
I think plays need to be read aloud as a group. We'd get assigned characters and read through the play out loud. Even if the play isn't funny (but the plays are funny) your classmates playing a role will add some levity. Some of my best times in English/Classics was reading plays.
I think this is the reason I have a much more positive view of Romeo and Juliet than most of my contemporaries. A friend of mine in high school and I used the "I bite my thumb at you, sir!" as a joke insult for years after we got to act it out in a group reading.
I also got to read the part of Mercutio, which also colors my views of it.
In terms of books I hated that I was forced to read, The Pearl comes to mind. I hated how fatalistic it was when trying to approach its themes.
In high school the thing I hated the most was some sort of Hemingway excerpt. I don't even remember what it was from.
I have a suspicion that it was The Old Man and the Sea. It's short so teachers try to sneak it in as a short work instead of a full novel to assign, and it's just so pointlessly bleak. "Sometimes you need to catch a fish, but you can't, because the universe doesn't care. So you fail, and then you die." It's the nautical version of "To Build a Fire" except the old man gets to go die in his bed. Not bad to read, but there's not much meat to pick off those bones so class discussions just get tedious and go on forever and suck any interest out of it forever.
So you're saying that the fish is a metaphor for discussions about the book? Seems like a good idea when you're alone but once you present it to the group it's a bare skeleton?
My recollection of Eng Lit was that we did (in no particular order):
Macbeth
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
Lord Of The Flies
Pride & Prejudice
Henry IV I/II.
There must have been another one we did (1 book/term, 6 terms) but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. So something deeply unmemorable, I suppose. I vaguely recally an interlude of smuggling paperbacks in, and hiding them within the cover of the book we were supposed to be reading. This was when I read the first Flashman book.
I actually rather liked or at least was OK with all of them, bar one.
Best: Henry IV (Falstaff & Bardolf ♥)
Worst: Pride & Prejudice. I strongly disliked every single character in this book and wished more bad things would happen to them, especially if it was some kind of injury or illness that would make them shut up forever.
i guess there's only so much room on the curriculum but i wish they'd do Faustus or The Alchemist from time to time. it doesn't have to all be about Shakespeare
We did Doctor Faustus. I can't imagine Marlowe being terribly pleased with whatever drunken lunatic they got to write the bits with the Pope.
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Anything by Faulkner. My English class was super basic compared to most people. We never read most of the books being discussed here. We did read Old man and the sea which was boring but did not really engender any hate. But fuck Faulkner.
Sighs, Satin, and the Potion of Trembling Secrets: Part 4 of the Larlar Saga: Now a Minor Television Miniseries!!
I must have had an especially dumb education. The stories for our English class were out of textbooks that chopped up stories to the point where they were basically unreadable, with huge sections of stories left out entirely or summarized in a few extraneous paragraphs between excerpts.
I think the only full book we had assigned was Lord of the Flies, which as an angsty teen seemed good.
Also the time I got fed up with excerpts and just read the books assigned to the honors classes on my own and read The Giver. Which I thought had fairly strong sexual undertones in it's relationship between the giver and his apprentice and an unsatisfying ending.
Thinking back, the Shakespeare we read in high school feels incredibly random. I remember reading Twelfth Night (loved it), The Tempest (weird), Midsummer Night's Dream (hated it at the time, loved it when I read it again years later), and a few of his sonnets.
No R&J, no Hamlet, and no Macbeth either which, you would have figured that someone would have assigned one of those.
Hamlet is kinda wasted on high school students, I think
I guess people feel compelled to assign it cause it’s like, the Shakespeare, but it’s so interior-focused that it seems badly suited for classroom reading
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Hamlet is kinda wasted on high school students, I think
I guess people feel compelled to assign it cause it’s like, the Shakespeare, but it’s so interior-focused that it seems badly suited for classroom reading
to me the problem with hamlet in high school is that there's been so much horrible shit written about it over the past 400 years and that's the stuff that's been force-fed to kids (and teachers!) for so long... if you're teaching it at a level where there are any stakes at all, the kids are going to play it safe and just regurgitate analysis that stems from like, an 18thC understanding of the play.
hamlet is so exciting because it's so raw and yet so coded. shakespeare was at his intellectual peak... to such an extent that we're only now getting around to the seeing the nuts and bolts of the play as academics
if anyone's interested, here's an essay i wrote when i was first teaching it and most obsessed. (it winds up shooting wide of the mark in its search for direction, and it gets increasingly pretentious, but it's easy to read and links to a couple of the most important new readings of hamlet in a hundred years)
i'm trying to come around to teaching it. my head teacher reckons she gets a very earnest response from kids... and she's been doing this way longer than me. still... at what cost such blasphemy?
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
The four Shakespeare plays I would use for high school (assuming one a year):
Hamlet
Richard III
Othello
Twelfth Night (or what you will - I could easily be persuaded to switch this out for any of the other crossdressing comedies)
Those are not necessarily my favorites, mind (although Othello is one of my top shows)
But they provide, I think, a good range
0
astrobstrdSo full of mercy...Registered Userregular
The one I would teach is Titus Andronicus. It may be the worst play, but 15 year old me would have loved that it is basically a dressed up GWAR show.
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
edited July 2018
I love Titus. I played Chiron once! I got my dick cut off on stage!
I like a lot of Shakespeare's "bad" plays though. Like Two Gents and Winter's Tale are also in my top plays probably, and they're both an absolute fucking mess.
I could actually make a case for teaching them to high schoolers because they tend to be rawer and lacking some of the multilayered subtleties of his big notable shows.
Quetzi on
+1
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Nathaniel Hawthorne is the worst "great" American writer by far and reading anything by him was a fucking slog.
what about james fenimore cooper
Oh yes, Cooper. He never used a single direct word when entire verbose paragraphs could be used instead. At one point I remember he used two paragraphs to dance around the fact that the group was at a salt spring, and never once used the word "salt" in the pages that were at the location.
You're in good company disliking him, because Mark Twain absolutelyloathed his writing style.
0
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
edited July 2018
Mark Twain also fucking hated Pride and Prejudice.
I love Titus. I played Chiron once! I got my dick cut off on stage!
I like a lot of Shakespeare's "bad" plays though. Like Two Gents and Winter's Tale are also in my top plays probably, and they're both an absolute fucking mess.
I could actually make a case for teaching them to high schoolers because they tend to be rawer and lacking some of the multilayered subtleties of his big notable shows.
Where would Shakespeare's sonnets come in with all of this? I ended up enjoying them when I read them in college, and I think would be fun for students to look at, especially breaking down the differences in style and also content.
I actually manage to dodge The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rhye, AND Wuthering Heights during high school! Yippee for me I guess!
The worst book that I remember actually putting my eyes on was deffo the Scarlet Letter because it perfectly mimics a type of writing from the Puritans that I think is, like, the most boring shit in existence.
The book that I had the strongest philosophical disagreement with was As I Lay Dying because that book's plot is about good people cardbord cutouts who vaguely resemble being good getting dicked over, no questions asked, and all the assholes and dirtbags being rewarded. Save maybe Vardman? I can't remember what happens to him in the end. I'm honestly really glad that I read "Barn Burning" last year because that gives me a more nuanced view of Faulkner.
I also hated The Pearl for similar reasons. I really just don't mesh with bleakness, it seems.
The book that I remember that all my friends loathed that I managed to forget to read was Sartor Resatus, which I hear was a great big ball of symbolism and nothing much happening.
I found A Separate Peace to be a book full of air and nothingness. I guess because I didn't care about any of the characters I didn't give a damn about what actually happened. I guess I didn't understand that the characters in the book were really strongly coded gay. I think I remember finding Bridge to Teribithia to be a lot more boring, actually.
Where A Red Fern Grows is, like, the ur-example of Newberry Fiction that really can't be topped nor should any attempt at topping it be made. It's done. There's no point.
I think the first example of me really liking a piece of fiction was A Wrinkle in Time, because that shit is the goddamn catnip for middle schoolers who think themselves as smart. Like me, when I was a kid that age.
Pride and Prejudice is a book that I remember wanting to like more than I did. It wasn't terrible by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't the thing I wanted it to be.
I was also one of those kids who identified way too much with Piggy from The Lord of the Flies.
I remember both liking and completing was Hamlet, for some reason. I don't know why because I usually don't like tragedies and I have a hard time reading plays. However, I found Macbeth to be overwrought and unfun. Its greatest sin, or at least the greatest sin of the Macbeth thing I watched — which was the one with Patrick Stewart in the lead — was that it took itself way too seriously.
I favor the interpretation of Lord of the Flies where it would have been a very different book if you'd changed any of the original circumstances of that group of kids. Those boys came from the same era of English private schools that Pink Floyd depicted in The Wall with a line of blank-faced children marching obediently into a sausage grinder. The only thing surprising is that they lasted as long as they did before becoming violent with each other.
In particular, I think the all-female version that's being worked on in Hollywood right now is gonna be reeeal fuckin dumb. Exerting your will through force and purging empathy have never been enshrined as virtues for girls the way they have been for boys.
Desert Leviathan on
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
Mm. You could do an all-female version, though I expect the Piggy character would be driven to suicide rather than actively slaughtered. Adolescents are horrifically cruel regardless of gender. But it would be a fundamentally different narrative, even if you kept the same beats, just because of the gender baggage the audience brings to the story.
I actually think it's kind of an interesting thought experiment, though I'm not sure whether it's worth making a movie.
edit: I disagree a little on the empathy thing, too. Girls are rewarded for performative empathy, which lets people hide some really sociopathic behaviour under a guise of good intentions. Yeah, I do think it's an interesting idea tbh.
I had to read the inspiration for Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe, in high school.
Instead of coming away from it being touched by the author's love letter to what baseball means to the American psyche, I bitterly wondered why I had to read a book about a man that abandons his impoverished family to recruit ghosts to play baseball in the field he turned a significant amount of his farmland into and also kidnap JD Salinger at gunpoint so they could go on a road trip to see baseball games in America's most famous stadia.
I loathe that book.
Captain Dream on
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0
Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
The Great Gatsby
field of dreams is probably the movie I resent the most
I liked Hamlet and one of my reports in that class was claiming Hamlet was only pretending to be insane because he possessed the mental capacity to not just make jokes, but understand the jokes he was making that ranged into the metaphysical.
However that is also the class where I got sent to the dean because the teacher felt "unsafe" about me. Which was brought about when they required a massive essay in the span of a single test, handwritten, with the stupidest questions to pick from for a topic. The title of mine was "Bullshit 2: The Bullshittening" featuring my stream of conscious and growing irritation. Because A) I had just finished spending weeks writing the aforementioned eight-page essay and now I was writing a four pages one in two hours, I'm left-handed and smudge everything when handwriting reports, and C) my hand cramps up really quickly when handwriting entire pages and pain triggers my sarcasm function with a vengeance.
Sighs, Satin, and the Potion of Trembling Secrets: Part 4 of the Larlar Saga: Now a Minor Television Miniseries!!
Hot take, Great Gatsby is a reasonably good book about shitty, miserable assholes living in the worst time in American history by written by a man who hated everything and everyone.
+7
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Hot take, Great Gatsby is a reasonably good book about shitty, miserable assholes living in the worst time in American history by written by a man who hated everything and everyone.
Oh, there are worse times in American History. Not great, but not the worst.
Posts
I have a suspicion that it was The Old Man and the Sea. It's short so teachers try to sneak it in as a short work instead of a full novel to assign, and it's just so pointlessly bleak. "Sometimes you need to catch a fish, but you can't, because the universe doesn't care. So you fail, and then you die." It's the nautical version of "To Build a Fire" except the old man gets to go die in his bed. Not bad to read, but there's not much meat to pick off those bones so class discussions just get tedious and go on forever and suck any interest out of it forever.
This was also most of that class's first experience with McCarthy and hoo boy, hitting a bunch of 17-year olds with having to read that shit cold in only a few minutes is, uh, brutal. Especially since that was probably the single headiest passage out of that book, and thus contained some absolutely tremendous McCarthy sentences
here's an excerpt from that passage to give you an idea, some decently sized spoilers for The Crossing within
I think this is the reason I have a much more positive view of Romeo and Juliet than most of my contemporaries. A friend of mine in high school and I used the "I bite my thumb at you, sir!" as a joke insult for years after we got to act it out in a group reading.
I also got to read the part of Mercutio, which also colors my views of it.
In terms of books I hated that I was forced to read, The Pearl comes to mind. I hated how fatalistic it was when trying to approach its themes.
So you're saying that the fish is a metaphor for discussions about the book? Seems like a good idea when you're alone but once you present it to the group it's a bare skeleton?
*strokes chin intellectually*
My recollection of Eng Lit was that we did (in no particular order):
Macbeth
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
Lord Of The Flies
Pride & Prejudice
Henry IV I/II.
There must have been another one we did (1 book/term, 6 terms) but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. So something deeply unmemorable, I suppose. I vaguely recally an interlude of smuggling paperbacks in, and hiding them within the cover of the book we were supposed to be reading. This was when I read the first Flashman book.
I actually rather liked or at least was OK with all of them, bar one.
Best: Henry IV (Falstaff & Bardolf ♥)
Worst: Pride & Prejudice. I strongly disliked every single character in this book and wished more bad things would happen to them, especially if it was some kind of injury or illness that would make them shut up forever.
We did Doctor Faustus. I can't imagine Marlowe being terribly pleased with whatever drunken lunatic they got to write the bits with the Pope.
PSN:Furlion
just like, what the hell
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I think the only full book we had assigned was Lord of the Flies, which as an angsty teen seemed good.
Also the time I got fed up with excerpts and just read the books assigned to the honors classes on my own and read The Giver. Which I thought had fairly strong sexual undertones in it's relationship between the giver and his apprentice and an unsatisfying ending.
Washington Irving is pretty bad (outside of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle that is)
No R&J, no Hamlet, and no Macbeth either which, you would have figured that someone would have assigned one of those.
I guess people feel compelled to assign it cause it’s like, the Shakespeare, but it’s so interior-focused that it seems badly suited for classroom reading
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Steam // Secret Satan
what about james fenimore cooper
to me the problem with hamlet in high school is that there's been so much horrible shit written about it over the past 400 years and that's the stuff that's been force-fed to kids (and teachers!) for so long... if you're teaching it at a level where there are any stakes at all, the kids are going to play it safe and just regurgitate analysis that stems from like, an 18thC understanding of the play.
hamlet is so exciting because it's so raw and yet so coded. shakespeare was at his intellectual peak... to such an extent that we're only now getting around to the seeing the nuts and bolts of the play as academics
if anyone's interested, here's an essay i wrote when i was first teaching it and most obsessed. (it winds up shooting wide of the mark in its search for direction, and it gets increasingly pretentious, but it's easy to read and links to a couple of the most important new readings of hamlet in a hundred years)
i'm trying to come around to teaching it. my head teacher reckons she gets a very earnest response from kids... and she's been doing this way longer than me. still... at what cost such blasphemy?
why don't you ramlet
Hamlet
Richard III
Othello
Twelfth Night (or what you will - I could easily be persuaded to switch this out for any of the other crossdressing comedies)
Those are not necessarily my favorites, mind (although Othello is one of my top shows)
But they provide, I think, a good range
I like a lot of Shakespeare's "bad" plays though. Like Two Gents and Winter's Tale are also in my top plays probably, and they're both an absolute fucking mess.
I could actually make a case for teaching them to high schoolers because they tend to be rawer and lacking some of the multilayered subtleties of his big notable shows.
Oh yes, Cooper. He never used a single direct word when entire verbose paragraphs could be used instead. At one point I remember he used two paragraphs to dance around the fact that the group was at a salt spring, and never once used the word "salt" in the pages that were at the location.
You're in good company disliking him, because Mark Twain absolutely loathed his writing style.
Where would Shakespeare's sonnets come in with all of this? I ended up enjoying them when I read them in college, and I think would be fun for students to look at, especially breaking down the differences in style and also content.
It did not seem an accurate portrayal of how children would behave under the circumstances described.
But maybe I give kids too much credit.
only takes a couple
I might have identified with Piggy a little too much at the time
The worst book that I remember actually putting my eyes on was deffo the Scarlet Letter because it perfectly mimics a type of writing from the Puritans that I think is, like, the most boring shit in existence.
The book that I had the strongest philosophical disagreement with was As I Lay Dying because that book's plot is about good people cardbord cutouts who vaguely resemble being good getting dicked over, no questions asked, and all the assholes and dirtbags being rewarded. Save maybe Vardman? I can't remember what happens to him in the end. I'm honestly really glad that I read "Barn Burning" last year because that gives me a more nuanced view of Faulkner.
I also hated The Pearl for similar reasons. I really just don't mesh with bleakness, it seems.
The book that I remember that all my friends loathed that I managed to forget to read was Sartor Resatus, which I hear was a great big ball of symbolism and nothing much happening.
I found A Separate Peace to be a book full of air and nothingness. I guess because I didn't care about any of the characters I didn't give a damn about what actually happened. I guess I didn't understand that the characters in the book were really strongly coded gay. I think I remember finding Bridge to Teribithia to be a lot more boring, actually.
Where A Red Fern Grows is, like, the ur-example of Newberry Fiction that really can't be topped nor should any attempt at topping it be made. It's done. There's no point.
I think the first example of me really liking a piece of fiction was A Wrinkle in Time, because that shit is the goddamn catnip for middle schoolers who think themselves as smart. Like me, when I was a kid that age.
Pride and Prejudice is a book that I remember wanting to like more than I did. It wasn't terrible by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't the thing I wanted it to be.
I was also one of those kids who identified way too much with Piggy from The Lord of the Flies.
I remember both liking and completing was Hamlet, for some reason. I don't know why because I usually don't like tragedies and I have a hard time reading plays. However, I found Macbeth to be overwrought and unfun. Its greatest sin, or at least the greatest sin of the Macbeth thing I watched — which was the one with Patrick Stewart in the lead — was that it took itself way too seriously.
I'm pretty sure I just barely passed the test about it giving pure bullshit answers.
In particular, I think the all-female version that's being worked on in Hollywood right now is gonna be reeeal fuckin dumb. Exerting your will through force and purging empathy have never been enshrined as virtues for girls the way they have been for boys.
I actually think it's kind of an interesting thought experiment, though I'm not sure whether it's worth making a movie.
edit: I disagree a little on the empathy thing, too. Girls are rewarded for performative empathy, which lets people hide some really sociopathic behaviour under a guise of good intentions. Yeah, I do think it's an interesting idea tbh.
Instead of coming away from it being touched by the author's love letter to what baseball means to the American psyche, I bitterly wondered why I had to read a book about a man that abandons his impoverished family to recruit ghosts to play baseball in the field he turned a significant amount of his farmland into and also kidnap JD Salinger at gunpoint so they could go on a road trip to see baseball games in America's most famous stadia.
I loathe that book.
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However that is also the class where I got sent to the dean because the teacher felt "unsafe" about me. Which was brought about when they required a massive essay in the span of a single test, handwritten, with the stupidest questions to pick from for a topic. The title of mine was "Bullshit 2: The Bullshittening" featuring my stream of conscious and growing irritation. Because A) I had just finished spending weeks writing the aforementioned eight-page essay and now I was writing a four pages one in two hours,
Oh, there are worse times in American History. Not great, but not the worst.