Books you had to read for school that you could not stand

[YourReality]

Lord of the Flies...oh the inhumanity...

Oh I hear ya, that was a particularly awful example of trying to slip high school students the message that people are predisposed to do nasty things.

I really really really hated Stone Angel. The only point I could manage to pull out of that mess is that some bitchy lady got old and didn't learn a damn thing. I didn't need a giant novel for that, thanks, we all have a cranky old great aunt who gets the same message across.

[Sammael]

I have to read A Home on the Field and Bird by Bird for the AP English III summer assignment. The first is fairly decent, except for the fact that the author misuses phrases such as "crossing the Rubicon" and doesn't explain many of his actions. The second, however, mostly talks about how hard it is to be a writer and that most writers have mental problems, instead of giving "Advice on Writing and Life" like it's supposed to.

Other books include:
The Odyssey: Actually good, but the school copy skipped so many books as to make the story extremely disjointed.
Oedipus Rex: Also good, but the version was horrible. Instead of referencing the Greek gods, it often used 'God' instead. The teacher also made the class read it out loud.
Things Fall Apart: I could never get into it. The story was bland and the main character was unlikable.

Everything else was mostly ruined by overanalyzation, the teacher going too slow (10 pages a day, while I do at least 60 in an hour), and the class reading out loud, in painfully slow monotones. At some points the reading was so horrible I volunteered to play all of the parts.

I learned much more about English grammar from 1 Latin class than from 10 years of English classes. Latin actually went into detail on different tenses, voices, moods, and cases; while English was still teaching elementary reading levels and basic uses of adjectives, adverbs, etc.

[thicknavyrain]

Lord of the Flies...oh the inhumanity...

Oh I hear ya, that was a particularly awful example of trying to slip high school students the message that people are predisposed to do nasty things.

Makes me feel more justified to do horrible things such as burning tremendously boring books if it's in my nature to do so...

[McCaber]

I learned much more about English grammar from 1 Latin class than from 10 years of English classes. Latin actually went into detail on different tenses, voices, moods, and cases; while English was still teaching elementary reading levels and basic uses of adjectives, adverbs, etc.

True that, sir. Latin made me think about the language I was speaking and gave me names to the parts of speech I was using every day.

I read Sense and Sensibility for an AP class, and I was like the only one in the class who really didn't like it. But Austen and I don't get along well.

[Jorpho]

I learned much more about English grammar from 1 Latin class than from 10 years of English classes. Latin actually went into detail on different tenses, voices, moods, and cases; while English was still teaching elementary reading levels and basic uses of adjectives, adverbs, etc.

That says more about the quality of your English classes than it does about how great Latin classes are.

Latin was a nifty challenge, but oy, memorizing the genders, declensions, and conjugations for every single bluddy word got so very tedious.

[Tarquinius]

I learned much more about English grammar from 1 Latin class than from 10 years of English classes. Latin actually went into detail on different tenses, voices, moods, and cases; while English was still teaching elementary reading levels and basic uses of adjectives, adverbs, etc.

It's the same for me - my English 10 Honours class was going over complex and simple subjects and predicates while my Latin 2 class actually talked about things like tenses and voices. I don't think my English class ever mentioned the idea of passive and active voices.

[Psycho Goose]

I also liked The Great Gatsby- didn't love it, found it slow and boring and not my type of thing at all, but I liked it for one main reason:
IT WASN'T THE SCARLET LETTER.

That book LITERALLY bored me to tears. If I ever have to do a "find the symbolism!" type assignment again, I'll probably kill myself. I hate explaining symbolism, since I tend to take books at face value, so unless the symbolism is right in front of my nose, or pointed out to me, it's just words. The only time I actually enjoyed that damn story was when we had to make a soundtrack for it- we had to find a song that fit the four main characters and one that captured the book itself, make a little album book and burn a CD for extra credit. I picked country songs, and then picked five Phoenix Wright themes as a "bonus track".

After that mess, The Great Gatsby was practically heaven.

That... that sounds exactly (well, minus the CD project) like what I was going to say. That's... uncanny.

I didn't like Frankenstein so much, but I think that's more the teacher's fault than the author's. I actually managed to accidentally Heart of Darkness despite said teacher. That was sophomore year.

Last year was our American Lit year. Scarlet Letter -- bleagh. Great Gatsby -- OK. Overrated, but okay. As I Lay Dying -- Loved, even though most of my class hated it. (What can I say -- I'm weird.)

[MotorToad]

I suppose The Scarlet Letter has been mentioned, but I'll mention it again because I don't think it can be sufficiently derided.

The worst I was subjected to, though, was in American Literature. See, I had to take some sort of literature class, and had the choice of early English (NO!!!!!!) later American (it was full when I registered for classes) and early American, which was 1620-Twain. Twain? I fucking love Twain, we'll survive this class, I'm sure.

Not quite so. We went over Calvin and his contemporaries for most of the course, with their religion-centric horribleness; Scarlet Letter AGAIN (are you kidding me? We're in college, you jerk); and then two weeks of ThoreauEmersonWhitman and I think he mentioned that Twain was famous just before finals.

[Geekthras]

Well Sophie's World was okay until the big plot twist which made me angry

Spoiler:

It turns out that the two characters who have only been referred to in name, never seen, are in fact the real ones and everyone else is imaginary.

[Sir_Elderberry]

Well Sophie's World was okay until the big plot twist which made me angry

Spoiler:

It turns out that the two characters who have only been referred to in name, never seen, are in fact the real ones and everyone else is imaginary.

Not so.

Spoiler:

They're all imaginary, because they're all in the work of fiction/philosophy textbook. It's mentioned at one point. You, the reader, are just one reality-level above the Major or whoever he was. So if the characters in the book are imaginary, but think they're real, but then think they're imaginary, but are actually even less real than they know, and then the ones who believed themselves real are imaginary and don't know it...what does that say about your preconceptions on the nature of reality? I think that was the point.

[evilspoons]

I didn't really find "To Kill a Mockingbird" enjoyable despite my parents thinking it's super-excellent. I did "Grapes of Wrath" for some English project and only ended up reading the first half and bullshitting my way through the rest of it - and I got 97% in that class - in ADVANCED PLACEMENT grade 12 English, no less.

I quite liked "Crime and Punishment", surprisingly enough. Maybe it's just because everyone said it was obtuse and I should've picked something else. Haha.

[MotorToad]

I did "Grapes of Wrath" for some English project and only ended up reading the first half and bullshitting my way through the rest of it - and I got 97% in that class - in ADVANCED PLACEMENT grade 12 English, no less.

Obviously your teacher couldn't finish it, either.

[mispeled]

The Grapes of Wrath, because stupid chapters about a turtle are supposed to deep symbolism. I say that symbolism isn't doing it's job right if it's only function is to be symbolic.

I liked Lord of the Flies. Any book that has me running around for two weeks telling my friends "sucks to your ass-mar" is a good book, in, ahem, my book.

[Psycho Goose]

The Grapes of Wrath, because stupid chapters about a turtle are supposed to deep symbolism. I say that symbolism isn't doing it's job right if it's only function is to be symbolic.

I haven't read any Steinbeck yet (though East of Eden is on my to-read list), but this is pretty much why I despised The Scarlet Letter.

[podbaydoor]

Exact same reason for Invisible Man (the Ellison one). Ugh, I hated that stupid Negro bank thing. The symbolism couldn't have hit us over the head harder than if the author had been armed with a two-by-four.

I actually liked A Separate Peace. The only "bad" thing was that I tended to identify with the protagonist a little too much and got very frustrated on his behalf, frequently. Also, I reread segments recently and realized the homoerotic subtext has about the subtlety of a brick.

[NecklaceOfShadow]

I suppose that I shall have to join in on the Scarlet Letter rants. It was a horrible, dull book. It was the first book that I ever had to use SparkNotes* for. I almost gave up halfway through the book until I was joking around with a then-friend of mine and I found a way to make the book so ridiculous that there was no way not to like it: we substituted the main character's names with the names of the actors in the remake of Hairspray.*** She had actually liked the book before and doing this apparently ruined the book for her but it made it bearable for me. It was what actually enabled me to read the actual book instead of the poor internet summary. Our teacher was also complete and utter rubbish and part of my frustrations with the book stem from the fact that she couldn't teach her way out of a paper bag.

Romeo and Juliet was horrible. It was tedious, repetitive, and the two hormone-laced main characters were some of the most asinine fools that I've ever encountered in a book. Romeo was one of the most unlikeable main characters ever and the book became more and more unbearable after Mercutio died. I do admit that my opinion of it might have been colored more by how we went over the book than the content of the book itself. Had I read it alone, I might have just thought of it as a silly little play that tons of literary references seem to come from and I would have left it at that, never to remember it again. The two months we devoted to the book were some of the most dull and dry times we had in that class. The only good thing about reading it is that it made the teacher make a passing reference to Inferno, which I read at the same time as Romeo and Juliet and which I enjoyed much more.

Lord of the Flies was assigned as a summer assignment that I wasn't informed of, so I had to rush through it at the beginning of the year. I was completely fine with the beginning; it was shaping out to be neither an incredible story nor a horrible one. By the scene in which the one boy was talking to Beelzebub, though, the book had completely failed to impress me. Piggy was really the only character I cared about and I think that I cried a bit when he died. His death was the final thing that turned me off of the book.

Two years ago, we read a play called A Raisin in the Sun. It was a badly written play that deals with a black family trying to move into a well-off neighborhood and the evil, caricature white man trying to stop them. I don't really want this to be taken the wrong way; I'm not trying to belittle the things that people went through in the past. I just think that the way that the play was executed wasn't effective. The message of the book was more important to the author than the actual book itself and that pushed me away.

I seem to be one of a few people who like Anna Karenina, though. Yes, it's a bit dry at parts, but the world that was made is so complex and detailed that I have no choice but to commend Tolstoy for being able to craft it so well. The book is an interesting commentary on life and society itself and it's nice to find things that you haven't noticed in your own life displayed clearly in the book.

* the only book that I've ever had to use SparkNotes for, really.
** I really do hope that I'm using that correctly.
*** she's a musical fanatic and I just played along. If I remember correctly, it was Effron -> Dimmsdale. Q. Latifah -> Chillingworth. John Travolta -> Prynne. Christopher Walken -> Pearl.

[guyy]

I hate lots of books I read for school, because the incessant "analysis" makes almost anything intolerable. But the worst of the worst...Beloved. This book is perhaps the most horribly executed idea in the history of half-decent ideas. It acts like a sort of (over)dramatic realistic fiction, but with the ultra-bizarre supernatural elements, excessive (and mostly religious) symbolism, numerous scenes that are creepy entirely for the sake of being creepy, and writing that's alternately needlessly perplexing and just plain terrible...it becomes a disturbing romp through a land of ridiculous implausibility, interrupted only by a single chapter that actually makes sense before diving back into the insanity.

Yet everyone else in my class loved it, and couldn't stop going on about how amazing and wonderful it was. I don't know if they were all nuts or just afraid of being called racist. As for me, I support the book's supposed message...but it utterly failed to communicate it. (And some people in my dorm hated it just as much as me, so there.)

[Jorpho]

Maybe Lord of the Flies should have its own thread already.

Two years ago, we read a play called A Raisin in the Sun. It was a badly written play that deals with a black family trying to move into a well-off neighborhood and the evil, caricature white man trying to stop them. I don't really want this to be taken the wrong way; I'm not trying to belittle the things that people went through in the past. I just think that the way that the play was executed wasn't effective. The message of the book was more important to the author than the actual book itself and that pushed me away.

I remember that one. I kind of liked it, actually; otherwise I probably wouldn't remember it so well over all these years. I wouldn't have thought the characters to be particularly caricatured at all. If nothing else, at least it was short and not the source of enduring pain.

Some plays that I have almost completely forgotten are the ones by George Bernard Shaw. He has some awesome quotes, but I can barely remember a thing about "Man and Superman". Maybe it was the setting.

[The TJ]

My English Teacher once made us read "A walk to remember" by Nicholas Sparks.

This book was basically a chick flick put to paper. That's not to say it's a particularley BAD thing, but it's literary value was zero to none.

Think "Twilight" without the vampires... And

Spoiler:

The girl dies at the end... But the boy still loves her (Done in a false swoon voice (If that makes any sense.))

[MotorToad]

... tons of literary references seem to come from...

I'm beginning to think that the amount of cultural references are inverse to the quality of the book (or movie).

[Chuff]

Two years ago, we read a play called A Raisin in the Sun. It was a badly written play that deals with a black family trying to move into a well-off neighborhood and the evil, caricature white man trying to stop them. I don't really want this to be taken the wrong way; I'm not trying to belittle the things that people went through in the past. I just think that the way that the play was executed wasn't effective. The message of the book was more important to the author than the actual book itself and that pushed me away.

I haven't read it, but I saw it live last year and thought it was really good. Perhaps that's just because Benetha was played really, really well, but I thought it worked well altogether. I think it dragged on a bit, but otherwise it was great.

Come to think of it, we don't have anywhere to discuss theater. I just saw Blood Relations today.

[MooglesLord]

Semi-related: Has anyone ever had to make a book log? At the simplest level, it is a record of all the books you have read. At the highest level, the one the most obnoxious english teacher ever made me reach in seventh grade, you must make a table of:
Book
Author
Time started
Time stopped reading
Times for all the different rimes you began reading and stopped reading for the while
Date begun
Date finished
Personal opinion

This drove me fucking INSANE. She recommended "attaching a stopwatch to your bookmark".

Mother of God. In Tenth Grade english, my idiot of a teacher (actually, I think the stupidest teachers I've ever had were all english teachers) Decided that it would be a good idea if the class spent the first 20 minutes of class reading. To "prove" that we were paying attention, we had to fill out logs, with titles, authors, and summary of what we read. You have NO idea how much of a pain in the arse it is to summarize a set of 20-25 pages in the middle of the 7th book in a series.

Then we realized that she didn't read anything beyond the first two lines, so you could write anything you wanted, followed by a string of random letters and still get full credit.

I hate teachers that pull things like that. Same with teachers that want you to summarize what you've learned that day, but that's a discussion for another thread.


Referring to OP, I don't think I've ever intensely disliked any book I've been forced to read for school. Granted I never really read many books outside of school, but all the same. I think I read Julie of the Wolves, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, A Day No Pigs Would Die, The Giver, The Hobbit , and I think that might be it. I tended to hate the assignments from some teachers (300-450 open-ended questions each for Roll of Thunder and A Day no Pigs would die), but I tended to enjoy the reading for the sake of reading. If I had to pick my least favorite thing to read, it would Probably be the vast majorities of the short stories in high school english. I loved the stuff by O. Henry though.

[Sodium Hexametaphosphate]

Walden I loathe that book so much, I have debated with my LA teacher over it many times.

[Sartorius]

Oh Walden. I read it for fun, and I wanted to like it, I really did. I tried so hard to like it. But man Thoreau is just a terrible writer. Also a bit snobbish.

[Chicostick]

The Portrait of a Lady[i] by Henry James was just the worst thing ever for me. I don't like his method of storytelling, and his extremely verbose descriptions of things that seem to go on forever yet don't really add much to your picture of something. That, and Isabel Archer was the most annoying protagonist ever. "Oh I'm pretty and have never done any work, then get the opportunity to live with rich relatives in a foreign country, become rich myself, lead on a bunch of very decent men and turn them all down, then marry a total asshole and whine about it." I mean how can you empathize with a character like that? That and Gilbert Osmond's daughter Pansy was just the worst.

Man I hated that book.

[i]A River runs through it[i] was also pretty hard to read for me, but the worst of all was [i]Speak. Speak is about a girl who gets raped at a party, then goes on and on about all her misery and teen angst until she becomes a hero in the end. It was such a tacky story I almost gagged.

[Cynical Idealist]

I learned much more about English grammar from 1 Latin class than from 10 years of English classes. Latin actually went into detail on different tenses, voices, moods, and cases; while English was still teaching elementary reading levels and basic uses of adjectives, adverbs, etc.

It's the same for me - my English 10 Honours class was going over complex and simple subjects and predicates while my Latin 2 class actually talked about things like tenses and voices. I don't think my English class ever mentioned the idea of passive and active voices.

My English classes did.

Specifically, they mentioned that if you used a passive voice in an assignment, you would be beaten with your paper and then given an F. At least for Freshman English in high school.

That said, I've learned some new ways of looking at English from learning Japanese.

[KallistiEngel]

I wouldn't say I read it, so much as skimmed the first few chapters before deciding it wasn't worth my time, but "The Great Gatsby" by F... that guy. Upper-class socialites in the 1920s? Check. Little relevance to the modern day? Check. Boring to read? Check check checkity check.

There are other novels out there that make the same damned point and are more interesting reads.

[garak1a]

I went to french school, and we had an array of really shitty french books to read. The most notable being:

Les Aventures au Restovite (translated: The adventures at the fast food restaurant). The story of a young girl and her first job at the local McDonalds clone. FAIL.

La Quête d'Alexandre (The Quest of Alexander). The story of a french Canadian who leaves his seminary to find his missing younger brother. Complete with hardcore rape scene that the teachers tried hilariously to warn us about beforehand, which only made us laugh at it; since we were warned so hard, there was no shock value.

Jeanne, Fille du Roy (Jeanne, Girl of the King). The story of a teenage orphan from France in the 1700s who is sent to Canada to be the replacement-wife for a colonist.

Some of the other books we read were good, but those three I hated.

[frogman]

I actually thought the Great Gatsby was very good. It had beautiful writing and the ending was quite sad. It may have been a bit slow at times, but for the most part the pacing was okay for me. Of course, I liked a bunch of books mentioned (Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, etc.) so maybe I just like the kind of books that they would make you read for English class.

[KallistiEngel]

I actually thought the Great Gatsby was very good. It had beautiful writing and the ending was quite sad. It may have been a bit slow at times, but for the most part the pacing was okay for me. Of course, I liked a bunch of books mentioned (Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, etc.) so maybe I just like the kind of books that they would make you read for English class.

The Great Gatsby just didn't do it for me, as I've said. Of Mice and Men wasn't the most enjoyable to read, but I could grok why we had to read it and thought parts of it to be beautifully tragic. And I did enjoy Lord of the Flies. I even understood the point of reading The Crucible and found parts of it to be enjoyable. Maybe it was the point I was at in my life when I read The Great Gatsby that gave me that impression of it, but I don't think I could even try to pick up a copy of it now.

[Internetmeme]

The Great Gatsby. This is the single worst book I have EVER read in my life. I didn't really even understand the ending. The book was just so incoherent! Here's what I read from it:

Spoiler:

-Some guy moves to New York onto an island called the West Egg (I bet this is somehow "symbolism")
-He knows a girl that is there. He visits her.
-They go to New York.
-They shop, the girl's friend buys a dog.
-They argue about something about the dog (I think it was the gender) that I didn't get any sense of
-They take the dog home (I bet the dog is more "symbolism")
-There is a party the protagonist is invited to
-He meets a drunk guy in a library (probably more "symbolism")
-He meets Gatsby
-Gatsby invites him on a plane (maybe more "symbolism")
-Protagonist notices a light on dock (ITS A FUCKING LIGHT IT IS NOT FUCKING "SYMBOLISM". THAT IS STRETCHED AT BEST. ALSO, IF THIS IS SYMBOLISM THEN EVERYONE IS JESUS IN PURGATORY. FUCK YOU "SYMBOLISM")
-Some more crap happens
-They go to New York
-A SHADY GUY is added to your party!
-A SHADY GUY has mentioned a PLOT COUPON
-A SHADY GUY has left your party!
-Some more crap happens
-Gatsby mentions how much he loves girl protagonist knows (Daisy?)
-Protagonist brings Daisy and Gatsby over
-Protagonist leaves them home alone and takes a walk (dirty thoughts ensue)
-We learn about the obvious "symbolism" of Gatsby's house
-Gatsby goes home
-another party
-GATSBY has joined your party!
-DAISY has joined your party!
-your party has left for NEW YORK
-Some more crap happens
-GATSBY has left your party!
-DAISY has left your party!
-DIRTY THOUGHTS have joined your party!
-Gatsby drives Daisy home
-Gatsby hits old women
-Some more crap happens
-Daisy's boyfriend shoots Gatsby
-Protagonist finds Gatsby's father ("symbolism" I guess, at least it isn't a FUCKING LIGHT)
-Some more crap happens
-Protagonist moves somewhere else
-GAME OVER

[Sir_Elderberry]

Gatsby

Spoiler:

-Gatsby dies alone and pretty much completely unloved because he poured all of his talents into superficial materialism in an attempt to obtain his nearly impossible goal of a woman who had changed quite a bit since he last met her, so he was really just chasing an old dream that had long since died. I think that was the point.

Personally, I really liked it.

[frogman]

Yeah Internetmeme, if you had actually paid some attention to the book while reading it I'm sure it would have been a more enjoyable experience for you. From what you've said, you barely understood what you were reading at all.

[The Locutus of Borgnine]

I have to say that I honestly love The Old Man and the Sea and have read it annually since I was nine. It works as a parable for the dignity of a man pursuing what he was meant to do and also as a literary suicide note for Hemmingway (He joined the bleeding choir invisible a few years later).

Basically in this reading it is him saying "I wrestled the giant fish of IMPORTANT LITERARY ISSUES! (read in your best Calculon voice) and you sharks gnawed it until it was but so much tattered prose chum, you filthy animals!"

It is the only thing that works as a sort of Stoic morality tale and whiny compliant about the unfairness of things that I have ever read.

Also, I like The Scarlet Letter. Give "The Minister's Black Veil" a read if you didn't like it. It has the same moral themes, but in a much more succinct and haunting presentation.

My Worst Books

Their Eyes Were Watching God
City of Glass
Tale of Two Cities

Most WTF inducing?

Perfume

[Jorpho]

Tale of Two Cities

Really? I tried to read that for school back in Grade 8 and found it insufferable - but I thought I was too young to appreciate it (or even follow it along at all). Were my impressions not mistaken?

[The Locutus of Borgnine]

In my defense, I was fourteen. But I still found his prose overblown and annoying. The last bit was fairly good, but that did not in any way make up for the 400 pages of overblown dreck I suffered through.

Still, I had my revenge. Somewhere there is a 2003 Mini Cooper with a copy of A Tale of Two Cities propping up it's battery, highlighted for prominent themes.

[Jorpho]

In my defense, I was fourteen. But I still found his prose overblown and annoying. The last bit was fairly good, but that did not in any way make up for the 400 pages of overblown dreck I suffered through.

Yep, that's pretty much my story - only my edition was 360 pages. (I was eagerly looking forward to the end.)

And to top it off, for some reason the teacher handed me the comic book version when I was nearly finished, which completely spoiled the ending.

[Decker]

White Noise.

Was I supposed to care about the characters? Like...at all?

[rat4000]

Man, The Perfume rocked.

[campbell90]

Wuthering Heights sucks so bad