/lit/ - Literature

>>22510752
guns germs and steel

>>22510752
this dogshit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Ask_Alice

The Light in the Forest

>>22510752
The Scarlett Letter
It’s about how roasties deserve sympathy. Lol.

>>22510752
La vie devant soi

I literally knew it was a jewish writer before looking it up. It has parts about the holocaust but it is not the central point.

Holes by Louis Sachar

>>22510752
The New York trilogy. Halfway through I started thinking "why is this so bad?", got suspicious, checked wikipedia, and lo and behold I was actually correct.

>>22511031
THIS

>>22511031
Is it really that bad? I always planned to read it to see what I missed out on.. Never seen the film either.

>>22510752

Catcher in the Rye.

>>22510752
Tuesdays with Morrie

>>22511811
This was mogged unfathomably hard by Fifth Business after reading both back to back.

>>22510752
Catcher in the Rye I guess. If I wanted to listen to a whiny asshole complain about his life I would've made friends.

>>22510752
three comrades. it should've been called one simp, his aids gf and two irrelevant background characters

>>22510969
Same for me as well.
Didn't read it. Read chapter summaries online. I was a good student so when my femenist teacher knew I wasn't interested in reading it she was pissed. She liked me before that.

>>22510752
I couldn't stand The Power of One but the other kids seemed to like it.

>>22510752
all of them . Where I live there is a notion to force younger generations to read 200+ years old books in order to rouse "patriotism" and "nationalism" effectively detering everyone and anyone by the unapproachable clutches of unruly letters of a bygone era.
Notably some of the worst are:
anything from Krasicki, Czarne Stopy by Szmaglewska, The Paul Street Boys by Molnar

fucking hell, I hated learning and reading untill I left the hopeless circle of formal education.

>>22510752
The things they carried

>>22510752
The Bible.

>>22510969
>>22511854
Holy heckin based!

>>22511031
Shit opinion, book was great

>>22511031
>>22511048
I read it for a book report in 4th grade and it was kino. Maybe you were just too old when you read it?

>>22510755
No way they gave you that trash to read.

>>22510752
Pygmalion as a senior in high school. Gotta lecture the kids on why feminism is le good, I suppose.

>>22510752
A Modest Proposal

My 11th (yes really) grade english teacher had a fairly normal curriculum with Gatsby, Macbeth, and some other cannon works, but then she threw this into the mix hoping a popular YA book would get the the terminally unengaged students more interested in the class.
It didn't work. I already read the series in 7th grade (and even then I was able to see a lot of the flaws in it) and all the other girls into YA also read it several years ago. So basically half the class was rereading it realizing just how bad this book we liked when we were younger was and the other half was still just completely disinterested

>>22510752
Houwelandt. it's basically Buddenbrooks but contemporary and for wine drinking middle aged bitches, which perfectly describes my german teacher

It's real meandering. Basically a guy meets a bunch of eccentric people who go on and tell their entire life story and then at the end of it they will say some fortune cookie style wisdom and that was the super important message that the guy had to meet them in heaven to learn. It's also odd that it explicitly takes place in the Christian version of heaven without conforming to any widely held Christian view of what heaven is

>>22510752
Most of what we read. 11th English was the only one where I actually liked and engaged with the texts from what I can even recall. Even then we had stuff like Harlem renaissance and Langston Hughes which aren’t exactly key American works. Stuff like Thoreau and Whitman is definitely important for understanding our nations literary heritage but everyone knows deep down that Langston Hughes and the like are only included as Affirmative action choices.

>>22512745
Fucking pseuds and Mark Albom. Did he blow someone in the teacher's union or something?

>>22510969
I just re-read it recently. It's actually about how Arthur and Hester are descending deeper and deeper into depravity and moving further and further away from God throughout the book, and that they deserve every consequence coming to them. The presence of Chillingworth as a "villain" is focused on too much, because he's really there to remind the reader of the pain their sin has inflicted him with, rather than demonizing him. The sad truth is, however, that when you become like Chillingworth, where your entire life is dedicated to revenge and and bottled-up anger, you do become an ugly person, no matter if you were the one who was wronged in the first place. Pearl essentially fills the same role as Chillingworth, really, but instead of using hatred and jealousy to shine a light on their sin, Hawthorne has her childish ignorance and purity be a constant reminder of the gulf between them and her, and how eventually, the sins of the parents do indeed reflect on the child should they not repent. Hawthorne did have his misgivings concerning certain Puritan behaviors, but that is far and away from being entirely against his Puritan forefathers as he is taught as being. This is especially clear in his earlier work, Mosses From an Old Manse, or even in the introduction of The Scarlet Letter itself. You have to first reclaim Hawthorne's writings for yourself in order to be able to appreciate them in the same way Melville did, and they are incredible.
>Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; no success of mine — if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success — would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. “What is he?” murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. “A writer of story books! What kind of business in life — what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation — may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!” Such are the compliments bandied between my great grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine. Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here; always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the other hand, after the first two generations, performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to public notice.

>>22510752
I had to stop taking college literature classes because we would only read awful bullshit that the prof/TA had done their dissertation on, most have no indication of ever having read another book.

I signed up for a class in science fiction freshmen year and it had been turned into a class on feminist science fiction. There's a lot of bad science fiction but feminist science fiction is insanely bad.

>>22510752
unironically The Sorrows of Young Werther
fuck this book

The Awakening

>>22510752
My Name is Asher Lev. Not for antisemitic reason. I just thought the protagonist was boring but enjoyed the description of 1950s art supplies.

Heres a couple I remember from off top of my head:
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Scarlet Letter
The Jungle
Namesake
Grapes of Wrath (but I loved Of Mice and Men)
Ill just add too, my favourite is either Odyssey or tale of two cities

>>22512991
>Grapes of Wrath
Why didn't you like it? It's another book I read again recently (I've just going through and re-reading American classics lately. Currently on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer), and it was far better than I remembered it being. I haven't read anything else by Steinbeck, not even Of Mice and Men, but if The Grapes of Wrath is considered to be one of his worst novels, then I can't wait to dig into Cannery Row and East of Eden. He really has a way of, similar to Mark Twain, just taking a magnifying glass to the most mundane things and making them pop. I know there are plenty of people who find his prose dry and lifeless, but for me, it really brings me into the story like I'm right there in the room with Steinbeck listening to him recount the Joads' journey from Oklahoma to California. I also came away from that re-read with a whole new appreciation for the silly, broken faith of Jim Casy, and shockingly enough, his death affected me in a way I never would've expected from a novel I used to hate so much. God, I felt more charged with emotion then, reading that scene than I have reading any other book in a long time. In some ways, I even find Steinbeck now to be a better Hemingway as far as his prose goes. And, rather than Mark Twain — and of course this is coming from someone who has only read The Grapes of Wrath — I think that Steinbeck portrayed the American family, life, philosophy, and so on more faithfully than anyone else. I will say that my appreciation of this book has probably been aided tremendously by the time I've spent reading American history over the past couple years, so if you haven't taken a deep dive there yet, I'd highly recommend doing so.
>A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.
>In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the Children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck through the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning...Every night a world created, complete with furniture- friends made and enemies established; a world complete with braggarts and with cowards, with quiet men, with humble men, with kindly men. Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus.

>>22511031
Movie kicked ass

>>22510752
Not high school but in middle school we had to read some young adult book about a world where kids weren't allowed to be born. I don't remember if it was good or bad but I do remember the ending where a mass of secret kids were gunned down in the street after they tried to revolt

>>22512969
I like reading Dickens for the historical references that for him were just everyday occurrences. Also, like how in Moby Dick, there was a battery in New York city, whereas now there is just Battery Park.

>>22510752
Siddartha

>>22510752
broken lives.
its a true crime book but specific to western australia in the 50s. not only difficult to read because it contained original research but also because it was super dense. i met the author and the accused and got their signature which was cool but i didnt actually finish the book lol

>>22510755
Why was it so bad lol. I've heard good things about it, but I can believe it might also suck.

House on Mango Street, but even though it wasn't bad, I absolutely hated Midsummer's Night Dream for some reason, which is odd because I liked Romeo and Juliet

House on Mango Street.

Animal Farm
I hate this book.

>>22510752
A Separate Piece. Had to read it twice.

>>22514066
Tankie spotted

>>22510752
>Last year of high school the shittiest English teachers in the department decide to switch their curriculums
>Usual curriculum was Macbeth, Beowulf, and some other shit
>New curriculum was purely YA fiction that had come out within the year(2016ish)
Hated this shit so much. Some of the blandest and most uninspired stories I’ve ever had to endure.

>>22514074
Okay, that's a new one for me.
What exactly is a tankie?
And just in case, I turned 43 last week.

>>22514082
Damn, when I was in school, we never got to read Beowulf.
I did, but it wasn't required by school.

>>22514083
Slang for "hardcore communist", the "tank" part comes from Tiananmen Square as far as I know

Either way I'm just yanking your chain, Animal Farm is really lackluster and I don't see why they can't just have high-schoolers read non-fiction books on communism

>>22514066
its like 100 pages and not subtle at all, any 10/10 essay just talks about symbolism and social context of when Orwell wrote it.

>>22514100
Okay. Thanks for the explanation.

>>22510752
Into the wild. It seems like it was sort of iconic for the other kids, but I shat on it the whole time. Stopped reading halfway through, told the teacher it sucked, it was stupid, and that I wouldn’t read it and I would take the bad grade. I probably would like it more now though. Also the book “things fall apart”.

>>22514105
That's one of things I hated about most classes I took, "look for and write about the symbolism in these books!"
I'm like: "uh, no. You do realize that most people just write books because they want to and there isn't any hidden symbolism and if it is there, it's either merely coincidental or you are reading too much into it!"
And then I was kicked out of class.
Fucking brainlette teacher.

>>22511843
You can always just use voice memos on your phone.

>>22514120
4/10 bait, you leaned too hard into it by misspelling "brainlet", but good effort nonetheless

>>22514126
No, that was intentional.
It was a female teacher.
Dude and dudette, so Brainlette and Brainlette.

The door into summer by Heinlein.

>>22514141
*Brainlet and Brainlette

>>22514120
god im reminded of my essays on 1984 from back when i couldnt write essays well. so much garb writing "the sky was static to show it was a bleak future" "the dust on the table showed the paranoia and extents the party would go to" like duh no shit. if i were to write now id massively lean into the social context at the time rather than surface level symbolism. something "in many ways the environment of 1984 parallels the uk, in many ways the predictions made by orwell are paralleled in contemporary uk, albeit under the guise of state paternalism''. like yeah its still a weak ass statement but its at least somewhat original.

>>22514143
Big brainy distinction, still a retarded post.

Ethan Frome.

Fuck that book.

>>22514160
I liked that book. Movie was okay except for ruining the two characters.

>>22514159
Retarded how?

>>22514172
>uh, no. You do realize that most people just write books because they want to and there isn't any hidden symbolism and if it is there, it's either merely coincidental or you are reading too much into it!"
You can do still do symbolic analysis even if there isn’t conscious/artistic intent. It doesn’t mean there isn’t symbolic information to be found and analyzed, and this sort of reaction is an excuse not to think deeper on the work you’re reading.

Stasiland by Anna Funder
I am still angry about the book and I especially hate its author, Anna Funder
I also hate The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

>>22514188
Sorry, I should have been a little more clear. The teachers all said that everything has symbolism and that we must explain it.

>>22512470
I was like 14 and we had to read it for english class

>>22510752
Great Gatsby

>>22510755
Hey I was also asked to read that shit, in fact, I met quite a lot if people asking me to read that shit. Some even send me PDF of it. It was worrying.

The preview of Chuck Wendig's debut Star Wars novel for Disney was as egregious a crime against arts and letters as I was told.

>>22512904
Nicely put t. a descendant

>>22512957
Goethe shows you the secret in it. Embrace the schlock.

>>22513405
Among the hidden I believe

Had to read the Kite Runner in 11th grade.

Was weird af reading the male rape sections as a class and was the defining bad moment

>>22514424
I liked The Great Gatsby.
But then again, I'm from NY.
I moved out around 2004-2006.
Been back to visit old friends and family a few times but I'm never moving back there.

>>22514424
you must have had a damn good curriculum

>>22510752
A modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet where she was a rich white girl in a private school and Romeo was black and poor but studying there on a scholarship. I asked if I couldn't just read the original since my mother owned a copy and the teacher said no.

>>22510752
Ulysses

>>22511920
>Reading this when 14 years old in class
>Get ASMR and tingly goosebumps from how he describes licking the envelope
Too this day, I don't know why I had that reaction

>>22511044
Filtered

>A Bridge to Wiseman's Cove
Dogshit Australian novel following the adventures of some fat boy having his uninteresting identity crisis in a new coastal town while his aunt gets sloshed on wine playing the pokies
Think I lost part of my soul reading that.

>>22513986
It is baseless assumptions meant to retrofit evolutionary biology into the ideals of neoliberalism.

>>22511031
Loved this book, but looking back, it was fairly left wing. A lot of old books i read were like this.

>>22511618
He's having a /pol/ moment. He is saying the book is bad because a central plot point is about a white woman having an affair with a black man in the late 1800's. The main character is also Jewish if that helps you understand why the chud is mad.

>>22513986
Check out Jared Diamond’s early life. There is no reason a European man should trust his enemy to write reliably about him.

>>22515893
You seem very upset over someone's opinion. Is everything ok?

if media tells me anything it's that high schools and colleges don't even teach this stuff anymore, they assign contemporary novels by diverse authors and hold "discussions" online where each student submits some half-assed statement once a week to make sure they get an A in the class

can someone please confirm this i really want to be wrong

>>22515940
I only took one literature class in college and it seemed fine, we read Dickens and Nabokov, then the exams were writing essays about them. Seemed fine and this was only 2 years ago. I have taken other gen ed classes though where it was just read 10 pages from a textbook, write a half assed prompt on an online discussion, then reply to 2 other half assed discussion prompt responses (the responses usually read like "That is a very interesting point you made here. I generally agree with X, but I also think you should have mentioned Y. You really changed my perspective here.")
In highschool it was just a shit show. Around half of all the books you read are about some form of racial discrimination (jim crowe, the holocaust, slavery, etc.). You still read the books out loud together as a class even in 12th grade. And you don't actually discuss the books or write your thoughts or anything, you just have to read each chapter several times so you can memorize inane details for the exam (I remember once having a question ask what time the clock said at the beginning of the chapter).
Basically every highschool english teacher wanted to be a writer, failed because they were utterly talentless humans, and then takes out their frustrations by lording over a bunch of schoolchildren

>>22513986
when i was in college i had a professor who said it was lame because geographic determinism disregards people's agency. it's not a scholarly work. kind of surprised to see it assigned in school.

>>22510752
Mr M was by far the best English teacher and the ony one who could do his job well. The ranking is Mr M and then the Freshman year guy who half assed it like he didnt want to be there and then the rest of them and the very bottom is the landwhale lady. Besides Langston Hughes/ Harlem renaissance shit I clearly dont care about the 11th year english lit curriculum was better than the other years which has a bit to do with it but also he was a good teacher. I wish I had done better in that class so I wouldnt have had to fail out of the advanced plcement english into the moron class with the fat lady whose name I forget.

>>22516660
The Freshman year english teacher wasnt bad but he definitely seemed like he didnt want to be there. He had that aura to him.

>>22515893
When did faganons start using chud unironically?

Don't say Anne Frank's Diary don't say Anne Frank's Diary
Uhhhhhhhhhhh
TKAMB

>>22515940
i just had a look at the state english exams and they still seem to have the same bs questions, but they seem heavily focused on exploring "perspectives and values" now as opposed to actually discussing the text. the questions seem a lit easier to just talk about experiences instead of the books youve read

>>22514029
fuck you

The Awakening hands down. "Oh yes it's very feminist to cheat on your husband and abandon your family for no real reason!"

Lmao we read the hunger gaymes in highschool because it was a "cultural phenomenon"
I guess they wanted kids to read even if it was schlock
Didn't work lol
Now I post on /lit/ meaning I never read

I liked the first section about the Golem but it fell hard after that

>>22516994
Normal placement English class is basically just babysitting. I had to do a year in that after I failed out of the higher English class due to poor grades. I think we read one 200 something page book the entire semester and then just did miscellaneous stuff. Mr M was right when he said it is physically impossible to fail out of normal level English unless you just don’t show up.

>>22514070
>Had to read it twice
I'm sorry you got held back.

>>22516994
I really get the feeling any hs class that isn’t advanced placement is just the equivalent of babysitting. I say that as a generalization but also from my limited experience.

>>22517035
If you have bad teachers, sure. Otherwise, nah. I work with at-risk-of-dropping out kids and have them reading Corncob McCarthy, Ursula K Le Guin, Beowulf, Richard Wright, etc. It just takes good, creative teaching to get kids into lit. I prefer that to AP types because they’re usually up their own asses with how smart they think they are that conversation and teaching them is dfficult

Sherman Alexie. Fuck that guy. What a colossal fucking racist. Everything about his books are shit. Reading his prose is like reading poetry from an elementary schooler. He throws in random rhymes that dont make any sense as if they're beautiful or meaningful, but they're just half assed. When a fight breaks out he wrote "there was motion and commotion." What sort of halfwit uses those two words together to invoke a sense of chaos? Everything he writes is about how awful white people are, and the book we read didnt even have any white characters. It was just hundreds of pages of complaints against this nebulous force of whiteness that's somewhere unseen. And I thought about how I was white, and all the students in class with me were white, and how collectively, our one class alone probably gave Sherman Alexie $500 in book sales. And I pictured him in his home, counting royalty checks from all the white kids forced to read his bullshit, in his giant Malibu mansion, plotting his next novel about how whites are evil.

>>22516901
Why?

>>22517069
House on Mango Street is a secret masterpiece of literature. It’s so short, so unassuming, but when you look at how perfectly crafted the vignettes are, the usage of language to indicate shifts in time...it’s mindblowingly good. Blows the shit out of most other American lit from the 80s

>>22515467
I dont usually get ASMR from descriptions

>>22514083
Dude I'm 41 and know what a tankie is. Probably helps that I spend my free time online around political edgelords but still

American English classes sound comically retarded

I'll be honest I didn't read half the books I was assigned. I just read sparknotes and got through most of class alright.
I don't even read that any more. I just judge books by their titles and complain relentlessly if anyone approves of something I don't like.

Invisible Man by far

>>22517176

>>22517167
They are. Don’t listen to this guy >>22517040

They’re glorified babysitting sessions where it’s impossible to fail out of.

>>22517167
Yes, in my 12th grade english class it took us over 3 months to get through one novel. The teacher would do retarded shit like spending an entire day before each chapter skimming through it looking for vocabulary words and copying the sentence from the novel it occurred in, and then going through a dictionary to find the definition and writing that down.. Being a teacher in america is all about trying to create as much busy work as possible for your students so you can sit at your computer doing nothing all day

>>22517003
>>22517035
My guys I was IN the advanced classes
I went to a charter school, meaning it was half private half public, meaning it's a good school you have to take a test to get into, unless you live in the area right around it, in which case you auto get put in
This is terrible because it means there's two levels to each course. Dumb and smart. I'll leave you to guess what group of people were in the dumb one
Anyways I was always in advanced courses except for junior year math because my school fucked up my placement in a weird way and I didn't care to change it cause I didn't care for math anyways
Hunger games is trash

>>22510752
Nobody currently mentioned "Secret," I guess you guys grew up on with a better education

>>22510752
Easy mode: Night by Eli Weasel. Why? Because if I wanted fantasy stories in my high school curriculum, I'd prefer The Hobbit.
Hard mode: some abridged, urbanized version of Oedipus and Antigone. Can't find it anywhere.
>>22514117
What did you hate about Thing Fall Apart? Never read it but my mom, an English teacher, was forced to teach it for nearly 6 years straight. She thought it was okay but not appropriate for teenagers because of the suicide. They were 10th graders and that was the ONLY book the class would read, for the entire year. Yes, that's right anon, only 1 book, and it was the diversity book that's secretly a blackpill about how you can't stop the march of progress. The school district would only allow teachers 1 book to teach, besides a (((new textbook))) full of writing exercises to think critically about your culture. Millions of tax dollars were spent on the contract for those textbooks, and probably the publisher of Things Fall Apart, too. She'd also get in trouble if she failed more than a couple students, max, and only if they NEVER showed up for a single day of class. There was heavy pressure to give a passing D to everyone, regardless of whether they came to school or turned in work.
>>22515940
>they assign contemporary novels by diverse authors and hold "discussions" online where each student submits some half-assed statement once a week to make sure they get an A in the class
For the most part, yes. Even tenured teachers have no choice because the union won't back them up for breaking the curriculum too hard. And where are they going to obtain a class set of books, even if they defy district standards? In my school district, there were, as you'd imagine, 1000s of copies of classic standards like Catcher in the Rye, Romeo & Juliet, Jane Eyre, etc. In fact, there was a huge warehouse full of these books! Where are they now? Hell if anybody knows. Perhaps they were donated to libraries in South Sudan, or sent to the glue factory for re-education.
>>22517267
To be fair, 70% of my mother's 10th grade students were tested to have a 3rd grade or lower reading level. What's she supposed to do with these retards? They fell upwards through cracks, and they'll end up in college somehow then drop out in 6 years with tons of debt. What is she supposed to do when she has 1 book to teach per year? She has to draw it out for the peabrains by utilizing baby vocab work. Even GATE (gifted) classes were only barely tolerable. Hell, the AP students wrote essays like 5th graders! I had the pleasure of helping grade some of that.

>>22511031
Fuck you I liked it.

>>22511044
First book is good
Second book is lame
Third book is great
Your opinion is trash

Not being on the curriculum is on its way to becoming a seal of quality in its own way, huh.

>>22513986
It's a case of not letting evidence get in the way of a good theory. Not saying everything in it has been deboonked or whatever, but the author makes sweeping claims about a bunch of shit and cherrypicks and pieces together whatever pieces of research favor his argument. It's basically lacking in any sort of academic rigor and full of holes.

>>22514126
Bad bait

>>22514253
Not everything does but more does than you realize
>t. Writer (not really)

Example
>le curtains were blue because the protagonist is le sad meme
On the surface level it's easy to dismiss this and say it's reading too much into it. And the teacher is probably wrong that this specific case is true. In reality the writer probably chose specific colors to be associated with specific characters actively and has a reason for it. For example, I have a character who is associated with purple and red, so anytime in the story I want to connect something to him or show some kind of symbolism I use those colors in relation to him. I unironically would make the curtains purple because some bullshit or whatever if I want
This is not limited to color
Any time I find a place I can reasonably and subtly use symbolism within the text I will try to because layers like this add depth to the work.

>>22515352
Incredibly jewish

The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta. Some Nigerian trash for women. I was in the honors class and we read that while the regular classes read things fall apart

>>22518411
that seems aa bit lame

A people’s history of the US.
Things Fall Apart
Joy Luck Club
Anything by Hemingway

FUCKING COMMIE DRIVEL

>>22514123
LMAO

>>22510752
To Kill A Mockingbird
>not about segregation
Sorry I failed hardmode

>>22518578
Hemingway wasn't a communist, what are you talking about?

>>22518578
Ayy another anon listed things fall apart. After my post I considered it, and I was always an outcast, so perhaps it’s not the worst in retrospect.

consuming life by zygmunt bauman is unparalleled levels of awful.

>>22517176
HG Wells or Ralph Ellison?
or Queen

>>22519069
He lived in Cuba, and was an ambulance driver in the Spanish civil war. This anon is an idiot who doesn't understand that the world isn't in black and white.

There was probably a single digit number of kids in my junior English class that actually finished The Scarlet Letter. Only book in school that I ever used Sparknotes for. I want to go back to it some day and finish it just to say I did.

>>22511920
Great book

>>22517915
that's fair. i feel like now no one could have a reasonable discussion about the realities of what happened. the narrative has be that it was all genocide and anything less is denying the events somehow. it's just weird propaganda.

>we have to lie or else people will think it's okay
such a retarded line of thinking from so called educated people

>>22515940
>contemporary novels by diverse authors
this is one out of three books I'm reading this semester for my english elective, the other two are Frankenstein and The Things They Carried

>>22514066
I feel like hate is too strong a word for it andthat's why it the other anon called you a tankie. I personally found it entertaining to read, it would be perhaps a funny book to read tomy younger cousins if I had any. Let them say Animal Farm is their favourite book while being 5-9 years old

>>22515940
Can confirm. Source: a female friend on 10th grade complaining ti me that she has to read some book written by a literal gay nigger. She also had to read a prequel to Hunger Games, but i believe that was for the Book Club

I did not enjoy Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy.

>>22512539
>hoping a popular YA book would get the the terminally unengaged students more interested in the class.
>the other half was still just completely disinterested
Some personality types just aren't wired to get anything out of recreational reading and there is nothing to be done about it. This is largely taken for granted among adults, so it's weird how we as a society stubbornly refuse to admit it's true for children and teenagers as well.

>>22520542
Yeah, but there's also a third group to consider—people who either don't appreciate books at that phase of their life and/or uninterested in current YA shlock, but then get completely turned off by school curriculum and leaves a bad taste in their mouth for years.

>>22510752
I'm from Canada, I had to read about American slavery (there are next to 0 black people where I live). The most unrelatable topic in existence. Also these books are shit and the only reason they are popular is they talked about le browns and le slaves and are le old.

>>22510752
The stranger by camus. Was the final book to read in my senior year when all other classes had stopped giving assignments.