/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15353592]

What's the worst book you had to read in high school?

[Anonymous No.15353623]

>>15353592
I disliked and still am not partial to "Fahrenheit 451"; but honestly that's the only book I actively disliked from the reading list. Bradbury's prose is weak and his themes are so hamfisted.

[Anonymous No.15353676]

not horrible but Oliver Twist was a headache

[Anonymous No.15353686]

Things Fall Apart

[Anonymous No.15353692]

>>15353592
Tit cock

[Anonymous No.15353702]

>>15353623
Mmmmmmmmm smoked ham. Fuck vegans they are missing out on the real thing here. Meat meat meat meat beat my meat & eat my meat. I’m gonna get back to watching Game Of Thrones Season 2, vaping this mint Juul & binge drinking box wine

[Anonymous No.15353723]

Handmaid’s Tale.

[Anonymous No.15353727]

>>15353592
I'm a Hue, so it was a Brazilian book (other than a few Portuguese books, we mostly read Brazilian literature in school).
The one I disliked the most was "O Cortiço".
Machado de Assis' "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas" was the best by far. The only "highschool book" I have read twice.

[Anonymous No.15353756]

>>15353723
gross

[Anonymous No.15354077]

>>15353702
aside from GoT that sounds like a fun time

[Anonymous No.15354087]

>>15353592
The Great Gatsby.

[Anonymous No.15354171]

Some dumb leftist fantasy about a bunch of teens rising up against the evil corporate CIA and fighting for "freedom and equality"

Heavy emphasis on adults being evil and kids good

[Anonymous No.15354679]

>>15353702
>vaping this mint Juul
RIP

Fucking teenagers ruin everything

[Anonymous No.15354786]

i don't remember the name, but it was about a woman who would get beaten up by her man, so she would ride bicycle every day and cry

i still don't understand wtf i read

[Anonymous No.15354889]

"Mecanoscrit del segon origen" by Manuel de Pedrolo.

[Anonymous No.15354896]

>>15354087
Glad I'm not the only one, just a bunch of wealthy cry babies.

[Anonymous No.15354967]

>>15353592
Kafka's metamorphosis

[Anonymous No.15354988]

all we read in high school were generic young adult novels. I am still mad

[Anonymous No.15355156]

Honestly a better question would be what books you liked from high school.

I had to read maya Angelou's autobiography and eli weisel's night. Angelou was generally boring punctuated with pedo rape scenes. In both cases why would I want to read that? Night was generally more interesting but it was frustrating that the author clearly took liberties with the story and I had to as a student accept everything as gospel.

[Anonymous No.15355168]

>>15353686
Same here - the only good part was when Octogan blew his fucking brains out

[Anonymous No.15355173]

>>15353592
A Farewell to Arms

[Anonymous No.15355255]

>>15353592
The Coral Island, what a boring piece of shit. We all laughed at Peterkin Gay.

[Anonymous No.15355350]

>>15353592
In 10th grade we got to pick books to do book reports on. I wanted to read Huckleberry Finn, but my teacher was a cunt so she made me read Atlas Shrugged just to torture me. I will never get the many hours I wasted on those one-thousand-and-something pages back. I didn't read a book by own will for like 2 years after that.

[Anonymous No.15355390]

>>15355350
Ayn Rand is the biggest fucking pseud I swear

[Anonymous No.15355520]

>>15353592
Noughts and Crosses, though it might’ve been middle school instead of high school

[Anonymous No.15355656]

>the term we had to read the hunger games because the fucking female teacher let this class mostly populated by girls vote
I'm still mad.

[Anonymous No.15355781]

I don't think I read any terrible books. Mostly read Shakespeare desu, even in American lit because my English professor had some tradition where she taught a Shakespeare play every year
I'm sure there were some shitty short stories we read, but I can't remember

[Anonymous No.15355913]

This shit. The book is so fucking long too

[Anonymous No.15355925]

>>15353592
I remember hating Pride and Prejudice, but I don't think it's too bad now. I'd like to reread it again to see if my opinions on it have continued to change.

Other than that, I had to read a book called The Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian. I still hate that one.

[Anonymous No.15356039]

The only genuinely bad ones were The Awakening (I’m still mad because I got a bad grade on the essay because I criticized the cunt protag, and when I asked the teacher she refused to explain what was wrong with my arguments and implied I was sexist) and Handmaid’s Tale (just a dumb book, I remember thinking it was oppression porn for liberal women even back then when I was pretty apolitical)
There were a few like Things Fall Apart and Farewell to Arms which I couldn’t get into, but I don’t think they’re bad books.

Some of the ones I didn’t like (As I Lay Dying in particular) I came back to later and absolutely loved.
Thinking high-schoolers will appreciate genuinely challenging stuff like Faulkner is beyond idiotic, I’m convinced teachers just do it so the students have plenty of literary techniques to namedrop in their essays, who gives a shit if they’re turned off literature forever amirite?

[Anonymous No.15356250]

>>15353756
It was the crown jewel of the feminist segment of the class. Fucking hated that class.

[Anonymous No.15356266]

>>15353623
Unbased

[Anonymous No.15356300]

>>15356039
>The Awakening
It looks like "Cultural Marxism" the novel.

[Anonymous No.15356301]

>>15353592
Martin Eden. I tried to re-read it now that i'm in my 20s, but it's just that boring and overall too sad and pointless.

[Anonymous No.15356305]

>>15353623
fpbp

[Anonymous No.15356312]

All of the "it's tough being a nigger in America" books were terrible, but Native Son practically made me racist overnight.

[Anonymous No.15356333]

>>15354087
>>15354896
Not appreciating The Great Gatsby outs you as being underage. Read it again when you're 25. You'll get it.

[Anonymous No.15356335]

>>15353592
I was really not a fan of Wuthering Heights

[Anonymous No.15356344]

>>15356312
Ha I ended up in the class that didn't have to read Native Son; have no idea what it's about but I've heard things

[Anonymous No.15356348]

I wasn’t a fan of Of Mice and Men, but I think that’s cause I wanted to hang out with friends or play video games rather than read, and I didn’t even finish it. Later I retried him, and he became one of my favorite authors in high school cause of Cannery Row and The Winter of Our Discontent. I also chose to do a book report on Duma Key by Stephen King and then Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates my freshman year and hated them both.
We had to read some good shit though for being a really small backwoods mining town in Arizona. My favorite thing we had to read is probably Frankenstein or The Importance of Being Earnest.

[Anonymous No.15356370]

We had to read Night in the 10th grade and I remember specifically my teacher made the entire class form a small circle surrounded by desks and cranked the heater up (it was late spring in california 85+ degrees outside) while reading the book to get an idea of how it felt for the Jews being transported in trains of the camps.

I think back and wonder if my teacher was a Jew

[Anonymous No.15356393]

>>15356370
We had to read that too, and my teacher was, unironically, a Jew convert through marriage. But I think the holocaust being a large portion of all non-science classes in American high school is pretty widespread. Kind of annoying for an English class though, when there is so much more to choose from.

[Anonymous No.15356424]

They intentionally teach you shitty books in high school. It's all by design. They want you to hate reading. They want you to hate learning.
You think it's an accident that the entire curriculum is just filled with white guilt bullshit like "It's hard being a gay Muslim black woman in the Bronx" and shit they know kids cannot relate to? They aren't stupid.

[Anonymous No.15356427]

I'll kill myself before I ever read another book about black women prominently featuring their black woman hair

[Anonymous No.15356437]

>>15356427
What shithole common core school district did you go to? So I know where to defund education when I become President.

[Anonymous No.15356466]

>>15353702
aside from the boxed wine and the vape, that sounds like a good time

[Anonymous No.15356519]

>>15356424
Nah, it depends on your English teacher. If they are an illiterate loser then the curriculum will represent their intellectual capacity.

[Anonymous No.15356534]

>>15356437
Public education is the state’s responsibility, not the national government’s.

[Anonymous No.15356636]

Friday Night Lights
>football football football racism football racism racism racism football

[Anonymous No.15356670]

>>15353592

ALL OF THEM

[Anonymous No.15356672]

>>15353592
I somehow managed to get through high school without reading a single assigned text. I don't really remember how I pulled it off.

[Anonymous No.15356680]

>>15356519
Your English teacher has little say in the books you read. If your school or your state says "hey, you can't teach Huckleberry Finn" then your teacher isn't teaching you that book, even if it's their favorite.
>>15356424
They do teach you shitty books on purpose, but not to make you hate reading. They do it to make you vote democrat. Every single book is about racism or oppression of minorities or women. Every single book is "white men bad." Every single essay you write is "white men bad." Kids don't come out of that four year spell and think "minorities hate me and want revenge" they think "I need to help the poor minorities."

[Anonymous No.15356688]

>>15356437
I went to private school

[Anonymous No.15356709]

>>15356680
And the worst culprit of this is Sherman Alexie. He's just a bad fucking writer. Everything he writes is so fucking melodramatic and his characters are farcical caricatures. He clearly hates white people and his books are just "fuck white people."

[Anonymous No.15356721]

>>15353723
Fkng lol

Probably 1 hundred years of solitude. I actually like Marquez but that book was not kino at all

[Anonymous No.15357650]

>>15355390

Everybody get a load of this good goy who says exactly what /lit/ has programmed him to say.

[Anonymous No.15358222]

>>15353592
The Catcher in the Rye.

[Anonymous No.15358276]

>>15358222
Ah yes, I too discount an author because of who they are rather than the quality of their work.

[Anonymous No.15358289]

>>15358276
Yes.

[Anonymous No.15358311]

>>15356680
> Kids don't come out of that four year spell and think "minorities hate me and want revenge" they think "I need to help the poor minorities."
You're so fucking close dude. So fucking close.

[Anonymous No.15358401]

>>15353623
I think it was an interesting read for the time it was written in, but the whole message is kind of moot nowadays because of the rise of the internet.

[Anonymous No.15358409]

>>15355173
Fuck you. Felate a shotgun.

[Anonymous No.15358542]

>>15353592
For me, it was Whirligig.

[Anonymous No.15358543]

>>15356333
Get what? Being a simp? Or being an outcast in the socio-economic milieu that you've joined and going to extraordinary lengths to gain acceptance, but failing because your behavior is a caricature of the way the people in that group behave? If you mean the latter, then yes, I understand it very well. If you mean the former, then yes, I understand that too. But these two themes were not put together in a particularly entertaining manner.

[Anonymous No.15358547]

>muh slavery!
>muh trail of tears!
>muh holocaust!

Rinse and repeat for 6 fucking years. Made me sick

[Anonymous No.15358564]

Never read a book in high school but I have to assume the worst were:
Handmaid's Tale and Ragtime

[Anonymous No.15358565]

>>15353592
Bless Me Ultima

[Anonymous No.15358815]

I can't remember really hating any, I generally liked reading.

I did have an English teacher for year 8 and 9 though who at the time was dying of cancer (we didn't know) and sort of just ran through the motions that the class did (write a recount of what you did on holidays, oral presentation on whatever topic, persuasive essay on some issue). He didn't really care about teaching at that point and basically let kids do whatever. He was also the first teacher I met that preferred and let kids call him by his first name (Wally).

I was autistic and hated writing so I'd bring my YA books to class and just read them instead of doing work. After a couple of weeks he said he would let me read in class instead of writing, but only if he chose the book and I had to have a discussion with him about the book and themes after every book, to make sure I read it. It was probably the best thing for me. It was sort of easier stuff like Lord of the Flies and Tarzan of the Apes or stuff that a kid can read but might not understand like Moby Dick, but talking about the book afterwards helped me pick up things I miss and is probably a big reason why I like reading today.

[Anonymous No.15358817]

1984

[Anonymous No.15358881]

>>15358817
based and baitpilled

[Anonymous No.15359206]

I haven't read A Separate Peace since I was a freshman, does it hold up?

[Anonymous No.15360560]

That book where the Arab kid gets raped in the butt and Great Expectations.

[Anonymous No.15360584]

>>15358401
Fahrenheit 451 still works in a post internet age. Just replace books with factual news.

[Anonymous No.15360606]

>>15353592
streetcar named desire