/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3395863]

Post your high school required readings / lit/
Favorite? Least favorite?

I am missing "Metamorphisis" and "Siddhartha", somewhere in my house.

I loved Tale of Two Cities.
I hated Wuthering Heights.
I didn't enjoy Great Gatsby

[Anonymous No.3395870]

man, I can barely even remember that shit anymore.

I think my least favorite might've been Shane.

Favorite would probably be all the Akutagawa stories I read, but that was for a paper and I guess not really required reading. I did have to choose off a list though.

[Anonymous No.3395885]

>>3395863
I was never required to read Siddhartha back when I was in high school, but I sure wish I did. It's the kind of story that my less savory classmates wouldn't understand and would completely botch presentations on. It would be a joy to behold.

Anyway, my favorite was Flowers for Algernon. My least favorite was Lord of the Flies, but I feel it was spoiled for me because we had to discuss the symbolism of the story every time a character farted.

[Anonymous No.3395894]

I went to an alternative school, they didnt make us read anything at all

[Anonymous No.3395898]

>>3395894
I guess it was the alternative to being an actual school

[Anonymous No.3395900]

>>3395894

And how do you feel about that?

[Anonymous No.3395901]

>>3395898

[Anonymous No.3395907]

My favorite was 1984. Among that was To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankenstein, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, The Lord of the Flies, and more.

[Anonymous No.3395913]

Favorite: The Great Gatsby
Least Favorite: A Thousand Acres

[Anonymous No.3395929]

>Liked
Of Mice and Men
A Chronicle of a Death Foretold
The Catcher and the Rye, come at me h8rs
Blindness
To Kill a Mockingbird
Lord of the Flies
The Road
House of the Spirits
1984
A Streetcar Named Desire
Slaughterhouse-Five
A Farewell to Arms

>Didn't like
The Sorrow of War
Hamlet
Brave New World (I think I agreed with it more than 1984 though)
The Kite Runner
The Outsiders
Persepolis
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Song of Solomon

[Anonymous No.3395941]

I went to an advanced private Christian high school. Had to read the works of Kant, Swedenborg, Jung, Blake, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Keats and Emerson. There was no Mockingbird or Gatsby or any of that shit.

[Anonymous No.3395952]

Favorite was The Grapes of Wrath, least favorite I don't really remember. I really like Inherit the Wind, The Great Gatsby, and 1984 as well.

[Anonymous No.3395959]

>>3395941
semi-jealous.

[Anonymous No.3395980]

>>3395959
It had its ups and downs. Being in 9th grade and having to read the works of Kant and Swedenborg was absolutely terrible, but by 11th grade I was loving it. I'm also glad I was spared being forced to read Gatsby and Mockingbird. What terribly boring and overrated books.

[Anonymous No.3395987]

>>3395980
I actually liked Gatsby, though I do think it's a bit overrated I didn't find it to be intriguing because of all the symbolism I didn't quite understand at the time. More philosophy should be taught in public schools but at least the public school i went to was decent.

[Anonymous No.3395993]

>>3395987
>I didn't find it to be intriguing
meant I did find it to be intriguing,

[Anonymous No.3396014]

Hey OP, did you happen to go to Warren Township High School?

[Anonymous No.3396023]

>>3395987
>>3395993

I hear ya. I just couldn't identify with Jay Gatsby at all. He's supposed to be one of the great American antiheroes of literature, but I found him to just be an asshole.

[Anonymous No.3396040]

>>3395980
I really like To Kill a Mockingbird, I've been rereading over and over since I was like eight or nine. It's not the most complex book, but I thought it was very good writing and really made me nostalgic for a time I didn't even experience.

[Anonymous No.3396042]

>>3396023
An antihero who's an ass, who'd have thought?

[Anonymous No.3396046]

>>3396014
Why yes I did.

[Anonymous No.3396047]

>>3396023
...and there goes any semblance of credibility you had

[Anonymous No.3396053]

Brazilianfag here, will narrow it down to the most important stuff (because I can't remember everything)

National stuff:
Eu - Augusto dos Anjos
Grande Sertão: Veredas - Guimarães Rosa
O Guarani - José de Alencar
Capitães da Areia - Jorge Amado
Senhora - José de Alencar
Memórias Póstumas de Braz Cubas - Machado de Assis
Quincas Borba - Machado de Assis
Iracema - José de Alencar

International Stuff:
Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevski
Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira - José Saramago
Dictionnaire Philosophique - Voltaire
The Prince - Machiavelli


My favorites are, by far, Crime and Punishment (which I've reread countless times) and Eu. Don't really have one that I hate, but my least favorite is definitely Iracema (archaic vocabulary that is truly a pain in the ass)

[Anonymous No.3396065]

>>3396053
Non-Brazilian fag here.

Why was Jose de Alencar so commonly read?

[Anonymous No.3396075]

>>3396046
Cool! I did as well. I recognized not just all of those books that we have to read, but the same print editions. I never thought I'd find someone from so close to my home on here for whatever reason.

I hated A Tale of Two Cities when I read it, but I have come to love Dickens now that my tastes matured. I didn't think much of any of the other books besides Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. I found that I am a big Steinbeck fan and Grapes tops my favorite list. I didn't enjoy Gatsby, but I thought it a fantastic book and almost fun to do Rhetorical analysis on because I kind-of liked Fitzgerald's style.

Well, nice to meet a fellow Blue Devil. Have a good day OP.

[Anonymous No.3396077]

>>3396047
Because I find Jay Gatsby to be a shitty character in an equally shitty book?

I'm sorry if I've offended your teenage sensibilities, little one.

>>3396042
There's really no other reedeming qualities to counteract how much of an ass he is.

[Anonymous No.3396090]

>>3396065


Well, he was a teacher's favorite way of torturing students. O Guarani is probably what is the first (and only) "Brazilian epic", Iracema follows on the indigenous formula, and Senhora is just a classic and one of the few I actually did enjoy reading at the time (I prefer urban romances), despite the vocabulary.

[Anonymous No.3396122]

>Silko

Dat token Native American novel, regardless of actual literary merit.

[Anonymous No.3396128]

>>3396090
Interesting. I may have to look into this, thank you.

[Anonymous No.3396133]

>>3396122
Yeah, it was a choice novel. I should have gone with Cormac McCarthy's "ATPH" but it was

[Anonymous No.3396149]

Lord of the Flies, 1984 and Animal Farm were the only books that I really liked. of course I was a lot more into smoking weed than reading. Things really have changed

[Anonymous No.3396157]

>>3396128


The Indianist Trilogy of José de Alencar includes O Guarani, Iracema and Ubirajara, though the last one I read by myself and quite frankly enjoyed the most out of all of them.

[Anonymous No.3396171]

>>3396023
He's just an original hipster

[Anonymous No.3396190]

>Liked
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Catcher In The Rye
The Wars
Lullabies For Little Criminals
Twelfth Night
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Hamlet
Death of A Salesman
The Crucible
Heart of Darkness

>Didn't Like
The Chrysalids
1984
Macbeth
a bunch of terrible plays by John Patrick Shanley
Margaret Atwood poems

Macbeth and Lullabies For Little Criminals could both kind of be in a neutral zone in the middle, also

[Anonymous No.3397177]

Had to read:
>Middle school
Mémoires d'outre-tombe (only the first book though, then later on I picked almost all of them by my own)
K by Buzzati
The Chouans by Balzac
The Miserables by Hugo
Some Molière plays
Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier
The Animal Farm by Orwell
And some worthless pieces of shit.

>Highschool (British school)
Hamlet by Shakespeare
Twelfth Night by Shakespeare
The Marriage of Figaro by Beaumarchais
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Inheritance of Loss by Desai
Zorba the Greek by Kazantzakis
Candide by Voltaire
Gorgias by Plato
Death of a Salesman by Miller
History Boys by Bennett
Playboy of the Western World by Synge
Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck
Loin de Reuil by Queneau
L'Assomoir by Zola
Peau de Chagrin by Balzac
Bérénice by Racine

Likes:
Hamlet, God of Small Things, Mémoires d'outre-tombe

Hated:
History Boys, Le Grand Meaulnes

[Anonymous No.3399006]

Loved

>Candide
>1793
>For whom the bell tolls
>The tragedy of man (it's a Hungarian play)
>Crime and Punishment

Hated

>Shakespeare as a whole
>Death of Ivan Ilyich
>Master and Margarita

[Anonymous No.3399957]

The Odyssey by Homer
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Life of Pi by Yann Martell
Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Before Women Had Wings by Connie May Fowler
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

[Anonymous No.3400020]

I do know I hated The Lord of the Flies. Everything else was all right.

[Anonymous No.3400042]

>>3399957

Of those favorite was Hound of the Baskervilles and least favorite was Before Women Had Wings.

[Anonymous No.3400054]

>>3395894
>>3395898
>>3395901

Sometimes I hate /lit/. This is not one of those times.

[Anonymous No.3400059]

>>3396190
>not liking 1984

[Anonymous No.3400093]

>>3396023
>claws his way up from nothing to become a billionaire yet doesn't forget about taking care of his elderly father back west
>throws cool parties where all people do is spread rumors about him
>Offers the love of his life a perfect escape from her abusive marriage
>Takes the fall himself when she kills a woman
>Even little, tiny Montenegro gave him a medal after the war

In what way was Gatsby an asshole?
The point of GG was that he was blind to the fact that most other people, even Daisy, are assholes

[Anonymous No.3400104]

>>3400059
Not that guy, but it really was an unimpressive novel overall.

Most dystopic fiction tends to underwhelm me, actually. I couldn't even get through Brave New World.