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Books you had to read for school

Firnafth

Firnafth

Mammalogist
V.I.P Member
Out of curiosity,

When you have had had to read books for school, did you like them or not? I didn't enjoy many of them. Some I felt were boring (to my guilt, "Diary of Anne Frank" fell into this category). Some books commonly assigned for high school I didn't read until college, and I discovered I didn't identify with the protagonists at all.

I assume they assign these books because students are interested in and will benefit from them. This seems to have failed in many cases for me. Maybe they don't care if the students really like them?

Sometimes the books are trying to teach something, only you don't want to be taught. Like books where the boy has to shoot his pet and after he does that, he's grown up ("The Yearling", although I think there are others like it). I guess doing what has to be done is part of becoming an adult. But really. Having to shoot your pet is horrible, it shouldn't be celebrated as a coming-of-age, even if it's handled seriously. At least that's what I thought when I read it.
 
Grapes of Wrath & The Great Gatsby were almost obsessively good to me. Due to my major impulsivity and word-amusement idiosyncrasy, i would mark any book i read very heavily to cross reference repeating words or descriptive "categories". i never gave them back either, i felt i took this ownership of them after consuming the writing.... It was like i was barely reading the actual plot though I did understand and follow it, and reading them more for the enjoyment of the lyrical value, the way the words weaved a cohesively colorful continuity for me...

for this reason i've gone on to enjoy all of chuck palahniuk's work. because i'm so involved in an interest of choice, i feel i'm neglecting reading awesome books like more of vonnegut and a few others that my wife fanatical about.
 
I can only remember the ones I read in high school.

Hating Alison Ashley
Of Mice And Men
The Silver Sword
The Outsiders
The Chocolate War
Back On Track: Diary of a Streetkid
The Club
The Removalists
My Place
Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy

We missed out on reading Looking For Alibrandi, thank god.
 
eon said:
. It was like i was barely reading the actual plot though I did understand and follow it, and reading them more for the enjoyment of the lyrical value, the way the words weaved a cohesively colorful continuity for me...
Click to expand...

Maybe I should consider this as a way to enjoy books which I have less interest in the plot. As something less of a people person, I occasionally find books which are only about people and their interactions to be boring or annoying, but maybe I can find other ways to think them interesting.

Some books I read in college I did enjoy: Ryme of the Ancient Mariner, The Dead, Secret Sharer. These have a lot of literary depth, so I enjoyed them more than the books I had to read for junior high or high school.
 
Bolded are the ones that I liked

Had to read all of these for english during many school years:

Of David
The Silversword
The Secret Garden
To Kill a Mockingbird
Pride and Prejudice
Pygmalion
Of Mice and Men
Good Night Mister Tom
Romeo and Juliet
Macbeth
Hamlet


Had to read all of these for classical studies:

Aenenid
Odyssey
Illiad
Juvenal's satires
Aristophanes: Frogs, Clouds and Wasps
 
Kodak said:
Had to read all of these for classical studies:

Aenenid
Odyssey
Illiad
Juvenal's satires
Aristophanes: Frogs, Clouds and Wasps
Click to expand...

So you like classical studies? My stepfather was a classicist (now he's more of a historian) so I've had more education in classical studies than the other non-classicists I know. I've read some of the Illiad in the original Greek! It was awesome.
 
I also want to read Iliad in the original Greek version.

Meanwhile, my books for the term include Economics and Accounting Theory and Practice.
 
I remember that one of the books I had to read in High School was Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, and I thought that it was absolutely the most boring book that I had ever read. I haven't revisited it since then. Should I give it another chance? I think the book that I thought was the second most boring ever written was Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, which I do plan to give another chance someday (Like several of the books I was assigned to read in High School, I don't think I ever actually managed to finish it).

With a few exceptions, I don't think I enjoyed the books I was assigned to read in school very much. I did read lots of science fiction and fantasy novels on my own, like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, William Gibson's Neuromancer, Lord of the Rings, and Frank Herbert's Dune (I can't help thinking of that as my real literary education during that period).
 
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The books that stand out for me are

Hiroshima
To Kill A Mocking Bird
Lord Of The Flies
Pygmalion
Of Mice And Men
The Chrysilads
Animal Farm
Let It Go

I didn't care for Pygmalion that much. I was this kid in class with the Cockney accent who was learning that Cockney accents were bad, and that kind of shut me up around my peers until I graduated and than I started talking to them again afterwards.
 
Of those I remember:

Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen

The Red Pony and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

A book whose title began with "The Tribes of…" but I can't remember what it was the tribes of. It is a novel about a teen girl who moves to California and learns to surf, and that is the only thing she enjoys while the rest of her life goes to pieces.

White Niggers by Ingvar Ambj?rnsen
 
In no particular order:

A Tale of Two Cities, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, The Diary of Anne Frank, A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, A Christmas Carol, Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, The Catcher in the Rye, and many more I cannot think of off the top of my head at the moment

A little off topic are books I wish I had read, again listed in no particular order:

Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and Dante's Inferno
 
I wish I'd read the collected works of Ibsen, Strindberg, Holberg, Shakespeare, Hemmingway, Poe, Austen and Wilde, but apparently my teenage mind wasn't ready for it.

Not to mention the Kalevalla and every Fairy Tale collection of every country ever.
 
A lot of the above, but my favourite was Caesar and Cleopatra. Caesar was such a card!:bounce:
 
I usually did read those all. For two I remember having watched a movie instead and wrote my essays solely based on that.
Often I had to ask teacher to advise me additional books as I'd read all of them in the original lists already. Oh, and I never touched Romeo and Juliet.

We did read much from Finnish authors, but others to mention I enjoyed these:
Albert Camus, The Outsider,
Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic,
Fjodor Dostoyevsky, Crime And Punishment,
Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death,
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls,
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's house,
Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez, Love In the Time Of Cholera

Also many short stories I can't recall. But I especially liked Kafka.

And when I had to write a comparison between Jesus' sermon on the mount as it was told in book of Matthew in New Bible and one specific chapter from a book Thus Spoke Zarathustra I of course did read three books from Nietzsche just to make sure I had all sweet little trivia right about his overall methods and style. I was so full of energy and enthusiasm back then, I'm kind of envious now.
 
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no order but these are the ones I remember....most of them I didn't like but its because they weren't my style of reading.:
The pearl and The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
1984 By Orwell
To Kill a MockingBird
Grapes of Wrath
Macbeth
Hamlet
Romeo and Juilet
The last of the Mohicans
The Raven By edger Allen Poe
Stephen King's Green Mile for a book report which I had read already 8times before it was due.

 
I've always wanted to read The Green Mile and see how it compares to the movie. P.S. The movie version is one of my favorite films.
 
For a long while I thought I was the only person who enjoyed required high school/college reading, so much so that I read books that were never apart of my curriculum!

Here's what I remember from High school:
Catcher in the Rye
Beowulf
To Kill A Mockingbird
Hamlet
Like Water For Chocolate
The Cantebury Tales
Romeo And Juliet
Macbeth(to date, the ONLY Shakespeare play I have ever read and not liked. Couldn't put a finger on why, I just didn't.)
The Seagull
Metamorphosis

And the ones I wasn't required to read but did anyways:
1984
Of Mice and Men
The Diary of Anne Frank
Animal Farm

I find myself wanting to read more of John Steinbeck's work, as well as more from J.D. Salinger. I had quite the love/hate relationship with Catcher in the Rye over the years.
 
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