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Namarrgon posted:I liked the themes, I loved the setting. I hated the writing. A website about science fiction said that it's all about the concepts and what the author does with them, rather than the quality of the writing. So you lose practically nothing by just reading the wikipedia articles instead.
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Nov 29, 2016 22:34
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Earwicker posted:I thought Dune was a decent book but I don't quite get why you are using it as a launching board for this generic rant about political correctness. No one even mentioned anything about the politics or ideas? Personally I think the book suffers from the same problem as a lot of scifi - great ideas and worldbuilding, bland characterization and bad writing. Yes there are indeed some really great concepts in Dune but for many readers it takes more than concepts for a book to be good. It just happens alot in book talk, there are lots of great works that are coloured by the time they were made or even just laziness around issues were are so MILITANT about now (everyone is EQUAL GODDAMNIT!). Scifi generally is about concepts moreso that characters and plot. It's generally accepted you need to slog through some Mary Sue characters and predictable plot lines to get to the sweet core of interesting ideas. There is scifi that can be all things to all people, but generally thats what he genre means to me. So if the criticisms is bad writing then I can appricate that, but if it's HEY LOOK EVERYONE IVE FOUND SOMETHING THAT DOESNT CONFORM WITH WHAT WELL ALL BELIEVE RIGHT NOW then I think it's groupthink/hivemind parroting devoid of deeper thought. Hobologist posted:A website about science fiction said that it's all about the concepts and what the author does with them, rather than the quality of the writing. So you lose practically nothing by just reading the wikipedia articles instead. The sufficiently complex and awesome concepts require good writing and lot more text than a Wikipedia article to have you comprehend them. It's like saying science is all about the results so by reading executive summaries you lose practically nothing. I mean, am I really explaining how a how genre of fiction (and a popular one at that) is more than Wikipedia articles? WampaLord posted:Tony Montana has a chip on his shoulder about kids these days and will find any excuse to rant about them. lol! Well, I guess it's better than being yet another anonymous poster. I guess I'm not the age I was when I joined these forums and alot of what I read on here is little more than juvenile blubbering.
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Nov 29, 2016 23:46
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Killingyouguy! posted:The best Shakespeare we read was definitely Hamlet. I was in an Advanced English class and we had the privilege of watching the entire adaptation of it starring Kenneth Branagh. The best Macbeth adaption is Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood/Spider-Web Castle. I will tolerate no disagreements.
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Nov 30, 2016 03:08
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shame on an IGA posted:My first grade teacher gave me Julie of the Wolves I read that book at the same time that I read My Side of the Mountain, Hatchet, and Dogsong. For a while I thought that all kids eventually ran into the woods and came out as better humans.
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Nov 30, 2016 04:21
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Tony Montana posted:It just happens alot in book talk, there are lots of great works that are coloured by the time they were made or even just laziness around issues were are so MILITANT about now (everyone is EQUAL GODDAMNIT!). well yes but most people on the forums have aged right along with you. literally no one in this thread was being in any way "militant" about equality in old books, and that's not at all common in discussions of books here in general, maybe you should work on your own reading comprehension and you'll stop seeing the "juvenile blather" that you seem to want to see.
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Nov 30, 2016 05:16
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Relax, my point is just don't get hung up on some antiquated parts or you'll miss the creamy filling. Don't look at the finger, or you'll miss all that heavenly glory! (if you can pick that reference) It's just a general point about reading and reading older books, which is something that happens in schools a lot.
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Nov 30, 2016 05:24
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You're like the worst grandpa, Tony Montana.
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Nov 30, 2016 17:09
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In Grade School, like every single year we'd read in class nothing but those teen boy wilderness survival books like My Side of the Mountain or Red Dog or whatever, and I always, ALWAYS hated them personally. I realize they are supposed to engage boys into loving reading, but they're dull as dirt to me. I had my 6th grade teacher get mad at me that I was a voracious reader, but only read like, sci fi, fantasy, and horror. This is still true today that I find fantastic adventure and action more interesting. In 9th grade, I remember surprisingly enjoying Great Expectations, but then in 10th grade I continued into the "smart kids" track and went into American Lit...and pretty much the entirety of the course syllabus was survivalist or puritan writing. Like, "Last of the Mohicans" was the only interesting to me book on the list. So I very quickly dropped and transferred to the lower impact English track, which was more fun, involving like more creative writing and a class on learning vocabulary roots and origins which was super interesting. My only regret is after the American year you would go into Euro lit which had a lot more interesting books to read, which was frustrating. I did have a journalism class where we read Fahrenheit 451 and The Jungle, which were rad. In the latter's case, we were each like assigned a couple chapters to read and summarize for the class, but after I read mine I was like "wow, this book is really good" and then went back and read the whole thing myself.
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Dec 4, 2016 18:10
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Choco1980 posted:In Grade School, like every single year we'd read in class nothing but those teen boy wilderness survival books like My Side of the Mountain or Red Dog or whatever, and I always, ALWAYS hated them personally. I realize they are supposed to engage boys into loving reading, but they're dull as dirt to me. I had my 6th grade teacher get mad at me that I was a voracious reader, but only read like, sci fi, fantasy, and horror. This is still true today that I find fantastic adventure and action more interesting. There's no shame in not liking "The Last of the Mohicans" The plot doesn't make a lick of sense. And you have Mark Twain on your side. And I consider Fahrenheit 451 as one of Bradbury's lesser works. I prefer Bradbury's The Illustrated Man or The Martian Chronicles. They're much more interesting stories. But they don't get taught at colleges any more. thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Dec 6, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 11:22
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My dad strongly encouraged me to read The Jungle when I was a kid because he worked for a meat processing facility. He wanted me to know what those assholes would do if they didn't have to follow some rules.
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Dec 6, 2016 11:57
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galagazombie posted:The best Macbeth adaption is Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood/Spider-Web Castle. I will tolerate no disagreements. Well I think Ran should get an honorable mention, since it is basically just King Lear with Samurai and awesome visuals. I joke, but Korosowa made some awesome epics, If it weren't for Kurosawa we wouldn't have the the magnificent seven or Star Wars, thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Dec 6, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 14:37
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There was some book I had to read for summer reading in high school that I remember standing out particularly awful. I can't recall the name but it was set in rural China in the 1800's, some farmer does some boring stuff and has kids and like 2 wives and he stole some guys stuff in the city and one of his kids is slow I think. It was terrible and I got a something like a 20/100 on the test, even though it was one of the books I actually read instead of cliffsnotes. I am 31, job, wife, 2 kids. This book and the assignment to read it had 0 impact on my academic, personal, or professional life. Yet it still takes up real estate in my brain as a miserable experience.
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Dec 6, 2016 14:50
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thrakkorzog posted:There's no shame in not liking "The Last of the Mohicans" The plot doesn't make a lick of sense. The movie version is extremely good. Though mostly because of the music and that one fight scene on the cliff.
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Dec 6, 2016 15:15
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Tinfoil Papercut posted:There was some book I had to read for summer reading in high school that I remember standing out particularly awful. That book was "The Good Earth".
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Dec 8, 2016 05:59
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Hated: Tuck Everlasting, Romeo and Juliet, Faust Part II Loved: Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, Faust Part I, The Sorrows of Young Werther
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Dec 8, 2016 07:55
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Favorite: Emile Zola's Germinal, thanks to a brilliant teacher with a theatrical bent. We walked into class one day to find that he had recreated the atmosphere of a 19th century coal mine with lanterns and a fog machine, and the whole sensory experience of that novel really stuck with me. Other favorites: Of Mice and Men (to the point that I forgot I first read it for school), Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, Dubliners Least favorite at the time: My Antonia. Or maybe it was O Pioneers. Or both in different years, probably. I found them unbearably dull and just couldn't relate to these boring farm people and their boring farm people lives—yet I had surprisingly little trouble with French coal miners. I guess it goes to show what a difference it makes when you have a talented teacher who truly loves the material. Or maybe Willa Cather just blows. I never felt compelled to revisit her novels as an adult to find out. Least favorite in retrospect: Mara, Daughter of the Nile, a book from 6th grade. The climax of the novel (and the only thing from it I even remember) was a rather long and very detailed scene where the main character was whipped and beaten. I remember thinking it was kind of messed up at the time, and in retrospect it was almost certainly the author's BDSM fetish showing. Rollersnake fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Dec 9, 2016 |
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Dec 9, 2016 08:56
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Best: All Quiet on the Western Front, because it was fun and brutal The Paul Street Boys and War of the Buttons, because they were about kids who loved to play war, and I was a kid who loved to play war If This Is a Man and The Truce, super scary and depressing but extremely interesting. Primo Levi was a bit of a sperg and I was all over his super detailed descriptions of everything Worst: How Green Was My Valley, by Richard (David Vivian etc.) Llewellyn. Who gives a flying gently caress about Wales and Welsh miners. Turns out it wasn't even autobiographical, guy was actually from London. gently caress Richard (David Vivian etc.) Llewellyn, I still have no idea why we had to be subjected to that endless boring turd of a book Black Boy, by Richard Wright. Seems our teacher loved to torture us with biographies set before we were even born, in places we'd never see, that we'd never have a chance of understanding. WHO CARES Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. Turned me off Asimov for years and I haven't dared try rereading it yet. What a dull book. I still have no idea what the plot was hackbunny fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 18:27
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Sic Semper Goon posted:That book was "The Good Earth". YEP! That was it, and my recollection was not far off: Wikipedia posted:The story begins on Wang Lung's wedding day and follows the rise and fall of his fortunes. The House of Hwang, a family of wealthy landowners, lives in the nearby town, where Wang Lung's future wife, O-Lan, lives as a slave. However, the House of Hwang slowly declines due to opium use, frequent spending, and uncontrolled borrowing. Meanwhile, Wang Lung, through his own hard work and the skill of his wife, O-Lan, slowly earns enough money to buy land from the Hwang family. O-Lan delivers three sons and three daughters; the first daughter becomes mentally handicapped as a result of severe malnutrition brought on by famine. Her father greatly pities her and calls her "Poor Fool," a name by which she is addressed throughout her life. O-Lan kills her second daughter at birth to spare her the misery of growing up in such hard times, and to give the remaining family a better chance to survive. During the devastating famine and drought, the family must flee to a large city in the south to find work. Wang Lung's malevolent uncle offers to buy his possessions and land, but for significantly less than their value. The family sells everything except the land and the house. Wang Lung then faces the long journey south, contemplating how the family will survive walking, when he discovers that the "firewagon" takes people south for a fee. In the city, O-Lan and the children beg while Wang Lung pulls a rickshaw. Wang Lung's father begs but does not earn any money, and sits looking at the city instead. They find themselves aliens among their more metropolitan countrymen who look different and speak in a fast accent. They no longer starve, due to the one-cent charitable meals of congee, but still live in abject poverty. Wang Lung longs to return to his land. When armies approach the city he can only work at night hauling merchandise out of fear of being conscripted. One time, his son brings home stolen meat. Furious, Wang Lung throws the meat on the ground, not wanting his sons to grow up as thieves. O-Lan, however, calmly picks up the meat and cooks it. When a food riot erupts, Wang Lung is swept up in a mob that is looting a rich man's house and corners the man himself, who fears for his life and gives Wang Lung all his money in order to buy his safety. Meanwhile, his wife finds jewels in a hiding place in another house, hiding them between her breasts. Wang Lung uses this money to bring the family home, buy a new ox and farm tools, and hire servants to work the land for him. In time, the youngest children are born, a twin son and daughter. When he discovers the jewels O-Lan looted from the house in the southern city, Wang Lung buys the House of Hwang's remaining land. He is eventually able to send his first two sons to school and retains the third one on the land. As Wang Lung becomes more prosperous, he buys a concubine named Lotus. O-Lan endures the betrayal of her husband when he takes the only jewels she had asked to keep for herself, the two pearls, so that he can make them into earrings to present to Lotus. O-Lan's morale suffers and she eventually dies, but not before witnessing her first son's wedding. Wang Lung finally appreciates her place in his life, as he mourns her passing. Lung and his family move into town and rent the old House of Hwang. Wang Lung, now an old man, wants peace, but there are always disputes, especially between his first and second sons, and particularly their wives. Wang Lung's third son runs away to become a soldier. At the end of the novel, Wang Lung overhears his sons planning to sell the land and tries to dissuade them. They say that they will do as he wishes, but smile knowingly at each other. The fact that a semi-accurate memory of this slog has real estate in my brain is irritating to me.
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Dec 14, 2016 16:42
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Shbobdb posted:Hated: Tuck Everlasting, Romeo and Juliet, Faust Part II If I recall correctly, by the time Faust part 2 was nearing completion that style of play had fallen out of style and stood basically no chance of meeting a positive reception. Goethe kind of gave up and published it without the crazy editing/revision process he gave to the first part. And boy does it show. The only assigned books I ever gave up on without finishing were Wuthering Heights and House of Mirth. I just do not care about 19th century high society. At all. The only person I know who likes either of those reads Breitbart, and part of me wonders if this isn't a coincidence. Blue Footed Booby fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Dec 14, 2016 |
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Dec 14, 2016 21:33
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Tinfoil Papercut posted:YEP! That was it, and my recollection was not far off: I feel you. That synopsis reminds me of another historical fiction book I was forced to read, Shades of Grey I think it was called. Filled with stupid peoples' mundane bullshit and petty arguments. Spoiler alert: civil war era people were dumb assholes, incredibly boring to read about. I don't hate all period dramas just boring lovely ones that ramble badly. We studied this book for months and it felt like it was never gonna end. Some of the girls liked it though, presumably because they were dumb, boring, petty assholes.
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Dec 15, 2016 00:31
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Our legally mandated Shakespeare unit in high school was started off by a student teacher doing Midsummer Night's Dream for a month, which I loved. Then she left just before we finished working on it and our regular teacher took over and immediately threw all that out in favour of Romeo and Juliet, which I hated basically on principle. I've even still got a slight grudge against the Baz Luhrmann version, for god's sake. The same teacher assigned us a book which I can't remember the title of, but I can remember the plot to this day: some douchebag falls in love with a girl who likes to play sports and wear men's clothing and there was like 300 pages of him torturing himself over "oh man I love this girl and I wanna go to prom with her, but she wants to wear a suit instead of a dress and I can't deal with this at all". gently caress that book. Mr Powell had garbage taste.
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Dec 16, 2016 11:18
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The Worst: Beloved. My friend was once chatting with a professor at Princeton, when someone who looked like Toni Morrison passed by. "Was that..." my friend whispered. The professor grimaced: "Yes, it's That Woman". Bad: Love in the Time of Cholera. Was Summer reading. I'll have to give it a structured re-read now that I'm older. Death of a Salesman. Not a fan of reading plays, but doubt I'd have enjoyed this performed. Favorites: As I Lay Dying: My mother is a fish. I love Faulkner. The Great Gatsby: Everything just clicked with me. My sister hated it at first, but came around to appreciating after writing an essay. Guess that's the point of lit classes. The Classics: The Odyssey: I regret taking Latin over ancient Greek. Canterbury Tales: Does this even qualify? Beowulf:  Countless others.
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Dec 16, 2016 14:07
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Love in the Time of Cholera is very good but I wasn't 100% clear on whether the author realised how utterly despicable the "hero" of the story is.
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Dec 16, 2016 20:54
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Worst: Crime & Punishment. Hated that book. 700 pages about a lovely self involved douchebag. At least Catcher in the Rye was short and had some interesting moments. Best: Hmm, of the regular high school curriculum, I pretty much hated most of the picks, as I had really annoying/bad english teachers. I'm racking my brain to think of *one* good book assigned to us in high school, but I'm blanking. But I did have an awesome Drama teacher that we did shakespeare with, King Lear was a favorite. I remember liking Fences a lot too. I did do a College level Sci-Fi class one summer in high school and that was awesome. Love the William Gibson books, but Red Mars was the highlight.
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Dec 17, 2016 07:28
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dordreff posted:The same teacher assigned us a book which I can't remember the title of, but I can remember the plot to this day: some douchebag falls in love with a girl who likes to play sports and wear men's clothing and there was like 300 pages of him torturing himself over "oh man I love this girl and I wanna go to prom with her, but she wants to wear a suit instead of a dress and I can't deal with this at all". gently caress that book. Mr Powell had garbage taste. Sounds like something based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Night van fem posted:Death of a Salesman. Not a fan of reading plays, but doubt I'd have enjoyed this performed. That's the one I dealt with the most. I probably read through it in 4-5 different classes.
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Dec 17, 2016 22:36
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My favorite was probably The Left Hand of Darkness. I was actually supposed to have read Heart of Darkness but I forgot the name of the book so I searched for "darkness" at the school library and found that first. It's a scifi book about gender identity, isolation, and ice/snow among other things. My least favorite was The Scarlet Letter. The writing style was just such a godawful chore to read that I probably only absorbed about 15% of the book despite reading the entire thing.
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Dec 18, 2016 12:57
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I'm a high school English teacher, so this is a fun thread to read. I have 'book clubs' in my grade 11 class, and right now they're reading: Into Thin Air Brave New World Fahrenheit 451 Oryx & Crake Three Day Road Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time I loved Hatchet when I read it in grade 5. It was the first novel to pull me away from endlessly reading Superfudge and Otis Spofford over and over again. In highschool we read the Chrysalids, which I really enjoyed. I did not enjoy Shakespeare. They're plays, not meant to be clumsily read by high school students.
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Dec 19, 2016 07:31
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DavidAlltheTime posted:They're plays, not meant to be clumsily read by high school students. So how do you approach this in the classroom? I see people make this point a lot and while it's true I think it kind of misses that there's so much a modern audience would miss without reading them first or at least spending some time reading about their context. They were plays that were meant for a 16th century audience who spoke the same dialect and who would easily get his references and jokes about 16th century politics and culture - without reading them a modern audience can certainly follow the basic plots but there is a ton they are going to miss that the original audiences would have picked up more easily.
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Dec 19, 2016 14:18
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DavidAlltheTime posted:I'm a high school English teacher, so this is a fun thread to read. My old HS English teacher put is into groups where we would have to play Shakespearean characters. It made Shakespeare come alive, or at least halfway interesting. We would randomly assign someone a role because he vaguely filled the role of Romeo. Nobody wants to to play Romeo those days. All the cool kids want to be Iago, or Aaron the Moor. thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Dec 19, 2016 |
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Dec 19, 2016 14:25
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Earwicker posted:So how do you approach this in the classroom? I see people make this point a lot and while it's true I think it kind of misses that there's so much a modern audience would miss without reading them first or at least spending some time reading about their context. They were plays that were meant for a 16th century audience who spoke the same dialect and who would easily get his references and jokes about 16th century politics and culture - without reading them a modern audience can certainly follow the basic plots but there is a ton they are going to miss that the original audiences would have picked up more easily. I've spent a little time on his sonnets & some of the memorable soliloquies, but I don't believe there's an adequate return on the investment an entire play requires. I've never seen a Shakespeare play worked through in an English class that wasn't somewhat slogged through. The language is a tremendous barrier for many students. Out of 30, there might be 10 kids who are engaged and getting something out of the process. I think there's better ways to spend class time that can still honour Shakespeare's contributions to English and artistry without taking up a huge chunk of time. It's similar reasoning to why I went with book clubs. If you assign a single novel to 30 kids, you end up with reviews like we've seen in this thread. Some people will treasure a book, while others think it's a colossal waste of time. I'm not interested in convincing students to love the same literature I do, I just want them to improve their reading skills.
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Dec 19, 2016 19:03
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The thing with Shakespeare is that it takes a little while before you can start to make sense of the poetry. It can be tough to parse through a lot of the dialog until you can sort of get a feel for where words are placed and all that. Honestly, I don't know if Shakespeare is best for a high school class. It just takes a lot of work, more than a 40 minute class can provide. Plus, half of the students are reading the Cliff Notes anyway and get nothing from it. That's the worst part about English classes. It basically becomes remembering the plot and you can pass. There was very rarely any real analysis going on.
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Dec 19, 2016 19:58
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yeah I think the most valuable thing I got from any high school class on Shakespeare was discovering Nino Rota's score from the 1968 film version of Romeo and Juliet. I still play pieces from it all the time.
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Dec 19, 2016 20:15
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Loved: The City and the Stars Hated: Great Gatsby. Holy poo poo do I loathe this book. Formulaic writing, asinine allegory and symbolism, completely un-relatable characters and a bland story to boot. Plus, my school loved this novel so loving much that we threw one of those "Gatsby" parties where a bunch of kids dressed up like goofballs and talked with a stereotypical 20's gangster "nyeaaah see, nyeaah" twang. I think the party is what made me hate this book with a passion, if I'm gonna be honest. Off topic: In college, I took a course that focused on Science Fiction as a genre. We read short stories from each decade and major theme shift. If you can find anything like this at your local college/online, I'd highly recommend it - not only did I get to read a great, curated list of short stories, watching the genre shift between major themes was awesome. EDIT: Cut off all the extra poo poo that made my post a book list instead of a "Best/Worst" Boozel fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Dec 19, 2016 |
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Dec 19, 2016 20:58
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I remember also reading "The Crucible" in High School. Remember nothing about it except that it was colonial Salem or some such. But throughout the book they used the term "Goody" for goodwife. My friends and I started calling each other "Goody (last name)" in place of "hey human being," and we still do on occasion to this day.
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Dec 20, 2016 02:37
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Liked: Gatsby, Mockingbird, Beowulf, Diamond Age, Frankenstein, Left Hand, lots more Hated because it was poo poo: Siddhartha (I swear I fell asleep every other page), Enrique's Journey. Hated because it made me cry: Algernon, Mice and Men
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Dec 20, 2016 04:50
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Hated because it made me cry: Algernon, Mice and Men Oh, that's a good idea, especially since I like most of the books I read in school *now*. I agree with those picks and add Mockingbird, Sybill, and the one book I really could not and can not stand, A Day No Pigs Would Die (the fact that the title is a drat lie does not help its case at all.) Loved: Most of the Shakespeare we read (fight me), Lord of the Flies, Island of the Blue Dolphins, the Giver, Davita's Harp, the Black Pearl, the Hobbit, the Fledgeling, And This is Laura. My teachers had darn good taste! Hated: Summer of the Swans (lovely teenage girl can't stop angsting long enough to care for her ambiguously autistic little brother and I guess there are swans?) The Farthest Shore (turns out this was the fourth or fifth Earthsea book and it ruined the series for me. How about don't have the class read the penultimate book in an established series with no context?) Parfume (gross shithead with a sensitive nose becomes a perfume maker and learns how to boil flowers alive to get their essential smells. He later moves on to boiling puppies alive  Amazingly, things get worse.)Weird Reading Class Memory That Dates Me: That one year all the New Kids on the Block fangirls were somehow allowed to read the lovely quickie "biographies" for their book reports.
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Dec 20, 2016 20:50
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Best: I liked Brave New World, Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, Siddhartha, and Lord of the Flies a lot. Grapes of Wrath is the only one i've revisited since then and it still rules. It's so heavy and desperate and I love the characters. Macbeth was a lot of fun but only because we had a really good teacher who dug into the language and made sure we understood what they were talking about and the characterizations and ideas and everything. The Sun Also Rises, Cuckoo's Nest, and to some extent 1984 i liked but also thought they were really sexist. I don't know what I'd think now. Reading Hemingway did introduce me to the idea that I could like someone's work while having major problems with it. We read some great short stories too. Tim O'Brien's "The Lives of the Dead" and Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" blew me away. Definitely the most memorable things I'd read in my life up til then. I knew on some level that "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" was super good but it was too weird and sweaty and ambiguous for me at the time. And some good plays too. Death of a Salesman and either Long Day's Journey Into Night or Beyond the Horizon or some other Eugene O'Neill thing about an irish american family with awful lives. Liked those both a lot. Read part of Equus in a theater class and was motivated to go seek out the rest on my own; there's no way they're gonna put that on a school curriculum but it rules. I don't remember much about Fences but that last image of the brain damaged veteran named Gabriel blowing on trumpet and no sound coming out is haunting In grade school one of the options for a book report was Slake's Limbo and I loved it then, although again I don't know what I'd think now. Didn't Get At The Time But They're Actually Good: Things Fall Apart, Gatsby Worst: For some loving reason we read Shane. That's not even a good book I didn't like A Separate Peace at all, but the combination of over-the-top sentimentality, homoeroticism, and violence helped prepare me for a jesuit education.
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Dec 24, 2016 23:52
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Worst: Catcher in the Rye or Jane Eyre. My opinion might change upon giving Catcher in the Rye a reread but I just could not find any real interest in the book and Jane Eyre was just so bloody dull. Best: Great Gatsby and Hamlet in part due to having an excellent English teacher who really got into the books (still remember doing three classes on Hamlet's first soliloquy). Edit: Actually almost everything I did with said English teacher I liked because he always got so passionate about it.
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Dec 25, 2016 00:56
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I don't really remember most of the books I was assigned for reading in school, so here's the two I do: My Side of the Mountain: read this in 4th grade, remember getting annoyed with having to take a turn at reading aloud, simply because I was multiple chapters ahead and would have to figure out where I was supposed to start reading. Really enjoyed the book, I think it's part of my "be as self-reliant as possible" mindset. Death of a Salesman: HATE. Have read it twice for classes, and watched theatrical adaptations. Maybe I missed something, but I spent the whole story feeling like the main character was going senile and could he hurry up and die already.
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Dec 29, 2016 10:58
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drat, you lucky buggers had some good books to read, for me it was more the best of a bad lot. Roll of thunder hear my cry was not as terrible as the other books they had us read. It was at least somewhat relatable to my bullied as a youth self. The worst was when they had us read Macbeth. I always get annoyed when the characters suddenly grab the idiot ball halfway through the plot. The fact that I was not getting the proper experience by not seeing it live was secondary to why in all that is unholy did Macbeth, upon hearing he would be king, decide to murder the king? Why not just wait patiently for it to happen? Grr. Technically I got to read (compare and contrast coursework) Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy and The Colour of Magic For credit but I chose those books myself so they don't count.
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Dec 29, 2016 16:31
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