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The best was a Midsummer Nights Dream. Since it was a small class for kids who took French/Spanish I instead of the normal reading class, it was pretty small, so we got to actually get up and act it out. The worst was The Scarlet Letter. The only assigned reading book I didn't read.
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Nov 25, 2016 20:31
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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 year after that we read King Lear but we watched this adaptation called King of Texas and it was as good as it sounds. E: tell me about your favourite and least favourite made for tv adaptations of books you read in school Killingyouguy! fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Nov 25, 2016 |
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Nov 25, 2016 21:16
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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. We got to watch that and Polanski's adaptation of MacBeth. Good times...
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Nov 25, 2016 21:41
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I didn't read The Great Gatsby in high school but when I eventually did as an adult, I found it absolutely hilarious that anybody in any country thought it was a good book to put on a high school curriculum. The entire point of the novel is about disillusionment, failure, and a desperate longing to to back to a more hopeful and optimistic time in one's own life. You couldn't pick a book that teenage kids - with their whole lives stretching ahead of them - would be less able to relate to.
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Nov 25, 2016 22:53
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freebooter posted:The entire point of the novel is about disillusionment, failure, and a desperate longing to to back to a more hopeful and optimistic time in one's own life. No, according to my high school English teacher, the entire point of the novel is analyzing why the light he sees is green.
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Nov 25, 2016 23:03
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freebooter posted:I didn't read The Great Gatsby in high school but when I eventually did as an adult, I found it absolutely hilarious that anybody in any country thought it was a good book to put on a high school curriculum. The entire point of the novel is about disillusionment, failure, and a desperate longing to to back to a more hopeful and optimistic time in one's own life. You couldn't pick a book that teenage kids - with their whole lives stretching ahead of them - would be less able to relate to. Not to mention that it takes a dig at the obsession with material goods and the worship of wealth. It is not a celebration of Making It and throwing wild, lavish parties but boy howdy do some people read that and think "holy poo poo if I get rich I can do all that? IMMA GET RICH!!!" Despite the book being all "yeah notice how nobody is happy?" Pretty much everything that American culture worships (and what teenagers are told they should aspire to by popular culture) is given a pretty brutal treatment in that book. But you know how it goes. Young rich jerks started throwing "Gatsby parties" just to show off how cool and awesome and wealthy they were while completely missing the entire point.
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Nov 26, 2016 01:23
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There's a ritzy apartment building here called the "Gatsby". I like Gatsby (the Luhrmann film is great) but it's entertaining first and symbolic second. All the symbols are so thuddingly obvious, too (uhhh duhhh the light represents the future duhhhh let's spend a week on this duhhhh).
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Nov 26, 2016 02:39
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PT6A posted:We got to watch that and Polanski's adaptation of MacBeth. Good times... We watched the version of Hamlet with Mel Gibson. But better was Othello with Kiefer Sutherland as Iago. I remember most the scene where he throws his wife on the bed, climbs on her, then looks RIGHT at the camera and starts a monologue. I remember the teacher having to rewind that because everyone in the class busted a gut laughing at it. Wuthering Heights I remember mostly because it was very confusing where Cathy died, and suddenly she was perfectly fine again. Oh no, that is her daughter that is played by the same loving actress and has the same goddamn name. It was preferable to Pride and Prejudice, but I think had we watched the latter, it might have been more entertaining, at least the Donald Sutherland version.
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Nov 26, 2016 04:16
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The worst I can remember was a novelized version of the Illiad and the Odyessy. It had a red and white cover, and was horribly boring. This is a story from three thousand years ago, one about fighting and sex and monsters and adventure. It takes skill to make that uninteresting. Maybe this thread can explain something to me: What is the point of trying to figure out what the writer meant when they wrote something? Either it has a concrete answer, because the writer told us, or any answer is valid provided you can find some evidence for it, no matter how unlikely it is. Either way, I've always thought it was the stupidest thing to write essays on.
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Nov 26, 2016 04:20
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Domus posted:Maybe this thread can explain something to me: What is the point of trying to figure out what the writer meant when they wrote something? Either it has a concrete answer, because the writer told us, or any answer is valid provided you can find some evidence for it, no matter how unlikely it is. Either way, I've always thought it was the stupidest thing to write essays on. At its best, it's a way to flex your creative muscles and find ways to connect to literature beyond "character do thing, thing happen, reaction, ending". It's a way to forge a link between the writing and your own life, and other writings or media, and it can make things more interesting and engaging. At its worst, it's an annoying puzzle game. I think it's too easy to come away with the idea that a given interpretation is the hardcore one, and that there's a "right" answer (any interpretation that can be defended is technically valid, but that doesn't prevent it from being potentially incredibly stupid). It's more just a way to enrich the experience - at its best, Great Gatsby is an American fairy tale, at its worst it's an aggravating symbol-heavy polemic about the American Dream, it just depends on how hard you tilt into the metaphors. Probably the best way to approach it isn't by what the author meant, but by what the story says, because then it becomes about a dialogue between you and the text, which is interesting and versatile, rather than a match between you and the author, where someone wins and someone loses, which is stifling and annoying.
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Nov 26, 2016 04:39
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Just remembered another cool book I read in school: My Side of the Mountain. it's about a kid who runs away from home and lives inside a hollowed out tree in the mountains (in the Catskills iirc). there was a made for tv adaptation but it wasnt great
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Nov 26, 2016 05:07
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Domus posted:The worst I can remember was a novelized version of the Illiad and the Odyessy. It had a red and white cover, and was horribly boring. This is a story from three thousand years ago, one about fighting and sex and monsters and adventure. It takes skill to make that uninteresting. One of the things you're learning in English class is how to communicate. Pretty much nothing is ever exactly what it says on the tin. The words you use are like 10% of what you say. Context, body language, tone, etc. are huge. You lose a lot of that in the written word obviously but a lot of it is still there. Context means a lot and storytelling is a very important method of communication to humans overall. This is how we hand down a lot of our knowledge; often a story is meant to teach you something beyond being entertaining. Sometimes the entire meaning of a story is "this character is a poo poo head. Do not be like this character." The other thing you're supposed to learn is critical thinking. Literature being kind of nebulous and weird is exactly the point of studying it. You're supposed to decided what you think it means and then justify it. That requires thought. It's also meant to show you what led to what we have now. There are a lot of tropes, archetypes, and timeless stories that just plain never go away. The communication thing is key, though; don't pay attention to the words. Pay attention to the meaning.
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Nov 26, 2016 05:13
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I don't remember a whole lot of the books I've had to read, but I remember reading Romeo and Juliet in high school and I STILL hate that play to this day. A class of kids giggling at "what ho!" might have had something to do with that. We also did the dumb "everyone reads a part" thing for a little bit and I grabbed at reading Mercutio because no one else could do that poo poo. If you laugh at "what ho" there's no way you can do Mercutio's speech about Mab, sorry. High school also exposed me to Hamlet and Othello but this was a different class and the teacher really engaged us in them. I still remember her saying that if you switched the two titular characters there would be no stories because Othello is a guy who acts when he should think and Hamlet is a guy who thinks when he should act. It was around this time that I realized Shakespeare wasn't really meant to be read anyway, as these were plays and even hearing them spoken was a major improvement. Same class had us read The Little Prince (okay but kinda eh on me) and Snow Falling on Cedars (which I really liked and still have my copy of).
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Nov 27, 2016 00:31
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Anyone else read Jane Eyre and chapter after chapter about the mysterious Mr. Rochester?PT6A posted:I will never, until my dying day, figure out what the loving point of The Outsiders was. I may never understand The Outsider fully either, but at least it's interesting to think about. Trying to be cool and stab other people with shiny knives all while using nicknames. Reminded me of Rebel Without a Cause. At that age it was a lot more engaging than something like Sarah, Plain and Tall. Stay gold, ponyboy. N. Senada posted:I really liked The Giver when I read it the first time in middle school. And then I got to college and started not liking it very much. And now, I would have a serious discussion with my kid if/when they read it. "Jonas, take off your tunic and I shall give you a memory of a stirring." -Old Man
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Nov 27, 2016 00:37
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Zogo posted:"Jonas, take off your tunic and I shall give you a memory of a stirring." -Old Man Desdemona, at a fraught moment in Othello: "He says he will return incontinent". We were reading aloud. Everyone lost it, even the teacher. We got Philip Larkin as our major poet for English A-level. I promptly lost my copy of his most famous poems, and bought the Faber complete works as a replacement – the one with an intro by Anthony Thwaite. And that is is how I learned that the great man spent his student years writing raunchy Malory Towers fanfic about lesbian schoolgirls. I found it hard to take 'The Less Deceived' completely seriously after that. 'A Kestrel for a Knave' was something that we probably should have read in class, but didn't. Instead, we did Lord of the Flies like everyone else, presumably on the basis that the WW2 setting was so dated it might as well have been about Romans from our point of view, whereas 'A Kestrel' was set just long ago enough to feel ancient. There was a stack of unused copies gathering dust in the Reading Cupboard, so I borrowed one out of interest. It's a short, punchy book about the power imbalance between adults and children -- oh, and about being a teenage falconer in the North of England in the 60's. It's by Barry Hines, who died this year and also wrote (among much else) the script for the nuclear-holocaust drama 'Threads', widely considered one of the most depressing things ever filmed. 'A Kestrel' is a laugh riot compared to 'Threads', but then, so is slamming your hand in a door. But it's very well-written, and contained the first dialect I'd read that didn't seem condescending. I highly recommended it, and its film version 'Kes'.
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Nov 27, 2016 14:07
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Favorite assigned book: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay The teacher gave the class a choice between a book about the 1800s in America that appeared boring, and this significantly longer book. Second favorite might have been Brave New World Least favorite: maybe some translation of The Odyssey? I'm not sure what was my least favorite.
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Nov 27, 2016 18:50
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Hobologist posted:Reading A Farewell to Arms was like pulling teeth. Hemingway writes like a piece of wood. But I liked 1984; Orwell is the most readable of all modern-era writers, fictional or nonfictional, and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise. I haven't revisited either of these books since high school but I felt exactly the opposite. 1984 didn't do it for me and I found A Farewell to Arms revelatory and ended up reading a bunch of Hemingway. dirby posted:Least favorite: maybe some translation of The Odyssey? I'm not sure what was my least favorite. I could see getting bored with the Iliad, but the Odyssey? Come on.
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Nov 28, 2016 14:19
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Had to read moby dick in 8th grade and utterly hated it. The first half is boring/gay as all hell and my teacher wouldnt aknowledge it, and the second half is just completely boring as gently caress and long winded for an 8th grader. The actual whale bit was good but you have to get past a shitload of blah blah blah word words the sea is like everything meandering bullshit from the crows nest to get there. Ahab had some memorable rants tho. The scarlet letter was boring and offended me on just about every level imaginable, plus it endowed me with a lifelong hatred of loving puritans. So thanks to hawthorne I guess. On the other hand I liked a lot of the assigned reading such as dune (7th grade, gently caress yeh) most of the stuff by the bard (all through middle and high school), the great gatsby (9th I think), The Giver (4th or 5th), and a shitload more. I found a lot of the poetry we had to read uninteresting but at least it pretty much ends quickly even when it sucks. A bad book drags rear end, especially when you have to write multiple essays and reports about it over a series of weeks.
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Nov 28, 2016 14:46
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Death In Venice. My god, it's like 58 pages long, but I've read 400 page books that go by quicker. Basically, reading about some old dude lusting after some young Polish teenager to the point where he follows him around is incredibly boring. Then the old man dies of cholera.
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Nov 28, 2016 18:47
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Nathilus posted:the assigned reading such as dune (7th grade, gently caress yeh)  Holy poo poo, I just read that book for the first time a few months ago and I would not want to be the teacher leading that discussion but I would've wanted to be the kid that got to read that in class.
N. Senada fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Nov 28, 2016 |
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Nov 28, 2016 19:38
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I read Dune on the recommendation of my high school compsci teacher and it hurt my impression of him a little bit, to be honest. All I got out of that book was 'white boy conquers the space muslims'.
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Nov 28, 2016 21:21
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I read dune when I was 10-12ish. And with 'read' I meant I progressively looked at all the words. I did it again in my twenties and when you finally understand it it's still not great.
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Nov 28, 2016 21:37
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It's great. You might be brought up in a different time and look down your nose at some of the ideas, but it's still brilliant, thoughtful scifi. One of the things that always really annoyed me about talking about books online is you've got no idea who you're talking to. Many teens and young twenties are still working out how the world works now and when they read an old book with SOME outdated ideas they can't help but get stuck on that say point and say over and over 'but thats SEXIST' or 'but thats RACIST' with whatever the definition of what those words mean today. This happens with Heinlein constantly. Dune is still great and will be remembered and copied for basically ever, while whatever the current politically correct interpretation of it will be outdated in a decade. There are concepts in Dune, scifi concepts, that any scifi fan/writer would appreciate as brilliant and now staples of genre. But people that don't really care about scifi or have the maturity to put aside some of the outdated writing, I would not recommend them this book.z
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Nov 29, 2016 00:16
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Now that I've had more time to think about it my least favorite was reading the unabridged A Tale of Two Cities. It really had no chance because I had to read a TON of books one quarter and it was the straw that broke the camels back in that regard. A gloomy book about peoples heads being chopped off wasn't the most appealing thing for me at the time.Carnival of Shrews posted:But it's very well-written, and contained the first dialect I'd read that didn't seem condescending. I highly recommended it, and its film version 'Kes'. I need to watch that one. Nathilus posted:...The Giver (4th or 5th), and a shitload more. The Giver in 4th or 5th grade seems early.
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Nov 29, 2016 00:42
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Gary Paulsen's The Hatchet in fourth grade was terrific. That kid was resourceful as hell and don't you even try to gently caress with him, not even if you're a bull moose. Some bad opinions itt, My Antonia and Tale of Two Cities were good books then and good books now.
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Nov 29, 2016 00:45
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Or the nerdy kid who gets a book from his computer teacher and reads it and thinks less of the computer teacher.... what is the book? Dune.
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Nov 29, 2016 00:48
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My 7th grade English teacher gave me a copy of Beadbury's Illustrated Man and it made me think better of her.
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Nov 29, 2016 00:55
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Tony Montana posted:One of the things that always really annoyed me about talking about books online is you've got no idea who you're talking to. Many teens and young twenties are still working out how the world works now and when they read an old book with SOME outdated ideas they can't help but get stuck on that say point and say over and over 'but thats SEXIST' or 'but thats RACIST' with whatever the definition of what those words mean today. This happens with Heinlein constantly. I'm sorry, but pedophilia is pedophilia, no matter the era. It kind of kills the rest of the story.
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Nov 29, 2016 03:12
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N. Senada posted:
It's (still) an entertaining read and has some illuminating bits in it. I particularly remember taking the lesson about fear being the true enemy out of it and also the idea that understanding can't be had by staying seperate from a process. In fact it was when I was rereading it years later and that part came up that I really began to internalize my understanding of quantum physics via the double-slit experiment. I'd never really understood how light could "know" it was being observed. It may sound stupid but up to that point I'd simply failed to recognize that any observation is by definition also an interaction. Zogo posted:The Giver in 4th or 5th grade seems early. Here in Texas we have this thing that is called "The Texas Bluebonnet Award". I think it's mostly awarded to stuff that is at a middle school reading level, but honors classes have you start reading them in fourth or fifth grade. The vocab and writing style weren't difficult for me, but some of the themes sure as hell went over my head. The main one about emotion being a double edged sword didn't, though. Edit: oh I have one more. One of the sophmore year honors english teachers at my high school famously loved the poo poo out of Casablanca and spent an entire semester on it. And I luckily got him. #1 motherfucking coolest, easiest semester of english in my life. The second semester of him we did mostly Bardly plays and that owned too. Dude had hella good taste. He's where I found out about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, stage version. 
Nathilus fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Nov 29, 2016 |
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Nov 29, 2016 07:16
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Nathilus posted:The scarlet letter was boring and offended me on just about every level imaginable, plus it endowed me with a lifelong hatred of loving puritans. So thanks to hawthorne I guess. Why is a book about not being shamed by society offensive? I mean, I get that some people find the book boring, but offensive is a new one to me. Anyway, Favorite was To Kill A Mockingbird. Least favorite was this weird story called "The Yellow Wallpaper". Maybe I'd appreciate it more now but high school me was not into this "feminism" bullshit.
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Nov 29, 2016 07:19
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I did not read a single goddamn page of the scarlet letter in 10th grade, but got a 97 on the essay exam on it, fuckin high point of my 20 years of formal education right there.
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Nov 29, 2016 07:29
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NikkolasKing posted:Why is a book about not being shamed by society offensive? I mean, I get that some people find the book boring, but offensive is a new one to me. Just the entire way that society treated the protagonist infuriated me. Worked as intended IMO. The entire point of the book is that you are supposed to find that behavior repugnant. It's why I thanked Hawthorne in my post. As hard as the book was to get through, it makes an excellent primer on bigotry and how trash puritans were as human beings. The Thorn Birds was kinda the same. Extremely hard to get through at the age I was forced to read it but overall incredibly valuable.
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Nov 29, 2016 07:31
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Kazak_Hstan posted:I did not read a single goddamn page of the scarlet letter in 10th grade, but got a 97 on the essay exam on it, fuckin high point of my 20 years of formal education right there.  . Props. Bullshitting is an important life skill anyway.
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Nov 29, 2016 07:34
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Tony Montana posted:It's great. You might be brought up in a different time and look down your nose at some of the ideas, but it's still brilliant, thoughtful scifi. I liked the themes, I loved the setting. I hated the writing.
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Nov 29, 2016 08:03
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NikkolasKing posted:Why is a book about not being shamed by society offensive? I mean, I get that some people find the book boring, but offensive is a new one to me. Well, part of it was feminist, but most of it was "gently caress you, guy who thought laying in bed all day was a cure for depression."
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Nov 29, 2016 10:26
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N. Senada posted:I had forgotten about Johnny Tremaine. Who is the kid that gets jazzed up about American history because of Johnny motherfucking Tremaine? I kind of want to go back and reread Johnny Tremaine because I'm way more into historical fiction now than I was as a shithead eleven year old. He fucks up his hand by pouring molten silver on it right? I always imagined that he forever had a silver hand because of that. Anyway, I was assigned to read Heart of Darkness in a college class and I loving hated it, couldn't stand it, ditched it halfway through and my impressions essay was about how much I hated the book. I don't even remember why I hated it so much, I just did. I also hated the loving James Joyce short stories we had to read in high school, mostly because we would read them and then spend a week analyzing the symbolism and I didn't enjoy listening to my fellow high school idiots grasping at straws because we don't actually know what literary symbolism is. I remember really liking Holes, Macbeth (I read it twice in two separate classes, even), Taming of the Shrew, Things Fall Apart and a jumble of short stories, particularly the ones from Interpreter of Maladies. I also liked To Kill a Mockingbird, like everyone else, but I hated the way my class read it, which was out-loud, round-robin style over the course of a loving month. Most of my classmates were not strong readers. A good book, terrible when read aloud by children.
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Nov 29, 2016 11:21
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Nathilus posted:It's (still) an entertaining read and has some illuminating bits in it. I particularly remember taking the lesson about fear being the true enemy out of it and also the idea that understanding can't be had by staying seperate from a process. In fact it was when I was rereading it years later and that part came up that I really began to internalize my understanding of quantum physics via the double-slit experiment. I'd never really understood how light could "know" it was being observed. It may sound stupid but up to that point I'd simply failed to recognize that any observation is by definition also an interaction. I really liked the Duke Atreides, Paul's father, and his attitude towards living on Dune. We're here on this desert planet, we need to adapt to our new environment. We used to exploit water, now we're going to use desert power. That, joined with the attitude of integrating into a mystic, desert sex cult through full participation, made me pleasantly surprised. Paul doesn't succeed because he teaches them his ways, he succeeds because he listens to/respects what his new host culture does. Still some white savior stuff in there but, for the most part, much better than I expected given the publication date and the genre.
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Nov 29, 2016 13:36
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Tony Montana posted:It's great. You might be brought up in a different time and look down your nose at some of the ideas, but it's still brilliant, thoughtful scifi. 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.
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Nov 29, 2016 14:00
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My first grade teacher gave me Julie of the Wolves
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Nov 29, 2016 16:28
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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? Tony Montana has a chip on his shoulder about kids these days and will find any excuse to rant about them.
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Nov 29, 2016 18:38
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