We did a lot of Shakespeare: Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice and all the histories covering the sequence from Henry IV to Richard III, and it completely closed Shakespeare off for me. I've put in a lot of effort to be able to enjoy a decent production of one of his plays, but they still seem to be intrinsically pretty tedious, with creaky plots, erratic pace, woefully contrived plot devices, shallow characterisation and blustery circumlocution. Fortunately, the best actors and directors disagree with me and so are able to make something entertaining out of the raw material.

On the other hand, school managed to bring Dickens alive - I really learned to savour the sprawling darkness and the black humour of Great Expectations and David Copperfield (although having studied those two books in fairly close succession I frequently confuse the details of the two), Nicholas Nickleby and so on.

I remember being disappointed by Animal Farm because I'd expected it to be funny.

I got the first inkling of the brilliantly crafted and precisely targeted subtle delights of Pride and Prejudice at school, but it's only on re-reading the book at a more mature age that I realise what an absolute delight it is.

The History of Mr. Polly was a bit of a non-event.

Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet are the only two Shakespeare plays I remember reading in high school, although there may have been others. Both are ace, the latter being much more ace than the former.

Grapes of Wrath - I read it on my own for a book report where we had a choice of about 100 great books, then we did it as a class in 11th grade with Mrs. Delisovoy, who was clearly around the bend and not very interested in teaching English anymore, but still failed to make me dislike anything we read. One of my all time favorites.

Great Gatsby - Did it for a book report. Awesome. I've read it three times, I think.

Animal Farm - Short. Easy to comprehend. Good book report.

Old Man and the Sea - Short. Good book report fodder. I like Hemmingway's style, but some of his stories are a bit tedious. This one was cool. I like stories about the sea and fish.


Some books we read were ruined by my insane English teacher's presentation and interpretation of them. Indeed, all four of my high school English teachers were batshit crazy, which was entertaining, but not educational. Fortunately, I had good teachers in junior high and my mom taught me how to write properly.

Lord of the Flies makes sense to me now, but it didn't in 10th grade with Mrs. Kingsbury, the stentorian battle-ax who called us her wretched children.

The Stranger makes sense to me now, but it didnt' to my 12th grade teacher Sue Proia, who led us all astray as to its point. She was also a bit skeevy. Most of the time, she seemed to be not-too-subtley hitting on Seth Lambiase and Craig Erickson, who sat in the front of the class (she's improved since then I've heard).

In that class we also read Wuthering Heights, which I thought was pretty stupid at the time, but maybe I just resented having to plow through it. I should give it another chance. The semaphore code version is pretty good, to be fair.

Ibsen's The Dollhouse (12th grade) is a bit lame too. Maybe at the time it was subversive but now it just seems so obvious. Yeah, we get it, it was hard being a woman in them days.

Tale of Two Cities (10th grade) is just shit.

Shakespeare I read: Romeo & Juliet (9th grade), MacBeth (11th), and Hamlet (12th). I also read The Merchant of Venice for extra credit, and in 9th grade our teacher showed us the R & J film where you see Juliet's boobs.

Only Dickens I read was Great Expectations, and I hated it.

10th grade was a bad year, not necessarily because of the books, but we all hated our teacher. As this was the year for American literature, it's sad how many bad associations I have with a lot of American classics. About the only book I read in there and didn't hate was Huckleberry Finn. I still haven't picked up The Great Gatsby again after that class.

11th grade was completely different--great teacher. He taught existentialism and surrealism, so we read The Stranger, the Myth of Sisyphus, Ionesco, and some modern poets. I didn't fall in love with much of anything, but I really respected him. It wasn't until I got to college and read The Plague as a freshman that Camus clicked with me.

12th grade was a bit of a grab bag--the teacher had been in our program for years, so we read a lot of stuff that she liked, besides the focus on mythology, which came at the start of the year. Read Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, as well as some Greek plays. The second half of the year was all over the place--Death of a Salesman read aloud in class (where I came out of my shell and excelled as Happy), Lord of the Flies, and ugh--Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver. The best part of the class was when discussing Animal Dreams, our teacher pointed out that saguaro cacti take 50 years to grow each arm. My friend John, who had an innocent childlike nature that let him get away with a lot, exclaimed "Mrs. Kephardt--you have two arms!"

Ironically for being in California, we only read one Steinbeck book, and it was The Pearl, and not The Grapes of Wrath. I only read that a few years ago, when I had to teach it in a class.

I honestly can't think of may books I read in my school days that I really disliked. I think that may be due to the fact that I had a few really good English teachers who made everything interesting. (As for the bad teachers, they were usually bad enough that I'd end up re-reading something again - easy A, or just reading a different Vonnegut.)

College I honestly can't remember much that I had to read that I disliked.

So pretty solid reading except for two:
In high school - Madame Bovary. Had to do it as an independt read, and hated it. CliffsNotes and faking my way through it.
In college - Uncle Tom's Cabin. Horribly written, skimmed the highlights and faked it.

I've also read far more 'classics' since leaving school than I ever did in school.

Richard III (Shakespeare) - Liked it. We got taken to see it as a play that year also, which was cool.

To The Lighthouse (Virginia Wolfe) - I actually rather enjoyed it at the time, but probably didn't really understand it. Haven't read it since, and probably still wouldn't understand it.

Travesties (Tom Stoppard) - Seemed a little too 'look at me clever' when I was 16. not sure if I'd revise that opinion now.

Nun's Priests Tale (Chaucer) - I couldn't get on with the language. It just seemed too much hard work to get any sense of the meaning.

Persuasion (Jane Austen) - Hated it. Haven't read any Austen since, though I probably should give it a go.

Volpone (Ben Jonson) - The fact that it was obviously our teacher's favourite rather put me of it. I couldn't see that attraction. Tolerable.

In French class we did Les Justes (Camus), which I did not enjoy at all. I suspect that this was, at least in part, due to the pretentious assholes who populated my French class. I've enjoyed all the Camus that I've read since (in translation, mind you). Maybe I was simply too young.

The kids in my Year 11 classes tend to really like 'Of Mice and Men' - aided of course by the stimulus from excellent Gary Sinise movie adaptation (which I've mentioned before on here).

'R & J' is generally well received, too. Again I give the kids a visual introduction (via the Baz Luhrmann film) but the themes and effects are timeless.

My favourite kids' book to teach is Louis Sachar's fabulous 'Holes' which is for my Year 8 groups. Very well written, lots of subplot/flashback action that displays a good sense of literary technique to the pupils without ever becoming flashy or wordy. Lovely, compelling stuff.

Holes is a fantastic book. Decent movie too.

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Isn't 'Catcher in the Rye' an American schools staple? Or maybe you've moved on ...


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We didn't read Catcher in the Rye in school. Maybe because all kids like it but Alan Bloom thought it was shit, so now the academics have put the kybosh on it and told teachers only to teach books kids hate.

I didn't read it until I was 25 or 26 and didn't like it that much, actually. I think I was biased because I'd just read something about Salinger that made him seem like a total asshole.


In my school, we didn't really read that much. I mean, we were alsays reading something but we tended to drag it out and not crank through as many books per year as they do at most schools. My school's English curriculum was more about learning how to write. This made it harder in my freshman English course in college because everyone else had read Chaucer except for me, but overall, the kids in my school were much better served. Kids have the rest of their life to study the symbolism in Wuthering Heights, but learning how to write properly and communicate effectively is invaluable skill for anyone to have.

My mom taught technical writing at Penn State, including the writing classes for students who dididn't want to write, and found that the kids from my high school were always better than average student writers.


BTW, this seems appropos of this discussion. http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39205

Forgot I read Catcher in high school, because I had read it the summer before starting 9th grade. They sent out a list of recommended books to read, and I read that, and tried to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, but gave up on that.

Reed, I thought you were going to go with this: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/37346

QUOTE:
"My friend Lisa did hers on Middlemarch," Durst said, "and I was like, 'Are you crazy?' That thing is like 10 times longer."

I love The Onion.

At University I always choose the courses on poetry or plays rather than novels, for exactly the same reason as Durst's friend Lisa.

I don't remember much from GCSEs (Lord of the Flies was okay), but A-levels were much better. I loved The Great Gatsby (and still do, although not the soft-focus Redford film version we watched), quite liked One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and enjoyed the satisfaction of getting to the end of Riddley Walker. We also had a very good teacher for Shakespeare, who made it an enjoyable and involving experience to read Henry V.

On the other hand, the thought of reading any more of that bloated, turgid DH Lawrence rubbish still makes me violent.

You guys only had to read five books at school? What's that about?

Anyway, here's a selection:

Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Romeo & Juliet, Richard III, Twelfth Night. Loved them all apart from Twelfth Night. Shakespeare is pretty much my ideal writer. I don't get on with Shakespeares's comedies though.

Paradise Lost: one of my favourite books of all time.

To Kill A Mocking Bird: Meh.

As I Lay Dying: Really opened up my eyes to narrative possibilities.

The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner: Fantastic. One of the funniest, darkest books I've ever read.

Chaucer: General Prologue and The Knight's Tale. Didn't really appreciate it at the time, but loved it when I did Chaucer at uni.

Translations (the Brian Friel play): Utterly brilliant. He combines Stoppard's linguistic wit and intellectual playfulness with a poignancy that's uniquely his own.

Arcadia: Not one of my favourite Stoppard plays, but, hey, it's Stoppard. Awesome.

Mansfield Park: Great, great stuff. Austen's prose style is incomparable.

Martin Chuzzlewit: I don't get on with Dickens. His prose style is insufferable.

Candide and Rasselas: Two wonderful, remarkably complementary books which despite near contemporaneous publication were apparently written without knowledge of each other.

Some of these posts are making me think that they shouldn't teach anything good in schools as it seems to put people off really excellent books.

Erm what do I remember best.
Rebecca (great); Animal Farm (great); The Crucible and Death of a Salesman (great when you are 14 I guess). R&J like everyone else. They tried to make us read Sons and Lovers once but I was having NONE of it. I remember also I refused to appreciate Ted Hughes and insisted on writing about Tennyson instead - haha, how obnoxious of me. There must have been more though. Oh I remember I was the only one in class who made it all the way through David Copperfield.

in French we did Le Noeud de Viperes - which I thought was fabulous, Catholic angst of the best kind.

in Russian we read Three Sisters and a couple of stories by Turgenyev (Asya) and Pushkin (the Queen of Spades).

in Greek I remember doing Medea and the Oedipus Tyrannos and there must have been some prose but I have no idea what now.

and in Latin, erm, Aeneid 4 and Sallust's thing about Catiline and I'm sure there was something else but again I forget.

This thread has also made me realise what an astonishingly poor memory I have.