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KittenJucerSupreme posted:This sounds interesting! I'm a sucker for this kind of mundane/absurd juxtaposition. He's the dude who wrote Jennifer Government in which corporations have so much power, people take their employer for a last name and the instigating event is that a dude working for Nike organizes a mall shooting on the release day of Nike's new shoe to give it street cred.
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Apr 7, 2023 12:21
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oh yeah The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird. Weird how much 20th century American literature we read despite being a school in England. I don't think we read anything from that century by a British author, maybe something by Huxley or 1984?
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Apr 8, 2023 18:14
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JethroMcB posted:I believe Maniac Magee was also on the BotB list for that year; I don't remember much at all about the book itself but I vividly remember the experience of reading it. Something about it hooked me so hard that I read half of it without stopping, and when I realized how far in I was I committed to finishing the entire thing in one sitting. I also remember very little about Maniac Magee. Except for the fact that I absolutely tore through it as well, and that I cried at the end. It was one of the first books to do that me, as far as I recall.
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Apr 8, 2023 21:55
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Plebian Parasite posted:I think the best thing I ever 'had' to read for school was Catch-22, but even then it was one of those 'write a report on one of these books I don't care which one' and I kinda just lucked out picking that one because it could've been so much worse; Catch-22 remains one of my favorite books. That's pretty great for an assigned reading. I wonder if I would have loved it as much if I had been assigned it in school. (Though I did end up really loving Murakami after we did a unit on his short stories, definitely my favorite assigned reading by far.) Animal-Mother posted:We were told we could read any Steinbeck except that. Perhaps the same phenomenon: We were assigned Black Boy by Richard Wright and explicitly instructed not to read the back half of the book, in which he joins the Communist Party. (Tbf it's not as interesting as the first half, but it might be the only time we were told not to read something in that class.) Sir Mat of Dickie fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Apr 9, 2023 |
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Apr 9, 2023 03:44
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vyelkin posted:Back when people read books, they used to make you read them in school, maybe in English class. I was reminded of this by someone mentioning the Kite Runner in another thread, because as a good product of the Canadian education system, that was one of the books I had to read. We also read Ender's Game at one point which was pretty random but taught me that posting on the internet is the most important thing you can do as a human being so I guess it wasn't all bad. Your Canadian education was different from mine. We read "Island of the Blue Dolphins", "Where the Red Fern Grows", Gordon Korman stuff, two kids surviving a winter in the wilderness, some book about nickel mining, one about a magic native American mask, and that one Canadian seal hunting tragedy. You're probably a good ten years younger than I am, at least. 
Mister Facetious fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Apr 9, 2023 |
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Apr 9, 2023 03:51
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The only book I remember strongly - because I hated it so much that I still hate it all these years later - was Ethan Frome. Miserable sack of poo poo goes around being a miserable sack of poo poo then fails a murder-suicide so he can be even more of a miserable sack of poo poo forever and nobody learns nothin'. Goddamn
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Apr 9, 2023 04:03
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Sir Mat of Dickie posted:Perhaps the same phenomenon: We were assigned Black Boy by Richard Wright and explicitly instructed not to read the back half of the book, in which he joins the Communist Party. (Tbf it's not as interesting as the first half, but it might be the only time we were told not to read something in that class.) Our teacher read us* Ender's Game in Grade 6 and purposefully stopped before the last quarter of the book. I still don't know what happens. She told us it's simply boring. It could be anything, I never finished the book myself. * Not that we read the book, but like in between periods if we were done early we'd all put our heads down and the teacher would read to us. This was a feature of my English education all the way through to the end of high school, which in hindsight is very weird. Getting read to is something i associate with not being able to read yourself. The moment I learned to read my parents stopped reading to me, but my teachers? reading to 18 year olds Mister Facetious posted:Your Canadian education was different from mine. We read "Island of the Blue Dolphins", "Where the Red Fern Grows", Gordon Korman stuff, two kids surviving a winter in the wilderness, some book about nickel mining, one about a magic native American mask, and that one Canadian seal hunting tragedy. You're probably a good ten years younger than I am, at least. I'm pretty young by SA standards but my school's library had like a million copies (which probably used to be in classrooms, from when it was on the curriculum) of Island of the Blue Dolphins so I figured it must be worth reading. Don't remember anything about it other than I thought it was boring as hell lmao
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Apr 9, 2023 04:36
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Catch-22 was a book I read just before or after Catcher in the Rye and the contrast was astounding. The first third of the book felt nearly inscrutable - and then Heller's writing style locked in and it became this whirling, cyclical fever dream of a novel; fully delivering on the brilliant, inspired, poetical cynicism that I'd been told to expect from Catcher.Mister Facetious posted:"Where the Red Fern Grows" Where the Red Fern Grows, in my memory, is an overwrought polemic about the dangers of running with an axe. I know other things happened in that book, but I just remember one of the dumb poor bully kids taking an unforced error to the heart.
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Apr 9, 2023 05:05
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To this day, I can't stand Charles Dickens because of my 9th grade English teacher. She pushed him down our throat the whole semester. What sucked for me was, I was really starting to get into reading things other than comics around this time, discovering books that I liked on my own and she would constantly badger us if we displayed any interest in anything other than Dickens. No discussion on how his works influenced anyone else. Great Expectations still is unbearable to me because of this bitch. The only thing I remember about the whole thing is having to write papers on each chapter and if you couldn't guess her exact interpretation of the material, she'd take points off and write you an essay back about why you were wrong about Pips place in the world. Or if we described the world as just a living hell of depression, she would counter with poo poo like "It was a different time and that was the romance of the era." Lady, the world was poo poo, full of poverty, slavery and just people loving each other over left and right. This isn't Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman. Getting out of that class was such a breath of fresh air. After that we'd read pretty much what everyone else has listed but were encouraged to find something we personally enjoyed. That's how I found Tolkken, David Eddings, Phillip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and countless others. Nowadays, I understand the importance Dickens played in the grand scheme of things. But for fucks sake lady, get off his dick and just be happy that a bunch of hick kids from smalltown Kentucky used a book for something other than wiping their rear end with.
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Apr 9, 2023 05:32
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Killingyouguy! posted:my teachers? reading to 18 year olds Did you get in trouble if you tuned out the teacher and read ahead on your own? My teachers did this until probably 8th grade but we each had our own copy to read along. It was miserable.
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Apr 9, 2023 06:23
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UwUnabomber posted:Did you get in trouble if you tuned out the teacher and read ahead on your own? My teachers did this until probably 8th grade but we each had our own copy to read along. It was miserable. Oh, I think they stopped reading out our assigned books pretty early, other than Shakespeare lol, though no, I don't think I got in trouble for that. What I was describing, the book wasn't part of the curriculum, only the teacher had a copy and it was just free entertainment if we had like 15 minutes before the final bell or anything
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Apr 9, 2023 13:13
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We had to read out The Merchant of Venice in class. The teacher assigned particular roles to a bunch of us a few pages in based on whose voice/style she thought fit the character and who could pronounce the abbreviat’d words. I got Shylock
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Apr 9, 2023 16:32
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I was an exchange student in high school, and in Dutch class we read Chinezen van glas by Nicolette Smabers. I did not, at that point, speak fluent Dutch so I struggled through it with a dictionary in one hand. I was so proud of my final 3-page paper about the underlying themes. When I got it back from Meneer Dammers he just wrote "NO" across the title page in red ink. Not even a "nee" because clearly he did not expect me to be able to translate it.  From the other side, in English class that year we read Animal Farm and Huckleberry Finn and it was a real eye-opener for me how torturous Twain's phonetic writing style was for people who spoke English fluently as a 2nd or 3rd language. Didn't help that the teacher had no clue what a Southern accent sounded like so she would mispronounce Jim saying "I's gwine ter" as something like "ease wean tea" so when i tried to explain that it means "I was going to" she'd just shake her head at me pityingly.
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Apr 9, 2023 16:43
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The only time I was read to in high school was 1) when we were studying poetry and things like meter and rhythm were important and 2) when our grade 11 teacher read us "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and made us all swear that we wouldn't read ahead to the ending before him.
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Apr 9, 2023 16:47
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to understand a reference in Catcher in the Rye, we had to read a chapter of David Copperfield, and then we all related to Holden when he was like 'that poo poo loving sucks' and our teacher was like 'lmao yeah dickens was paid by the word' and we rioted
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Apr 9, 2023 16:48
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In high school we had an English class were we had to read Dracula, and at some point Frankenstein. And later the teacher had us watch the old Universal movies. But also Dracula, Dead and Loving It. The only movie I ever walked out of at the theaters as a kid. I don't remember a single word about either book. But I recently bought a really cool looking hard cover printing of Dracula from 2011. It's really hard to find a cover that isn't just ugly as hell, or weirdly sexual. I mostly only read horror stuff, and I felt weird not having a copy of that in there somewhere. So I'm excited to see if I actually like it or not.
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Apr 9, 2023 16:53
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The easiest A I ever got on an English class assignment was a book report on Jurassic Park, because it was already my favorite book at the time and I'd just recently finished re-reading it. The main thing I remember about assigned reading in high school is that George Orwell is the most boring motherfucker I've ever had the displeasure of reading. I was an avid reader so school-mandated reading felt mostly like an inconvenience until I could go back to what I wanted to be reading. JethroMcB posted:Where the Red Fern Grows, in my memory, is an overwrought polemic about the dangers of running with an axe. I know other things happened in that book, but I just remember one of the dumb poor bully kids taking an unforced error to the heart. lol that's the main thing I remember about that book too. Our fifth grade teacher read it aloud to the class and the raspy voice she did for the dying kid really stuck with me. Also if any of us in that room told you they weren't crying at the end they were a loving liar.
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Apr 9, 2023 17:20
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lol goddamn 1984 sucks
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Apr 9, 2023 17:38
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One summer we were given a list of books and we had to pick one to read so I picked Animal Farm because it was the shortest, because even though I loved reading I wanted to read books I chose for myself and not books that were imposed on me by school. Anyway Animal Farm is okay I guess, but I thought it was pretty heavyhanded even as a dumbass teenager.Killingyouguy! posted:Our teacher read us* Ender's Game in Grade 6 and purposefully stopped before the last quarter of the book. I still don't know what happens. She told us it's simply boring. It could be anything, I never finished the book myself. At the end of the book the humans trick Ender into committing genocide against the aliens and it makes him sad.
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Apr 9, 2023 21:55
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vyelkin posted:At the end of the book the humans trick Ender into committing genocide against the aliens and it makes him sad. loving lmao
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Apr 9, 2023 22:09
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Gambit from the X-Men posted:lol goddamn 1984 sucks I haven't revisited it since I was I think 15, but... yeah, it sure fuckin' does Killingyouguy! posted:loving lmao Also: After the end of the war he ends up finding a hidden bug queen egg and fucks off with it to explore space and hopefully one day atone for killing an entire species. Also his sociopath older brother ends up ruler of Earth or some poo poo, I forget exactly.
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Apr 9, 2023 22:15
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what the christ
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Apr 9, 2023 22:18
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Memories are coming back and the entire parallel plot with Ender's siblings is actually hilarious. They blog so good and so persuasively that they steer the Earth into a genocidal war with the aliens and then Peter parleys that into literal world domination lmao
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Apr 9, 2023 22:22
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Mr. Baps posted:Memories are coming back and the entire parallel plot with Ender's siblings is actually hilarious. They blog so good and so persuasively that they steer the Earth into a genocidal war with the aliens and then Peter parleys that into literal world domination lmao the dream of every BrooklynDad_Defiant!
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Apr 9, 2023 23:15
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Mr. Baps posted:Memories are coming back and the entire parallel plot with Ender's siblings is actually hilarious. They blog so good and so persuasively that they steer the Earth into a genocidal war with the aliens and then Peter parleys that into literal world domination lmao It was the 80s, people didn't know yet that teens posting on the internet weren't going to become the world's most influential political thinkers.
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Apr 9, 2023 23:36
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Anyone else made to read The Education of Little Tree? It remains the absolute worst book I have ever read. Tells the autobiographical story of a cherokee descendant spending time with his grandparents... except it was actually written by a white KKK segregationist shithead, and despite that, was still on Oprah's recommendations when I was in school, and in fact for years after that came to light I am still so loving mad I read that book.
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Apr 9, 2023 23:52
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We had to read a ton of Shakespeare, minimum of one comedy and one drama every year for all five years of high school. I hated Shakespeare, other than Julius Caesar, and it wasn’t until after high school that I appreciated the plays. That was a common theme -in particular I remember being surprised by how much I liked Great Gatsby when I read it at like 20 compared to being forced to read it at 15. I don’t remember anything particularly great from our reading lists. They were extremely white, extremely British (with a bit of cancon and the rare American) and extremely male. I did read a bunch of existentialist lit in French class which holds up real good.
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Apr 10, 2023 00:13
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I grew up in Missouri so I had to read a minimum of three books by Laura Ingalls Wilder a year for 7 years. Every once in a while I remember some detail from those books and go poking around on Wikipedia. Last time I found out that her arch nemesis Nellie Oleson wasn't even a real person. She was three different people that Laura just smashed together into Pioneer Bully. Went on a field trip to the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum in Mansfield, MO and saw the gun her husband got her to shoot native Americans with after they saw some. Her loving daughter grew up to be a libertarian writer and some racist alt history guy wrote a book where she's the president of the Confederacy in the 1940s. I think about Laura Ingalls Wilder a lot.
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Apr 10, 2023 04:55
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I loving hated A Separate Peace, I still think it was educational malpractice to try to get me to relate to the infinite amount of novels about upper class white boys in boarding school I was assigned in Honors English, and why I ended up dropping Honors English to go read Greek plays, Shakespeare, and Hemingway in regular rear end English.
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Apr 10, 2023 16:45
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I used to love reading and then my accelerated English class in my sophomore year of high school killed that with A Passage to India and Jane Eyre in one semester.
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Apr 11, 2023 03:59
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silvergoose posted:Anyone else made to read The Education of Little Tree? I had buried that book deep in some memory hole, but my intense dislike came roaring back in a second. I mainly remember how it plods along until very suddenly everyone around the kid dies at the end, including the dogs, for miscellaneous reasons.
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Apr 11, 2023 05:32
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Hrist posted:In high school we had an English class were we had to read Dracula, and at some point Frankenstein. And later the teacher had us watch the old Universal movies. But also Dracula, Dead and Loving It. The only movie I ever walked out of at the theaters as a kid. I don't remember a single word about either book. But I recently bought a really cool looking hard cover printing of Dracula from 2011. It's really hard to find a cover that isn't just ugly as hell, or weirdly sexual. I mostly only read horror stuff, and I felt weird not having a copy of that in there somewhere. So I'm excited to see if I actually like it or not. Frankenstein is loving phenomenal! Like, I really enjoy Gothic literature in general, but Mary Shelley is by far the best writer in the genre. Also, arguably, the first science fiction novel. Dracula is fun and enjoyable, but not as good as Frankenstein.
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Apr 12, 2023 05:41
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The Giver was such a trip for my grade 6 mind. The moment when he realizes everyone is colorblind was a watershed moment for me as a reader. I refused to watch the movie when it came out a few years ago because of that scene. How could you possibly translate that into a visual medium and keep the impact? Still haven’t watched it. Book ruled though.
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Apr 13, 2023 03:51
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Never had to read The Giver. It was normally read in my sixth grade class but we read Timothy of the Cays that year instead. Which was pretty good.
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Apr 13, 2023 06:15
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I remember reading either for class or summer reading: The Red Badge of Courage Where the Red Fern Grows Hatchet The Giver 1984 Of Mice and Men Flowers for Algernon Lord of the Flies Secret of NIMH Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Maniac Magee - was the shocker for some of y'all that he was homeless? I read a lot of books. Waffle! fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Apr 14, 2023 |
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Apr 14, 2023 01:04
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Enfys posted:I had buried that book deep in some memory hole, but my intense dislike came roaring back in a second. Phew it wasn't just me. I will never stop bringing it up, it was such a horrible thing to make people read for so many reasons.
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Apr 15, 2023 13:06
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For my high school senior year AP English class, we had to read The Great Gatsby the summer beforehand. I put it off until the last week or so of break because I was dreading it so much, and I think I ended up getting so engrossed that I read the whole book in one setting.
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Apr 15, 2023 15:24
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I (just me) was assigned a Wizard of Earthsea in like 6th grade English. s/o to that teacher.
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Apr 16, 2023 17:27
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I read the stuff on the general list even though we didn't have to read them all and I also stole the AP lit book from the classroom while I was still in middleschool because it was a huge book with like several novellas and short stories in it and I was like aight that rules lol. I was freak, loved to read and even loved reading all the stuffy poo poo everyone always complains about. Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry was p baller. We had a English teacher for seventh grade who had been a literal Black Panther and he loving ruled, all his curriculum was literally just books about and surrounding black people, I went to an art school though so that poo poo wouldn't have happened elsewhere, probably would have went down real bad nowadays with the wack rear end CRT conspiracy theory bullshit. I think the book I hated the most was A Scarlet Letter because it was just agonizing, I also remember Island of the Blue Dolphins boring the sin out of me. Some stuff I really enjoyed was reading The Dubliners as part of curriculum, that started my love for Joyce, I also really liked Kindred quite a bit (it should be obvious who assigned that book). Lil Swamp Booger Baby fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Apr 16, 2023 |
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Apr 16, 2023 17:58
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Jordan7hm posted:We had to read a ton of Shakespeare, minimum of one comedy and one drama every year for all five years of high school. I hated Shakespeare, other than Julius Caesar, and it wasn’t until after high school that I appreciated the plays. That was a common theme -in particular I remember being surprised by how much I liked Great Gatsby when I read it at like 20 compared to being forced to read it at 15. I took Shakespearean Studies in highschool and I didn't give a poo poo about Shakespeare before but that class made me realize how much it rules, we went through Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream basically line by line, and our teacher deconstructed all of it and gave us a lot of insight into how the plays were performed back in the day and for who. She really removed the dumbass haughty mystique from it and introduced us to the ribald and goofy rear end reality of it all. Titus Andronicus is straight up one of the dumbest things I've ever read and it's awesome. Oh and I was the only boy in the class and like half the girls had crushes on me. That class loving owned.
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Apr 16, 2023 18:00
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