What is the worst thing you ever read in High School?

Frankenstein, although obvious why it was such a big deal at the time, was extremely boring, murkier than a swamp, bizarrely paced and featuring some of the most asinine plot points of any story I've seen. Also, Shelly's lack of both story structure and geographical knowledge was responsible for one of the most riotus class periods I've ever had, as our teacher deconstructed how ridiculous every plot point in two or three consecutive chapters was, in a manner that would've made Cracked.com proud.

Jesus, I forgot about Frankenstein, yeah that book sucked. Dracula was at least "not bad".

I hated A Separate Peace. Our teacher made this huge deal about "what the tree symbolized," and when the day came to finally discuss it, it turns out it's just whatever you want it to symbolize. Stupid, stupid, stupid book. And those guys were totally gay.

The totally were! Of course, being freshmen at the time, my class would draw pictures of my teacher getting his "limb" jounced by Phineas. He deserved it for making us read that crap.
 
Off the top of my head,

The Breakable Vow - Basically, we were forced to read this book about dating violence Sophomore year and it sucked balls. I understand the purpose of trying to educate kids about this, but the book was a waste of time and it had no literary value at all. It was a Lifetime movie in book form. And the worst part was that all the kids who usually hate English and don't want to read anything were all over this book, because apparently it takes useless bull**** to get kids interested in reading.

I also remember having to do something similar Freshman year. We had to read the autobiography of some guy who grew up in the ghetto and persevered and went on to do something or other. All I know is that the book felt like it was written by a 15-year-old. I think there were spelling mistakes.

And of course, Pride and Prejudice. What a load of garbage. Some terrible, pretentious romance about some rich people who like to dance and socialize and obsess over manners. And then some chick falls in love with a guy. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anyone considers Jane Austen to be serious literature. This is a ****ing AP class I'm in. I can't see what the importance or depth of this book is. The only thing Jane Austen can be credited with is inventing the sappy romantic comedy, a distinction that's basically comparable to saying you invented herpes.

And Mark Twain agrees with me:

"Whenever I take up "Pride and Prejudice" or "Sense and Sensibility," I feel like a barkeeper entering the Kingdom of Heaven. I mean, I feel as he would probably feel, would almost certainly feel. I am quite sure I know what his sensations would be -- and his private comments. He would be certain to curl his lip, as those ultra-good Presbyterians went filing self-complacently along."

"Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it."

"To me his prose is unreadable--like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death."

"I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
I thought we could take this both ways.

For me, I think it is probably Metamorphisis by Franz Kafka.
I actually read the Metamorphosis in our text book this year even though it was never assigned.

I liked it.
i hated most Dickens and Shakespeare in high school

They are just way too touted and over praised too much.

I did take a college level Shakespeare class, it somewhat helped, but the teacher was an idiot, she said 'umm' "ahh' or 'uhh" 197 times in 25 min. She made us retell 7 stories in one flowing narrative, it was terrible, god awful even.

I just haven't been able to get back into Shakespeare since
We're reading Hamlet right now. But we're reading along with a recording of it with Kenneth Brannagh and Judy Dench.

I think Shakespeare is overrated but he was damn good with words.

Like in the scene in Act II we read today:

POLONIUS
"Madam, I swear I use no art at all.
That he is mad, 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity;
And pity 'tis 'tis true: a foolish figure;
But farewell it, for I will use no art.
Mad let us grant him, then: and now remains
That we find out the cause of this effect,
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause:
Thus it remains, and the remainder thus. Perpend."

Now I know where Jesse Jackson got his rhyming schtick from.
I hate Anne Frank.
Anti-Semite.
The Catcher in the Rye.

Yep.
I liked it.
I found Lord of the Flies to be overrated, but I really hated A Separate Peace.
I also thought Lord of the Flies was alright, though everyone else hated it.

We had to read A Separate Peace over the summer before Sophomore year. It was just horribly forgettable.
Oh yeah, Romeo And Juliet was a stinker. How people still regard it as one of the greatest love stories of all time is insane to me. Shakespeare In Love is a much better love story than what it's paying homage too, and Jim and Pam from The Office millions of times better still.

Romeo And Juliet only works if you think of it as a satire of shallow, dramatic, fake teenage infatuation-love. I actually wrote my essay on it about that. Do Romeo and Juliet even have one conversation in the entire play?! Not counting descriptions of how badly they want to swim in each other's eye and stuff, of course. It's not love.
Yeah, I remember feeling so vindicated about this when my awesome English teacher last year pointed it out in class.

I've been saying it for ages.
 
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And of course, Pride and Prejudice. What a load of garbage. Some terrible, pretentious romance about some rich people who like to dance and socialize and obsess over manners. And then some chick falls in love with a guy. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anyone considers Jane Austen to be serious literature. This is a ****ing AP class I'm in. I can't see what the importance or depth of this book is. The only thing Jane Austen can be credited with is inventing the sappy romantic comedy, a distinction that's basically comparable to saying you invented herpes.

And Mark Twain agrees with me:

"Whenever I take up "Pride and Prejudice" or "Sense and Sensibility," I feel like a barkeeper entering the Kingdom of Heaven. I mean, I feel as he would probably feel, would almost certainly feel. I am quite sure I know what his sensations would be -- and his private comments. He would be certain to curl his lip, as those ultra-good Presbyterians went filing self-complacently along."

"Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it."

"To me his prose is unreadable--like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death."

"I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."

I know! I could barely get through the first hundred pages and it was like, "God, nothing has happened except they've played ****ing cards." They go on and on about walking over to the neighbor's for lunch... ugh.

I love Mark Twain's criticism. I though Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were both okay, but the dialects he uses make his books illegible to me.

I agree with everyone who says Romeo and Juliet suck. I opened it up expecting something epic, and the first page is nothing but rape jokes. The hell?
 
Scarlet Letter- Dear Lord is it dull. I mean geeze find a point and get to it please.

The Secret Life of Bees- For the life of me I can't see why we were made to read this. It was just so bad on so many levels.

I originally thought The Grapes of Wrath was really dull and I wouldn't enjoy it but as you gett reading it turns out to be a classic as everyone says.

I liked The Great Gatsby and Ayn Rand's books.
 
Sense and Sensibility rules.

Tale of Two Cities is a weak effort from Dickens, who is one of my favorite authors.

Catcher in the Rye and Great Gatsby are good.
 
I despise The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald is only a moderately good writer who tried to pull off a Hemmingway peice and failed horribly in the process. The book hits you over the head with symbolism because of its author's insecurities that people wouldn't get the book. The characters are never fully realized and the prose is pretty average for something that's considered a classic.

Hemmingway's "The Sun Also Rises" deals with some similar themes (at least in terms of disenchanted 20-somethings in that era, and what it means in terms of america), and is one hundred times better, easily.
 
Scarlet Letter- I had to drop AP English because I couldn't make myself finish this book.

I find it absurd that I only had to read tree books my Sr. year in AP English. Because I didn't read that book I would have failed and would've had to repeat Sr. year. When I dropped out of AP English and went to regular English I didn't have to read another book. It absolutely pisses me off how terrible and wasted my Jr High and High School educations were. I played basketball for like 5 or more hours a day. While my actual book learning was under 4 hours a day. INSANE. God, I could type for days about hour effed up the US education system is.
 
Scarlet Letter- I had to drop AP English because I couldn't make myself finish this book.

I find it absurd that I only had to read tree books my Sr. year in AP English. Because I didn't read that book I would have failed and would've had to repeat Sr. year. When I dropped out of AP English and went to regular English I didn't have to read another book. It absolutely pisses me off how terrible and wasted my Jr High and High School educations were. I played basketball for like 5 or more hours a day. While my actual book learning was under 4 hours a day. INSANE. God, I could type for days about hour effed up the US education system is.
Damn, 3 book in AP English?

Off the top of my head, here's what we've read so far in my AP class:

Invisible Man
Catcher In the Rye (Summer assignment, but we all read it sophomore year and I don't think we even did any work on it.)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Pride and Prejudice
1984
The Color Purple
Death of a Salesman

We're reading Hamlet right now and I think we're going to read The Stranger before the end of the year.
 
Scarlet Letter- I had to drop AP English because I couldn't make myself finish this book.

I find it absurd that I only had to read tree books my Sr. year in AP English. Because I didn't read that book I would have failed and would've had to repeat Sr. year. When I dropped out of AP English and went to regular English I didn't have to read another book. It absolutely pisses me off how terrible and wasted my Jr High and High School educations were. I played basketball for like 5 or more hours a day. While my actual book learning was under 4 hours a day. INSANE. God, I could type for days about hour effed up the US education system is.

Sounds like YOUR school/teachers, not necessarily a systemic problem.

In AP English I read Crime and Punishment, The Elements of Style (not a novel, but a darn find writer's aid), and Hamlet (that was summer reading); we also read Cry, the Beloved Country, Catch 22, The Return of the Native, Heart of Darkness, The Death of a Salesman, Oedipus Rex, A Raisin in the Sun, and Wuthering Heights. I may have forgotten a couple plays and short stories...
 
Tale of Two Cities is a weak effort from Dickens, who is one of my favorite authors.

I've only read four things by Dickens. Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol. It still boggles my mind that the former was written by the same author who wrote the beyond outstanding latter three.
 
I've only read four things by Dickens. Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol. It still boggles my mind that the former was written by the same author who wrote the beyond outstanding latter three.

The first Dickens I ever read was Christmas Carol, in grade school, then I didn't pick him up again until after I graduated high school, when I read Hard Times. Then I read Twist, then Tale of Two Cities, and I stopped. I'll get back to him someday.
 
I liked most of what I read in HS. Hamlet was awesome, Of Mice and Men... Greatness.

I didn't like "A Seperate Peace", however. That was REAL gay.
 
I can't take Dickens seriously.

I've tried to read A Christmas Carol. It's one of my favourite stories ever and I've always wanted to read the book. But I can't get past the first two paragraph.

Chuckie D said:
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

This would be a great opener under other circumstances, but as it is I cannot take it seriously. He was being paid by the word. Once I found that out, that was it for his credibility.
 
Beyond a doubt, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

If you want complete, utter trash given book form, this is it. Plain and simply, it is all bad. There is not a good thing about it.
 
Midsummer Night's Dream

How could this **** pass as a comedy, I mean really? Good thing Shakespeare is dead or there's about 4 generations of English student ready to stab him between the eyes.


....thinking about it, I'd probably get my sister to it, being born by cesarean section n' all (lolz /smrat)
 
Coco pops are my favourite breakfast cereal, but I still haven't eaten them in about eleven years as there are better things...lunch....per example
 

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