Worst book you had to read in school

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I fucking hated ochem. "Great" Gatsby also sucks. Lee Harvey Oswald got the wrong "Fitzgerald"
 
While I'm not sure it's the absolute worst thing my high school forced me to read, I hold on to the one laugh I got out of a non-shakespeare forced reading (Bill was trashy pop entertainment, and is actually pretty good if you like wordplay and don't take it too seriously. Better as a play, obviously).

The grade 10 main book in English class was Lord of the Flies. One of the points has a character's glasses being used to focus light to start a fire. Said character was confirmed as nearsighted, meaning their glasses could not do that. By sheer coincidence, grade 10 was when optics were notably covered in the general Science course. It was the one time I could point out how the entire plot fails because of some minor physics knowledge, and have a room full of people go "now that you mention that, you're right."

As for actually worst book, I'd probably go with the one that had me leave the French Immersion program after grade 10: Silence of the Sea. Allegedly, everything important that happens is a social undertone. Of course, if you can't pick up on those (such as, say, you are genetically predisposed to be bad at exactly that), nothing happens at all. I literally had five of my chapter summaries in a row look identical, that little happened that I could perceive.
 
In the first few pages of Jane Eyre, someone throws a book at Jane and this is what happens next

"Wicked and cruel boy!" I said. "You are like a murderer — you are like a slave-driver — you are like the Roman emperors!"

I had read Goldsmith's History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.
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Even in 10th grade I had read fanfiction with less blatant “let’s establish how our protagonist is super awesome and smart” lines


edit: for some positivity, some books I remember liking from school: Catch 22, The Kite Runner, The Stranger, Pride and Prejudice, Heart of Darkness
 
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I'm glad that on a meme forum we've solved that books which have moved, delighted, and astonished readers for decades or even centuries are actually secretly bad, and not that we as teenagers and/or literary philistines who were forced to read these books against our will just might not have been the most perceptive judges of literary merit. Nice work crew.
 
Jasper said:
I'm glad that on a meme forum we've solved that books which have moved, delighted, and astonished readers for decades or even centuries are actually secretly bad, and not that we as teenagers and/or literary philistines who were forced to read these books against our will just might not have been the most perceptive judges of literary merit. Nice work crew.
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i can understand how a work is important or influential and still think it’s boring as fuck lol
 
Jasper said:
I'm glad that on a meme forum we've solved that books which have moved, delighted, and astonished readers for decades or even centuries are actually secretly bad, and not that we as teenagers and/or literary philistines who were forced to read these books against our will just might not have been the most perceptive judges of literary merit. Nice work crew.
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At the same time, we are not the culture that existed decades or centuries ago. Where we look for deeper meaning in creative works is allowed to change, as are the ideas that we want to find there. Let's use Don Quixtoe as an example. It was originally very cynical, decrying heroic fantasy and has the attempt at a happier ending being that the goofball identity is destroyed and normal life resumes. Modern stories that use the exact same setup (e.g. Man of La Mancha) don't follow those same ideas, sometimes instead embracing that creative nonsense can sometimes still produce good. To me, the original DQ gets a lot of flak for being the same "fiction will cause people to lose touch with reality and break stuff" I'm tired of hearing about videogames, while Man of La Mancha was an enjoyable musical with some good tunes.

Also,
Ununhexium said:
i can understand how a work is important or influential and still think it’s boring as fuck lol
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I don't want to take this too seriously (admittedly my hackles go up when people slight literature, regardless of the context), so I'll end with this point. We all have our blind spots when it comes to perceiving greatness in different forms of art. Recognizing and admitting that we have those blind spots, rather than disparaging the art we don't "get," frees us to learn more about others and ourselves.

Just something to keep in mind when off smogoff and out in the world.
 
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I read Grapes of Wrath in high school and thought it sucked. I read it ten years later and it was pretty good (though not as good as Of Mice and Men or East of Eden). English class is a pretty stupid place to try to appreciate art. That's all Jasper is saying.

All mediums are great, but it's pretty fucking worth it to give literature a real shot as an adult. It's some high-tier shit, and even the more questionable lit books I've read were at least half-decent.
 
Australian school book choices bloody suck major ass big time. There was:
a coming of age poetry book, ”by the river” it was called,
This shit, critical acclaim my ass, I wanted to kill every character with my bare fucking hands,
This for gods sake
amongst others I have since deleted from my mind. Shakespeare is enjoyable compared to this.
 
nui said:
Wuthering Heights should never be allowed in the education system. Making anyone read books with old english should be considered terrorism.
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This. This is the one I came here for. I also remember seeing some weird film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet involving guns and stuff.

On the flip side there was a book called Stone Cold I had to read that turned out to be quite good.
 
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