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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Mar 7, 2020 21:04:59 GMT -5
Inspired by reading Fahrenheit 451 for the first time. What are the books you’ve put off because you’re pretty sure you were supposed to read them in school, but didn’t.
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Post by Mr. Greene's October Surprise on Mar 8, 2020 1:06:01 GMT -5
Probably none, because I read all the books I was assigned.  |
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Mar 8, 2020 7:29:18 GMT -5
Probably none, because I read all the books I was assigned. I meant more like “wait wasn’t someone supposed to assign this to me?” than just not reading it |
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Mar 8, 2020 9:12:33 GMT -5
Probably none, because I read all the books I was assigned. I meant more like “wait wasn’t someone supposed to assign this to me?” than just not reading it Probably something like Houghton-Mifflen’s Algebra II: 5th Edition or something. |
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Post by liebkartoffel on Mar 9, 2020 1:09:08 GMT -5
Never read any Steinbeck, aside from that depressing short story about the dead horse. Never read Catcher in the Rye either. Didn't read any Hemingway until college.
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Post by Nudeviking on Mar 9, 2020 2:05:36 GMT -5
Probably none, because I read all the books I was assigned. I meant more like “wait wasn’t someone supposed to assign this to me?” than just not reading it Catcher in the Rye is a book that somehow never got assigned to me to read in high school. If we're going the "books you were assigned to read but only ended up watching the movie adaptation that you rented from Blockbuster Video" route the list is far, far, far, faaaaaaaaaaaaaar longer. |
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Post by Desert Dweller on Mar 9, 2020 2:15:46 GMT -5
Is this like how our state curriculum programmed "To Kill a Mockingbird" for 10th grade, but my district thought confronting racism was too traumatizing, or some such BS, so we read "A Separate Peace" instead? And it took me about 15 more years to ever read "To Kill a Mockingbird" because I really should have read that book in 10th grade?
Edited to add: Oh, I also was never assigned "Catcher in the Rye". I read that sometime in my 30s (too lazy to check Goodreads) and I understood that I clearly should have read that book when I was younger. Although I was never a disaffected, rebellious youth, so maybe that book was never for me in the first place.
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Mar 9, 2020 7:37:34 GMT -5
Is this like how our state curriculum programmed "To Kill a Mockingbird" for 10th grade, but my district thought confronting racism was too traumatizing, or some such BS, so we read "A Separate Peace" instead? And it took me about 15 more years to ever read "To Kill a Mockingbird" because I really should have read that book in 10th grade? Edited to add: Oh, I also was never assigned "Catcher in the Rye". I read that sometime in my 30s (too lazy to check Goodreads) and I understood that I clearly should have read that book when I was younger. Although I was never a disaffected, rebellious youth, so maybe that book was never for me in the first place. Yea, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Also: Mockingbird was considered too challenging for 10th graders?! The hell?! |
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Post by patbat on Mar 9, 2020 8:37:27 GMT -5
Another vote for Catcher in the Rye
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Mar 9, 2020 8:57:57 GMT -5
Another vote for Catcher in the RyeYea, I'm pretty sure whatever point in one's life you're "supposed" to read Catcher in the Rye in has passed to the point I'll just never pick it up at this point. Steinbeck is another good one that I'm actually planning on rectifying as part of my reading list this year. I think the regular 12th grade English class did read The Grapes of Wrath but I took AP English instead, so I guess that one's not really on the school district. |
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Post by patbat on Mar 9, 2020 9:00:26 GMT -5
Another vote for Catcher in the RyeYea, I'm pretty sure whatever point in one's life you're "supposed" to read Catcher in the Rye in has passed to the point I'll just never pick it up at this point. Steinbeck is another good one that I'm actually planning on rectifying as part of my reading list this year. I think the regular 12th grade English class did read The Grapes of Wrath but I took AP English instead, so I guess that one's not really on the school district. What's doubly sad is that I have absolutely loved all the other Salinger I've ever read, so the high probability is that, if I had read Catcher when I was "supposed" to, I would have really enjoyed it. |
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Post by MrsLangdonAlger on Mar 9, 2020 9:01:52 GMT -5
Anything written by women. At all.
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Mar 9, 2020 9:17:31 GMT -5
Anything written by women. At all. Nothing?! Not that our reading list wasn't (probably overly) white dude heavy, but at least like, Jane Eyre made the cut... |
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Post by MrsLangdonAlger on Mar 9, 2020 9:19:44 GMT -5
Anything written by women. At all. Nothing?! Not that our reading list wasn't (probably overly) white dude heavy, but at least like, Jane Eyre made the cut... IIRC, Jane Eyre is the only one we read in high school. I think we read The Giver and Number the Stars in middle school.
In high school I set up an alternative independent study with my English teacher and read nothing but women. But the set curriculum was all dudes.
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Mar 9, 2020 9:30:09 GMT -5
Nothing?! Not that our reading list wasn't (probably overly) white dude heavy, but at least like, Jane Eyre made the cut... IIRC, Jane Eyre is the only one we read in high school. I think we read The Giver and Number the Stars in middle school.
In high school I set up an alternative independent study with my English teacher and read nothing but women. But the set curriculum was all dudes.
yeesh, although cool that you had English teacher willing to work with you on doing that. I wish that kind of flexibility was more the norm for lit classes, although I suppose that limits the ability to do class discussions and the like. |
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Post by MrsLangdonAlger on Mar 9, 2020 9:37:15 GMT -5
IIRC, Jane Eyre is the only one we read in high school. I think we read The Giver and Number the Stars in middle school.
In high school I set up an alternative independent study with my English teacher and read nothing but women. But the set curriculum was all dudes.
yeesh, although cool that you had English teacher willing to work with you on doing that. I wish that kind of flexibility was more the norm for lit classes, although I suppose that limits the ability to do class discussions and the like. She was great in general! She volunteered to be the faculty sponsor for our Gay/Straight Alliance, at huge risk to herself since she was in a lesbian relationship and that school totally would have fired her for it if they found out. And she allowed me to do presentations about LGBT stuff all the time, and called people out when they were assholes about it, most notably the time I wrote a shitty poem about Matthew Shepard's death and someone made a joke about AIDS.
Thanks, Ms. M. You kept me sane in high school, which is a huge feat considering my high school experience!
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Post by The Stuffingtacular She-Hulk on Mar 9, 2020 10:43:25 GMT -5
I went to an all-girls Catholic high school, so I read more female than male authors in English class for the most part. Still had to read Catcher in the Rye, though. We read To Kill a Mockingbird in eighth grade, which I think is more appropriate than 10th.
Frankly, I detest all Regency literature as much as I detest Hemingway. But I do love me some Steinbeck.
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Post by Nudeviking on Mar 9, 2020 19:36:31 GMT -5
Anything written by women. At all. My high school was pretty good about making us read works by women and people of color especially for the mid-90s. Sure there was the "Here's a heap of old British shit," (Dickens, Big Willy Shakespeare, The Bronte Sisters, etc.) and the "classic" white male American authors (Twain, Poe, Fuck Scott Fitzgerald, et. al.) stuff that every high school in America assigns but we were also assigned stuff by Toni Morrison and Lorraine Hansberry and Sandra Cisneros. One year we spent like an entire semester on the Harlem Renaissance. Whenever we had to read poetry there'd always be some works by Native American or Asian-American poets though I can't remember any of the poets in question off the top of my head (one of them had a poem about a persimmon and getting a splinter that I for some reason remember to this day). |
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Post by Ice Cream Planet on Mar 9, 2020 20:12:36 GMT -5
My high school English teachers were so bad that whatever blindspots I have, I'm grateful. Better than having an aversion to magical realism because my teacher was such a thickheaded nitwit.
That said, I do wish I had read a lot more LGBT fiction and nonfiction back then. Deeply closeted as I was, I'm sure it would have made feel much less alone. Granted, the school system would have never allowed it (they didn't even The Color Purple on the list!), but as you know, any book with LGBT characters and themes is automatically porn and/or a literary hellmouth.
But...still. To think how I could have read The Price of Salt or Tales of the City or Rubyfruit Jungle or Giovanni's Room and maybe I could have felt less lonely. But no point crying over the past.
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Post by Hachiman on Mar 9, 2020 22:00:44 GMT -5
I left high school early to just go to community college on the State's dime and so missed a lot of Steinbeck, Tolstoy, and Hemingway. I didn't catch up on those until later. Alternatively, up to that point, there were a ton of books like Catcher in the Rye that I would read after my sister read them for her assignments, only for the curriculum to change when I caught up to that grade. For some reason, my high school curriculum was very short story-focused as well, so I missed a few other books that way as well.
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Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Mar 10, 2020 8:23:02 GMT -5
I’ve never read Catcher in the Rye, but I’ve both heard enough about the main character and loathing of the book from people who sound, well, a lot like the main character that I wonder if it wouldn’t be a bad read after all. I read it on my own - we had a copy at home for some reason - and didn't like it. I remember discussing it with a guy in college - he liked it and said something about it being especially meaningful to teenage boys. Well, I was never a teenage boy. |
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Mar 10, 2020 11:08:14 GMT -5
I left high school early to just go to community college on the State's dime and so missed a lot of Steinbeck, Tolstoy, and Hemingway. I didn't catch up on those until later. Alternatively, up to that point, there were a ton of books like Catcher in the Rye that I would read after my sister read them for her assignments, only for the curriculum to change when I caught up to that grade. For some reason, my high school curriculum was very short story-focused as well, so I missed a few other books that way as well. Question for everyone here: We’re any of you assigned “a lot” of Tolstoy in high school? Because his two most famous works seem way too long to devote the time to in a high school English class, and I was only ever assigned the short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, but I guess it’s possible that lots of kids get assigned The Death of Ivan Ilych or something. |
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Post by Superb Owl 🦉 on Mar 10, 2020 11:44:01 GMT -5
I left high school early to just go to community college on the State's dime and so missed a lot of Steinbeck, Tolstoy, and Hemingway. I didn't catch up on those until later. Alternatively, up to that point, there were a ton of books like Catcher in the Rye that I would read after my sister read them for her assignments, only for the curriculum to change when I caught up to that grade. For some reason, my high school curriculum was very short story-focused as well, so I missed a few other books that way as well. Question for everyone here: We’re any of you assigned “a lot” of Tolstoy in high school? Because his two most famous works seem way too long to devote the time to in a high school English class, and I was only ever assigned the short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, but I guess it’s possible that lots of kids get assigned The Death of Ivan Ilych or something. I know for sure we didn't get assigned any of the novels (or any non-American/British novels). It's possible that we got some non-American/British short stories or poems, though I don't remember them and suspect we didn't |
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Post by liebkartoffel on Mar 10, 2020 11:59:05 GMT -5
I left high school early to just go to community college on the State's dime and so missed a lot of Steinbeck, Tolstoy, and Hemingway. I didn't catch up on those until later. Alternatively, up to that point, there were a ton of books like Catcher in the Rye that I would read after my sister read them for her assignments, only for the curriculum to change when I caught up to that grade. For some reason, my high school curriculum was very short story-focused as well, so I missed a few other books that way as well. Question for everyone here: We’re any of you assigned “a lot” of Tolstoy in high school? Because his two most famous works seem way too long to devote the time to in a high school English class, and I was only ever assigned the short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, but I guess it’s possible that lots of kids get assigned The Death of Ivan Ilych or something. Never was assigned any Tolstoy in high school--in fact the only Russian piece of writing we had to read was Crime and Punishment. |
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Mar 10, 2020 12:12:18 GMT -5
Question for everyone here: We’re any of you assigned “a lot” of Tolstoy in high school? Because his two most famous works seem way too long to devote the time to in a high school English class, and I was only ever assigned the short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, but I guess it’s possible that lots of kids get assigned The Death of Ivan Ilych or something. Never was assigned any Tolstoy in high school--in fact the only Russian piece of writing we had to read was Crime and Punishment. Wow, that’s still longer than anything I was ever assigned (I think the longest book I was assigned was probably either an abridged Les Miserables or else Wuthering Heights. Was never assigned anything by Dostoevsky, and the only Russian novel I had to read was One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich. |
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Post by Crash Test Dumbass on Mar 10, 2020 12:29:06 GMT -5
I had a pretty liberal and varied high school curriculum -- we were even given the option to read the Bible as literature (I did a comparison of the writings of Paul and the various Johns because I'm a Beatles nerd; this is also why I left the Catholic church and fucking hate Paul), but I too never read Catcher In The Rye and I don't think I missed much. I didn't like Dickens and didn't read more than a little of A Tale Of Two Cities before last year's London Calling Reading Challenge (tho I read A Christmas Carol and Bartleby The Scrivener in my 30s and liked them it). I was never assigned any Russian literature. One of the English department spoke Middle English so she did a reading of The Canterbury Tales (tho I still prefer the MAD version, "Whon thot Aprille swithin potrzebie / The burgid prillie gives one heebie-jeebie.")
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Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Mar 10, 2020 14:14:00 GMT -5
I had a pretty liberal and varied high school curriculum -- we were even given the option to read the Bible as literature (I did a comparison of the writings of Paul and the various Johns because I'm a Beatles nerd; this is also why I left the Catholic church and fucking hate Paul), but I too never read Catcher In The Rye and I don't think I missed much. I didn't like Dickens and didn't read more than a little of A Tale Of Two Cities before last year's London Calling Reading Challenge (tho I read A Christmas Carol and Bartleby The Scrivener in my 30s and liked them). I was never assigned any Russian literature. One of the English department spoke Middle English so she did a reading of The Canterbury Tales (tho I still prefer the MAD version, " Whon thot Aprille swithin potrzebie / The burgid prillie gives one heebie-jeebie.") is by Herman Melville. |
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Post by Crash Test Dumbass on Mar 10, 2020 14:22:41 GMT -5
I had a pretty liberal and varied high school curriculum -- we were even given the option to read the Bible as literature (I did a comparison of the writings of Paul and the various Johns because I'm a Beatles nerd; this is also why I left the Catholic church and fucking hate Paul), but I too never read Catcher In The Rye and I don't think I missed much. I didn't like Dickens and didn't read more than a little of A Tale Of Two Cities before last year's London Calling Reading Challenge (tho I read A Christmas Carol and Bartleby The Scrivener in my 30s and liked them). I was never assigned any Russian literature. One of the English department spoke Middle English so she did a reading of The Canterbury Tales (tho I still prefer the MAD version, " Whon thot Aprille swithin potrzebie / The burgid prillie gives one heebie-jeebie.") is by Herman Melville. I would prefer not to correct myself. |
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Post by Hachiman on Mar 10, 2020 18:58:51 GMT -5
I left high school early to just go to community college on the State's dime and so missed a lot of Steinbeck, Tolstoy, and Hemingway. I didn't catch up on those until later. Alternatively, up to that point, there were a ton of books like Catcher in the Rye that I would read after my sister read them for her assignments, only for the curriculum to change when I caught up to that grade. For some reason, my high school curriculum was very short story-focused as well, so I missed a few other books that way as well. Question for everyone here: We’re any of you assigned “a lot” of Tolstoy in high school? Because his two most famous works seem way too long to devote the time to in a high school English class, and I was only ever assigned the short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, but I guess it’s possible that lots of kids get assigned The Death of Ivan Ilych or something. was what they read. I remember all of my friends bitching about it. Oh, and I missed reading Doctor Zhivago as well. Our English teachers had some sort of thing for Russian literature, apparently. |
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Post by Desert Dweller on Mar 10, 2020 22:27:53 GMT -5
I left high school early to just go to community college on the State's dime and so missed a lot of Steinbeck, Tolstoy, and Hemingway. I didn't catch up on those until later. Alternatively, up to that point, there were a ton of books like Catcher in the Rye that I would read after my sister read them for her assignments, only for the curriculum to change when I caught up to that grade. For some reason, my high school curriculum was very short story-focused as well, so I missed a few other books that way as well. Question for everyone here: We’re any of you assigned “a lot” of Tolstoy in high school? Because his two most famous works seem way too long to devote the time to in a high school English class, and I was only ever assigned the short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, but I guess it’s possible that lots of kids get assigned The Death of Ivan Ilych or something. I was assigned Anna Karenina in a college class, but never in high school.
The longest book I did get assigned in high school was Les Miserables in 12th grade but it was an abridged version. It was a terrible abridged version, too. Like, the stage musical from the 1980s incorporates more of the story than the abridged novel we read. I ended up checking out the full novel from the city library and reading that. Which, granted, has some pointless scenes but wow, I couldn't believe how much of the story had been sliced out. I did get assigned a lot of novels in addition to short stories, but none were the big doorstopper size novels.
I think I was assigned a grand total of two novels by women. And I don't have any idea what was in the curriculum for the regular English classes. I was always in the honors classes. (My school didn't have AP.) It is possible that regular 10th grade read Jane Eyre.
Edited to add: I did read a Toni Morrison novel in 11th grade, but it was on the Supplemental list and not on the Required list.
However, I am quite sure that the regular 12th grade class was not reading Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. This was the district that wouldn't let 10th graders read To Kill a Mockingbird because the examination of racism was "too controversial". (No I still don't understand this.) The 12th grade course had a curriculum entirely invented by the teacher of the class. Prior to my year, all the 12th grade Honors students would just take English 101 and 102 through the local Community College. However, in my year, 30 of us had already taken college level placement exams and had tested entirely out of English 101, 102 AND 105. Therefore, there was no need for us to do that. So, since we didn't have AP, this teacher just created a 12th grade Honors English class and basically taught a Literature Review course. I think she assigned us 6 novels. Which is how we ended up with Les Mis and Their Eyes Were Watching God.
I basically hated most of my high school English classes. I thought that the lesson plans and class discussion all but killed any enjoyment I had in reading.
Oh, and count me as another who didn't read Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities until over a decade after high school. We were assigned Great Expectations, but I developed a hatred of it it due to the class discussions, which were awful. I still haven't re-read that one. I did give A Tale of Two Cities a try many years later, and thought it was okay. People now tell me that Great Expectations is better, so maybe I should try that one again.
My college courses were much better at assigning novels and making it so I didn't end up hating them all. Of course, they weren't actually English courses, so maybe that's why?
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