Literally any book that you now dislike due to school. This also applies to other literature styles as well.
Mine is The Hunger Games. I had to read it las year in school and it drove me insane. We started doing the novel study in early February and didn’t finish until May. I finished the book in less than two weeks, so I was pretty much just reading personal books all through English class for close to two months.
It’s not even like we had to analyze it super intensely. It was projects like ‘Make a playlist for a character of your choice’ and we had vocabulary tests every week, that were a joke. It was multiple choice for words like quest and forage. I know that English wasn’t everyone’s first language but come on.
I didn’t even like the book that much in the first place, so all of this was just adding to the misery.
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Summer of the Swans by Betsey Byars, sixth grade (11-ish). It’s a fine enough book, but I could (and did) read it twice or more in a class period, and listening to my classmates stumble over every other word bored me to tears, literally. Additionally, we weren’t quite old enough for the main character’s self-criticism to be relatable, so I didn’t find the book itself interesting. My mom went to the school to see if something could be done and it turned out that despite my reading comprehension test scores they had left me out of the advanced class for no reason. I was moved soon after.
Middle school, man. You couldn’t pay me enough to do that again.
The Hobbit. My teacher who taught me the year it was assigned was very annoying about it.
Ughhhh this one sticks out to me the most. I could not stand the slowwww pace we were reading at out loud in class. I would count ahead to the section I would have to read and stick a post it note there…and then I would read at my own pace until my name was called and I had to read my section out loud. I swear it took us MONTHS to read that book. I was done in a few weeks, and still able to complete the assignments with it. I got in SO much trouble when my teacher caught me reading ahead. I just could not stand the long winded descriptions of scenery being read out loud in class. I swear it made my brain feel like it was melting.
Well, I’m not sure because it’s ruined for me, but I suspect that if I weren’t trying to keep up with the class in my AP English class, I might have really enjoyed reading The Scarlet Letter. It was an absolute slog, but I thoroughly enjoyed class discussions.
Should I try again?
Ugh
The opposite for me. I remember every detail of My Side of the Mountain and Tuck Everlasting like it was yesterday. Sixth grade was my favorite year because of all the books my teacher did with us. She had a passion for reading that she tried to pass on to all of us.
Dicey’s Song. I never thought I could hate a sad book so much. The English teacher just didn’t teach in a way that wanted me to read this book. I’m so happy I just read whatever books I wanted outside of school.
I thought Of Mice and Men was a beautiful story but my teacher insisted on analysing it as a product of the 1930s and focusing in on the characters’ clothes and attributes and how the whole thing was influenced by life in the Great Depression. I guess that’s important the beauty of that story to me is not in the history, it’s much more about the relationships between these characters because of what they’re going through and it just really turned me off having to write papers like that. Usually when a teacher has a really specific interpretive lens it turns me off because then they expect you to write that.
I hated having a vocabulary test on Fahrenheit 451
My gods, three months on one book?! That’s ridiculous, I’d hate it too. Very early on every damn class I had in middle and high read Shakespeare, it was tedious to a point of meaning nothing after awhile. My absolute WORST was Grapes of Wrath. Giant fat book, depressing as hell, about The Depression, dragged on and on and on tied into the entire rubric so the instructor constantly referenced it and tied it into every damn thing we read.
After that I was in literature AP, so we moved through so many different works I could find something to like. But my college was similarly affected, probably a cousin professor because we were to study classics, and this woman’s selections were so terrible it put me off recreational reading until after graduate school.
None were ruined because they were required reading. I liked ~90% of the books we read, but I hated Their Eyes Were Watching God. I basically hate any time an author writes dialogue in an accent because of that book.
Nope, my English teacher was excellent and gave me more of an appreciation for books I would have otherwise found boring.
Can’t really relate. Many of the books that I like are ones I read in school. Great expectations. The picture of Dorian Gray. The Great Gatsby. Lord of the Flies. Pere Goriot… If it wasn’t my my eccentric french teacher, I probably wouldn’t have started reading Balzac.
Of Mice and Men.
Just felt like the book was just pountlessly cruel and misogynistic. Like I get its set in the Great Depression but it felt bad even for that time period. Couldn’t pay me to re-read it now.
And this is coming from someone who read Shakespeare in their free time because they liked it.
I also hated this book. I want to re read as an adult to see if I have a newfound appreciation for it.
Well I hope you get some enjoyment out of it from another fresh look. I just couldn’t.
Not exactly or entirely. I don’t like Shakespeare because I studied Romeo and Juliet, likely Act 1 Scene 1 put me off, the thumb biting exchange just seemed so overlong and pointless. I wasn’t a fan before high school so while it put me off Shakespeare, I wasn’t really change my opinion. Even now the only things I like about Shakespeare are 10 Things I Hate About You and “Let’s BooBoo” from The World’s End. I had a read a few very abridged versions of Charles Dickens’ stories. I had some in class assignment looking at a chapter of Great Expectations, the one describing Wemmick’s house. Maybe not the whole chapter, maybe just a few pages. One page had what seemed to be one long, convoluted sentence. Strangely, that was enough to put me off reading Dickens. Just reading it, I can still watch adaptations.
For some reason my 7th grade English class was separated into 4 groups of 5 to read different books, and the one I got was The Hobbit, nothing wrong with that. What was wrong was us having to do a rotation and explain our books to the other group instead of actual discussion analysis.
Othello. It’s an ok story but school is ruining ut