Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Challenge: Books I Read In School And Didn't Like

Right, so, the usual bit of context: Weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. Hit their homepage to see the current week's responses, and add a link to your own if you're so inclined.

This week's challenge is Books I Had To Read In School And Didn't Like.

There really weren't a lot of these, but then I went to an unusual school. Unusual how? Well...

All right, an example: in ninth grade, we were due to read The Scarlet Pimpernel. I'd found a copy of it in my desk the previous year, so I'd read it already. So instead... they gave me The Name of the Rose, with the condition that I had to translate the Latin. (No easy trick in those pre-Google days; I was doing pretty well until I hit a passage that I just could not parse... because, as it turns out, it was in Old High German. But I digress...)

So, yeah: a lot of books, not many I didn't like. But I will note that there is a very distinct genre of Books I Read In School that seemed design less to teach us the joys of reading or the beauties of literature, and more as an exercise in sadism. And for that, I need to send you over to the Secret Cabal's guide to Traumatizing Children With Literature.

10 comments:

  1. LOL! I love that link. It was a great post, and so very true. Bridge to Terabithia made me cry my heart out.

    Can you still read and write latin? I'm impressed that you translated that whole book!


    My post.

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    1. Bits of it. I'm better at reading, and I'm really out of practice, so trying to actually compose something in latin is going to require a dictionary.

      I have very strong feelings about The Name of the Rose, but I'm saving those for one of the upcoming prompts.

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  2. My older girl had to read How to Read Literature Like a Professor as summer reading before her senior year. She's still salty about it. I can't imagine translating something from Latin (or even German, honestly)!

    I was lucky in that I loved to read and wanted every excuse I could find to do more of it.

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    1. I think they decided that if they were going to let me out of doing the class assignment, they needed to make sure it was clear to everyone that this was *more* work rather than less.

      But yeah, the fact that I generally loved to read was a big help all through school.

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  3. Yes, I've read all but one of the ones on the traumatizing list. It is spot on.

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  4. When I taught 7th - sophomore English I had trouble finding books that boys would read. All students were at a much lower level of reading as I was at their age. They couldn't understand of word of Poe. Mickey Spillane was over their head. Then I found Barry Sadler's Casca The Eternal Mercenary series. I got all the boys reading them. Girls were happy with Judy Blume, S. E. Hinton and so on.

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    1. I am not familiar with Casca The Eternal Mercenary, but Firstborn is around that age range (very high reading level) and I may try it out on him; he's generally pretty good with fantasy and fantasy-adjacent stories.

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  5. Oddly, my high school didn't seem to go for the traditional high school reading list; maybe that was because it was a private school and the students were presumed to be already indoctrinated. As I mentioned in the Secret Cabal post, of the three recommended books mentioned, I've only read A Separate Peace. I haven't read To Kill a Mockingbird either, but I understand that's another high school staple.

    I did read a thing called The Horse's Mouth which was about an artist who spends much of the book obsessing over a mural of the resurrection of Lazarus, with particular emphasis on getting one foot exactly right. This was clearly more traumatizing than the traditional book, since I remember the artistic obsession and not a thing about A Separate Peace. Needless to say, I didn't particularly like The Horse's Mouth.

    Both books were on the Ninth Grade summer reading list along with Out of the Silent Planet. I was on a bit of Lewis kick at the time, so I slurped that one down, but I did note that he really wears his religion on his sleeve.

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    1. Huh. I'm not familiar with The Horse's Mouth, but that sounds like the kind of thing that we might have read in one context or another.

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