School has actively ruined all the pleasure Emmett might take in reading. He does read it seriously and he feels it. And it makes him feel like shit. It's not the teachers - it's the curriculum.
We had a great convo the other night about his feelings on just that subject. The look of horror on his face when I told him I read
Catcher in the Rye
by choice was worth the price of admission. He seemed relieved when I told him I hated it. Of course, it still wasn't as bad as having to read
Ethan Frome
and
Mrs. Dalloway.
My prep school reading was less "rascism is bad" and more "let's bore you death with stories about depression and prepare you for your WASP life of alcoholism."
Tell him it could be worse. My senior year we had a unit of Russian Lit and a unit on Hemingway, both of which I Did Not Want.
I had to read and write a 20 page research paper on Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. BEFORE INTERNETS.
Torture.
In my high school Junior lit class, we got The Hobbit.
God bless Mr. Berryhill.
I don't remember any teaching moments. Except Dragons Are Bad (but have great dialogue). It may have been more a matter of "For god's sake, get some books in those poor hillbillies' hands!"
Somehow, even though thinking on it I have bad memories of the Mayor of Casterbtidge (?), I still hated all the American Lit stuff junior year more than British lit or World lit and yet I can't remember what the heck we read other than the Scarlet Letter. I think we read Gatsby, I have vague memories of being required to think about symbols in it. Huh. I have no idea. It was the one year of school we didn't do at least one Shakespeare play too, sadly. (ETA obviously the bard would be hard to argue for in American lit. But still)
Thankfully we got all of the above but mitigated by lots and lots of incredibly entertaining short stories. And short stories are one of my favorite forms of literature (or just simply reading) today. I bet Emmett would totally dig Leinegan (sp?) Versus the Ants or a Diamond as Big as the Ritz.
The book I hated most was The Good Earth and I reread it with my book group a few years ago and hated it even more!
We read most of the books above but had some Thurber and Saki to leaven things.
I read Russian lit by choice in High School. The assigned book I truly hated was Lord of the Flies.
Was Mr. Berryhill, by any chance, a hobbit himself?? That seems like a pretty hobbity name.
You know, I must be indoctrinated, because I can't really think of any book that is not, at the heart "miserable things happen to be" that is also something you would teach in a high school classroom that would appeal to both boys and girls. But I like Thomas Hardy, so what do I know?
The assigned books I hated were The Old Man and the Sea, The Red Pony, and The Pearl. I think that was mostly writing style, though.
I never liked any of the novels I was assigned in English class before my senior year in high school, but it never affected my love of reading. I did love many of the short stories we read in the assigned anthology, and I mostly rebelled against the novels I didn't like by reading the novels I did like whenever I could. FTR, among the novels we had to read in high school that I hated: The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible (no not a novel but long form assigned reading), and A Farewell to Arms.
