Jayne ,'Jaynestown'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
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.
Oh god, The Pearl. That was worse than Lord of the Flies!
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?
Yeah, I really can't think of much either other than Shakespeare's Comedies, in which miserable things happen to people, but it happens to be funny at the time, and the story ends happy. Mostly I think miserable things happening to people is what makes for compelling literature.
The worst thing about The Pearl was that I had gotten it mixed up in my head with Scott O'Dell's "The Black Pearl", and thought I was going to be reading something like Island of the Blue Dolphins.
But, I forgot the one I hated the most-- Heart of Darkness. Which I had to read in high school and TWICE in college.
Books I liked- Silas Marner, The Diary of Anne Frank, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Black Like Me.
We had To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby and... possibly Lord of the Flies, although I might have read that one on my own (I remember liking it though.) Oh! And Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End.