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Consistently terrible books in English class (OBLIGATORY SUBJECTIVITY WARNING)
A fair number of you have probably seen me griping about A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man, or James Joyce himself, at some point or other. Had to read that a little while back, and I actually skimmed my way through the whole thing.
Then the teacher had us read Mrs. Dalloway, or tried to have us read it. At this point in the year, it wasn't going to happen. The messages it tries to tell are obscured by shit-tier prose, and the parallel that Woolf apparently attempts to draw between two of the characters borders on offensive.
And now Plainsong. He pitched it to us as if we'd get through it in a weekend and eat it up, but the writing is waaaaaaay too tedious for that. I'm also annoyed at how, as with A Portrait (and I honestly can't remember if Mrs. Dalloway did this), there are no quotation marks, and Haruf isn't half the writer McCarthy is, so I can't just let it go.
Hopefully college literature classes don't have quite that high a density of shit.
as a Young Man, or James Joyce himself, at some point or other. Had to read that a little while back, and I actually skimmed my way through the whole thing.
Then the teacher had us read Mrs. Dalloway, or tried to have us read it. At this point in the year, it wasn't going to happen. The messages it tries to tell are obscured by shit-tier prose, and the parallel that Woolf apparently attempts to draw between two of the characters borders on offensive.
And now Plainsong. He pitched it to us as if we'd get through it in a weekend and eat it up, but the writing is waaaaaaay too tedious for that. I'm also annoyed at how, as with A Portrait (and I honestly can't remember if Mrs. Dalloway did this), there are no quotation marks, and Haruf isn't half the writer McCarthy is, so I can't just let it go.
Hopefully college literature classes don't have quite that high a density of shit.
Comments
That's, uh, that's fairly subjective, dude. I don't care for Plainsong either, but at the very least, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man is considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. What didn't you like about it?
And as for the "no quotation marks" bit, I recommend staying away from The Road.
Still, three novels you hate in a row sucks. Hopefully the next one will be better.
I hate A Separate Peace, personally.
I get that it's a literary landmark. I just kinda didn't like the way it read, and it was a bit boring. Finnegan's Wake, however, has earned my loathing, as has Joyce himself, for his letters to his wife.
"And as for the "no quotation marks" bit, I recommend staying away from The Road."
I was reading Blood Meridian around the same time as Portrait, hence my reference to McCarthy in the OP; I'm a stickler about stuff like that, but I can forgive McCarthy for his opinion on the matter because he can actually write worth a damn.
The next one will be for college; we're just gonna watch movies and stuff after Plainsong, now that the AP test's been taken.
Most of the books they made us read in Spanish are pretty good, except for like two or three years where they made us read Twilight tier novels and La Celestina, which I don't care how much of a classic it is, it's one of the worst books I've ever read
I honestly can't say I agree, at least not based on The Road, which is all I've read by him. He didn't really have much to say other than that getting by in a postapocalyptic country would suck, which I kinda already knew, and he didn't really have any original ways of conveying that.
Way back in high school, taking AP Spanish, we had to read One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Next year in AP English II, we read One Hundred Years of Solitude.
And even ASP turned out okay, because my teacher was awesome, and used it to set up this thing where our class split up into two sides and basically spent two weeks putting the main character on trial. That was ridiculously fun.
Hmm. Blood Meridian eventually got pretty boring, as well, but the prose was beautiful. I mostly meant write as in "put words on paper," honestly. I can't comment on how "deep" he is. :P
I haven't really liked any of the books from English class (except for Orwell's, but who doesn't like those?), but I've read some other classics on my own time that I've liked, like Ulysses. Maybe you just have to read these books at your own pace to enjoy them, rather than the school's pace.
Probably half the reason I didn't like A Separate Peace is because my eight grade teacher was one of those pretentious ones who constantly told us to look at TEH HIDDEN SYMBOLISM in places where there was none.
Also, the main character was an unlikable spineless dick and the end was some of the worst emotional manipulation I've ever seen. I mean, was there any reason for Phinny to die other than "BAAHHH THAT'S SO TRAGIC!"? There's that too.
On the other hand, The Great Gatsby was great no matter how badly it was taught.
I was really sleepy every class, when we did that one, so I honestly don't remember that much of it. It's unfortunate, because the class, as a whole, was a joke.
"Back in freshman year, we probably had the worst introduction to Shakespeare ever (Romeo and Juliet)."
Dude, samesies. I also read Macbeth sophomore year (it was taught pretty annoyingly), and Hamlet this year (also not terrible, but I can't stand actually watching adaptations of it).
"Maybe you just have to read these books at your own pace to enjoy them, rather than the school's pace."
I dunno, our teacher's pretty laidback about it all (he didn't hold it against us that none of us were willing to read Mrs. Dalloway, for instance). And I took Portrait at a pretty comfy pace (as in, skimming it).
There's always Sparknotes.
Anyway, I wish teachers would teach King Lear. I mean, a guy's eyes get torn out. That would interest even the most uninterested of students.
When I had to read Gatsby in junior year of high school, I absolutely hated it. By the time I had to read it again in...junior year of college? I'm not sure...I appreciated it a good deal more. It's probably half that over those few years I grew a taste for effluent prose, and half that on the second read-through I had a teacher who wasn't stretching the hunt for symbolism to completely hilarious extremes. I mean yeah it's loaded with it, but suffice to say it's a bit less loaded than said high school teacher had deluded himself into thinking.
My best year for English was the year that we read The Great Gatsby, the short stories of Ernest Hemingway, The Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451 (which I had read a couple of years before and now appreciate a great deal more), and "The Taming of the Shrew".
I seemed to be the only person in the class who liked Ernest Hemingway.
@gentlemanorcus:
I did it in grade 12. Grade 12 English curriculum in Toronto is the teacher's choice of either Hamlet or King Lear (a relic of the five-year system; previously one of them was grade 12 and one was grade 13).How can you like Hemmingway? His views are batshit and his prose isn't interesting enough to justify reading his work.
I find his prose interestingly blunt and his views, while kinda odd, allow me to think of his works from an entirely new perspective.
> The Catcher in the Rye
Welp.
In any case, I didn't get any really interesting stuff in high school. It was all pretty terribad and most of them were YA books aside from Romeo & Juliet and Macbeth.
I didn't get any interesting reading until college when I started reading stuff like Beowulf and Canterbury Tales.
I loved Hemingway because his prose reads like Gabriel Garcia Marquez after a drunken binge. Or so my mom claims.
Yeah, I guess I could see that.
Romeo & Juliet is remembered as being a sweet romance and not because it has a tragic ending. The classic Milhouse line "We were like Romeo and Juliet, but it ended in tragedy!"
Anyway, you fuckers are lucky, we never actually read books. We just read scenes here and there and that was that. The only time we ever actually do any academical reading was in eleventh grade and our teacher just let us choose our books.
^Holy shit dude, same here.
In tenth grade I just read LOTR, Drizzt novels, and the Elric books and got an A in English.
It's good to know my country's education is retarded by centuries ;~;
not like i didn't know that but still.