Books you had to read for school...and hated!

Rydia

Throwing rocks at emo kids
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Like the other thread. What books did you have to read for school and didn't really care for?

The Scarlet Letter: This book was supposedly banned for it's content at one point, and it should have stayed that way. Not for the adulterous content but because it was BORING. It would have been a lot more tolerable if the writer had not filled the book with metaphors and description of the scenery.

1984: Yeah it's a classic. But I was rather bored by it. Maybe because I just couldn't relate to the situation?

The Black Pearl: BORING BORING BORING! It was agonizing to read a single page of this book.
 
Wuthering Heights: I hated this book with a passion. The story and characters were really annoying. I can take boring books, but the book was just so...stupid.
 
Books I read for school and didn't like...

The Road: I just didn't care for the story, I didn't relate to it nor did I really care. That and there was no punctuation at all.

Julius Ceaser: Not sure if I even spelt that one right. I didn't understand the point of this book I love Shakespeare really I do, but this is one of his works that I just didn't like.

The Black Pearl: It was very slow and boring... I don't even know why they made us read it.
 
The Three Musketeers: I had to read this in grade 10 for my french class. It was so long and boring because sometimes I was reading a description of a place and the description was almost one page long. Too much details and the dialogues were written in old french so I wasn't understanding everything. I think this book was written in the 19th century.

The story wasn't bad, but I hated the book because of its length and the way it was written.
 
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Othello. I loathe this play, I loathed reading it and absolutely despised having to talk about it for my AS level. In fact, I pretty much anything and everything to do with Shakespeare. To be honest, even though it was for the exam I got half way through the play and stopped reading it, I don't think anyone could understand what the characters said or what they meant and thus, it was completely pointless to attempt to read. We got given the question months before the exam anyway so most of us only read the one chapter >.>
 
The Scarlet Letter: This book was supposedly banned for it's content at one point, and it should have stayed that way. Not for the adulterous content but because it was BORING. It would have been a lot more tolerable if the writer had not filled the book with metaphors and description of the scenery.

OMG I HATED this book :rage: :rage: :rage: The priest dude was so whiny and emo, and it seemed like they were making such a huge deal out of something and caring about what society thought so much, it was so annoying. I was so glad when we were done with the unit on this thing, the scarlet letter in the story should have been "F" for FAIL :mokken:

A Farewell to Arms--FAIL :rage: It wasn't just a farewell to arms, but also legs, spleens, and decency :mokken: Much more violent, graphic, and debauched than Catcher in the Rye, and yet that GOOD book gets a bad rap and this piece of sparsely-adjectived crap doesn't?! Sorry Hemingway, I know you're supposed to be a cool dude for hanging in my region of the world and whatnot, but I'm sorry, I just can't get into your writing :sad3:

A Wrinkle in Time--Annoying :rage: I had to read this one in middle school and I can't remember much about it, but I know that the enemy at the end was annoyingly smug, and the character "Meg" pissed me off for some reason. Also, "The Giver" had a similar situation and issue, I just could not get into either of these :mokken:

A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet--Shakespeare :rage: The only work of his that I can truly appreciate is Hamlet, and all the other ones can remain in the 1600s pls thanx. His innuendos are completely ridiculous and the "teehee, we should all make a huge deal of this" way we had to interpret it in the class pissed me off, I could care less about such things. But even if I had read the stories independently, they were too boring for me and I still wouldn't have liked them :mokken:
 
Moby Dick. I hate the book with a passion. Way too long and not to mention boring. I didn't finish reading this book, actually. :hmmm: And I failed my quizzes. =[ But that's because I really was not into this damn book at all.

Oliver Twist. Hahaha, okay maybe I hate this book only because one time, there was one of those pop-up oral book report in my class. My teacher called me up (thankfully I was the last one in class and everyone had already left) to her desk and asked me to summarize the book. I was not prepared. I racked my brain and BS'ed my way, only summarizing the recent chapters I read the previous night. In the end, she looked at me with a disappointed look and told me to go read the book. :lew:
 
The Scarlet Letter: I'm going to agree with Ali and Kate on this one. I hated this book so much. It was atrociously boring and I didn't even finish it. Just awful all around.

Their Eyes Were Watching God: My teacher would not stop going on about this book and how great it was. Turns out it wasn't. It wasn't even good or halfway decent. It was fucking boring and awful. And one of the main characters was called Tea Cake. That alone is enough for me to not want to read the book. I read the majority of it anyway but I was in no way entertained. >.>

Huckleberry Finn: -__--__--__- The book was okay for like the first five chapters and then it just got boring and stupid. And it seemed to go on forever. I did enjoy Tom Sawyer but this one was just awful.
 
+To Kill a Mockingbird - I...just don't know what I make of this book. The themes that Harper Lee tackles, I must admit, I was rather impressed with how it was done, and I rather liked how a mockingbird was used as the symbol of innocence. However at the same time, I really struggled to get into the book itself, let alone actually studying it to great lengths and memorising as many quotes as possible for the closed-book exam. Perhaps if I were to just read it for pleasure this time instead of studying it to death at school, it would garner a much more favourable reaction from me.

+The Tempest
- That's what we're currently doing now. It was either Measure For Measure or this. And I was made to do this one with Dr Faustus as the accompanying text. This play is the one I have to study at much greater detail while for Dr Faustus I can get away with just knowing the basics in the exam. I don't actually mind most of Shakespeare's plays as long as they're not dull like this one. Add to the fact that we are assessed on this quite often while we only touch Faustus (the far more interesting of the two plays) only briefly in comparison.
 
Henry V
That book was so boring and pointless. It was quite long and most of the scenes were annoying, especially the long speeches. What made it worse was that it was the teacher's favourite book -_-
 
The Catcher in the Rye. I hated this book. It just did not interest me at all. It was boring to even read a page of it. While numerous people liked it I am not one of them.. The characters in the book were weird. Never going to touch this abomination again..

Romeo and Juliet.. This love sory is just so boring.. well the book was. I read this in high school and I can even remember falling asleep on some pages. When my teacher used to read it to the class you would just hear "Oh sorry mrs where were we again?"

Invisible.. which I had to read twice in high school :rage: The book is short but it is honestly shit. I was not even interested ever in this book. I remember just zooming through the pages. Easy shit to understand but BORING AS HELL.

Well that is what I can think of for a little bit :hmmm:
 
Great Expectations: This made me want to slash my wrists. It's so unbelievably dull and mundane that it's very existence should be a crime. I had to study this in Secondary School AND in College, and I've seen the film adaptation (the 1974 one, I think) more times than I care to count. It's a thoroughly depressing, unimaginative and just plain crap story and if I ever see another copy of it, I'm burning it.

Of Mice And Men: I really didn't enjoy this, either. It's not exactly subtle in what it is trying to convey...but then, this is probably why it was selected.
...plus I don't like how it ends. For some reason, it really pisses me off...
 
The Giver. This book made me want to shrivel up and die. My teacher kept referring to it as an "incredible classic". But, I just don't see it. The characters were easy to forget, and half the time I was reading it I was trying to keep myself awake at the same time. I keep telling myself over and over that I just wasn't into those types of books back then. Still not sure if I should give it another go, though.
 
Thought of some more.

Anything Shakespear. I don't mind watching a Shakespear play, but not reading. No I can't enjoy a bunch of dialogue nor understand it. Just think if you had to read a movie script and not actually watch the movie. Not fun.

Invisible Man. Again, very boring. and I couldn't relate to the character or situation at all. I understand what it was trying to do, but so many other book did it better.

 
Rydia said:
Anything Shakespear. I don't mind watching a Shakespear play, but not reading. No I can't enjoy a bunch of dialogue nor understand it. Just think if you had to read a movie script and not actually watch the movie. Not fun.
I hated reading The Merchant of Venice but I actually enjoyed reading Macbeth for some reason.

A Room of Ones Own: I had to read this for Uni and I absolutely hated it. It uses a train of consciousness thing which means that the topic constantly changes abruptly without warning (sometimes mid-sentence). In theory this technique is interesting, but it makes for a very annoying read.
 
I'm the King of the Castle by Susan Hill.

Absolutely loathed the plot of two boys fighting for territory. I'm not going into full details, but it was really repetive and had to study it for my English Literature GCSE back in school some years ago.

I never ever want to pick it up again.
 
The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway depresses me, because his books/stories are these painful experiences that I had to drag myself through as if I was walking through a field of thumbtacks without shoes on. The worst part of all: the guy had an insanely exciting life and was a true blue adventurer. I wish my life was as interesting as his... Or even that his books were as interesting as his life.

Beowulf - The reason I mention this is because it made me aware of a unique phenomenon that occurred when I read it for school. I read it the year before we had to read it and loved it. I read it for school, and hated it. Three years later, I went back and gave it another try, and it was even better than the first time. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if this because I had to read it for school, or if my brain shorted out for a year. The only other book I tried reading outside of class that was required in school was The Old Man and the Sea, and it didn't work out so well...
 
most of them i hated

but most of all

Lord Of The Flies
i thought it was a generally disgusting and unpleasant book
i disagree with its point that all men are animals, and the ending was stupid

1984
I enjoyed it until the end
its not because the ending was unpleasant that I didn't like it, it was it seemed a little unbelievable
and not that bleakness bothered me, it was just so severe that at the end I wasn't thinking "wow, what a good book!"
I thought
"I just read this whole book for noting"
ESPECIALLY the last line. the book would have been better without it.

I also dislike the point it makes about love.
 
Ah, I've got plenty. My highschool reading days were filled with hours and hours of wretched forced reading. There were a few books I enjoyed, like The Great Gatsby, but the rest were just hell:

Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, -yes, I know the shakespeare plays are classics and whatever, but I might as well have been reading greek newspaper articles-, Beowulf, The Fifth Business, The Kite Runner, Death in Venice, A Tale of Two Cities, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451.

Those were the good old days..
 
Only had to read 2, thankfully. First was To Kill A Mockingbird which, I have to admit, was actually a very good book. Even the typical over-analysing and considering what the writer said, what he meant, what he REALLY meant, and then saying if he did it well or not, didn't make this book too bad.

The other one was called In the Forest by some cow of an author. It was to do with a wee boy whose mum didny love him and who got raped by priests and bullied by boys who didny resist the rapes, and then grew up to be a psychopathic killer. Horribly written and it did my nut in. Not interesting in the slightest.
 
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