What's the absolute worst book you were forced to read in school?

What's the absolute worst book you were forced to read in school?

hi don how's the shoulder

Jane Eyre.

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I'll cop to having disliked Ethan Frome in school and not having since re-read it, but it's a shame that Wharton gets dismissed. Her novels (Age of Innocence especially) demonstrate genuine technical mastery and a gifted intellect, but she especially shines in her short stories where the chilly, stifled atmosphere doesn't have the necessary length to become suffocating.

Never read it, but I have a hard time believing its bad. Young Goodman Brown and most of Hawthorne's other stories are sublime, an opinion shared by Melville, whose word ought to be the final authority.


tl;dr: if you ever finish high school and become literate, you'll rethink these things.

Seconding Jane Eyre.
Scarlet Letter is tolerable once you get behind the idea that Chillingworth did nothing wrong. I'd like a novel from his perspective where he just goes on a rampage throughout the town like Charles Bronson in Death Wish.

That. Also Madame Bovary (we did it as a "quick book", ie a week dedicated to it in sophomore year).

I enjoyed this and the crucible a great deal, we did like 3 months on the two (thats what you get growing up 10 miles from plymouth plantation)

>Sleds killing people all day left and right. Fuckin sleds bitch.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Kill yourself. The utter lack of appreciation for Hawthorne on this board is just another demonstration that its full of pseuds

O Pioneers. My teacher refused to believe they fucked.

Why do you think this book is bad OP?

Has anyone else here read Ethan Frome?

Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson. Was so fucking tedious and non-linear that I decided to avoid finishing it and instead turned the course final into an exercise in shitposting replete with pop psychology nonsense and general nonsensical fucker. Got an A, and I'm glad I never have to take another English course ever again.

*nonsensical fuckery

this

I read Ethan Frome in high school.
I thought it was great and have been meaning to check out some of her other works.

I don't see why it's getting so much hate.

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racist

Read it again.
It's just being made to read it that makes it bad. It's excellent.

>not dropping out in 7th grade

Hawthorne a shit
25 pages bitching about the fuckups he had to work with at his joke of a government job. It's like listening to my uncle complaining about his boss after he's had a few beers
Fuck Hawthorne.

This piece of shit.

Written by a nineteen year old, and it shows. She'll reuse the same words or phrases within paragraphs of each other, and goes on and on about the same two texts -- we get it, you read Paradise Lost.

Bloody Chamber too.

I agree with the OP that EF is bullshit, but the descriptive prose is fucking great, especially the scene setting in the first third. It's bullshit because the actual story is just a cheap twist and the sled denouement is unconvincing. Age of Innocence is a solid gold novella and House of Mirth is very strong too.

Yeah. Gets credit for being a thinking person's book on account of the sermonising, but the thoughts aren't up to much.

The book is fine, the problem is all the teenage girls who are convinced that Hester did nothing wrong, that adultery is okay and slut-shaming is bad, and that those evil Christians were at it again