Why was every single book they made us read in school the single most bland, uninteresting piece of dogshit literature known to man?Nobody would have willingly chosen to read Tangerine or The Outsiders or Ender's Game or Hatchet or Catcher in the Rye or The Giver of their own accord ever. It was all absolute fucking dogshit.Why didn't schools make good books part of their curriculum? Are they insane? I did read Childhoods End years later by myself and enjoy it however admittedly.>B-but Enders GAYME!!You haven't read SHIT since your formative years and it fucking shows. You make me fucking SICK.
I just reread catcher and lord of the flies for the first time since HS and they were both kinoI shan't be rereading grapes of wrath however
>>25210832I read tangerine on my own and enjoyed it. I was always 2nd in accelerated reader though after that darn katie hebert :/
>>25210836>>25210839>t.suckers of cock in real life
>>25210842Post bookstack
>>25210836Steinbeck sucks anyways.
>>25210847Here's just the stack next to my couch.
>>25210832To kill the general public's interest in and capacity for reading and create an uniformed and easily-controlled populace divorced from critical thinking.
>>25210832I don't think the books were bad, just the way they ere taught and the general atmosphere of a public school classroom.
>>25210832Just like everything else in schoolThank God we don't have classical educations anymore where we read Homer and The Bible in Greek or Catullus in Latin or anything.
>>25210832I didn't read in school, because schoolwork was lame and I hated book reports. It sucked the fun out of reading, which is still an impairment that lasts to this day. I just liked writing, and was good at it, at least from an academic standpoint, which I see as potentially corrosive to authentic talent.Oh well, Huckleberry Finn said nigger a lot, though I didn't read that either. I've never had an interest in literature presented to me in school. I just read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and stuff about aliens, and that's much healthier brainrot to whatever it is they feed kids these days that makes them want to cut their dicks off.
Back when I actually had a job and wasn't a NEET who reads all the time, I was told by someone high up that one of the greatest threats to the United States government was a 'philosophically active' populace. Historically, the powers that be feared the population would radicalize from reading too much. For most of the last century, they feared a communist revolution. Now they fear a fascist revolution almost as much. America is a powder keg that the wrong ideas could ignite, so this theory goes, and euthanizing the joy of reading in young people is one of the only ways to prevent that outcome.
>>25210881I have a hard time buying that. They've been teaching to every elementary school student and in every Hollywood movie the basic principles of the leftist revolutionairies.The truth is, revolutions are bogus. "The people" never rise up. Every revolution in history has been the elite infighting.
>>25210832You went to a school that had to teach things frogs could grasp but not bore everyone else to tears. Hatchet is great, i read lots of his books in 5th/6th grade. It and The Phantom Tollbooth were highlights of gradeschool lit for me.
most books school forced me to read were great experiences, better than what i would read or watch by myself.examples (since i'm french):La Maison du chat qui pelote (Balzac)Les MisérablesOedipe roi, Antigone, AjaxUn long dimanche de fiançailles (so much better than the movie)Colomba (Mérimée)Don Juan (Molière)without school, no kid would read that kind of masterpieces. in fact it was the main benefit of school for me
God, French is such a gay fucking language.
>>25210832A part of it lies in your perception. Teenagers and adults view art differently, I went from hating Heart of Darkness to loving it after rereading it in my late 20s. On the other hand, Sienkiewicz is just as awful as I remember him, revisiting him only made me hate him more.For reference, I hated most assigned reading apart from the Doll (Prus), Plague (Camus), Ferdudurke, Macbeth and Crime & Punishment.
>>25210886This anon knows
>>25211029How did you do Les Mis considering how long it is?
>>25211081Usually you've got a shortened version of 400/500 pages. Wich is doable but don't even think most people have read it. Most kids just go on internet and paraphrase wiki.No ones read the 600*3 volumes especially in our age.
>>25210832To kill your interest in reading. Same for math and physical activity.
In Vietnam's case the most dogshit and most common 'masterpieces' (of which the content is put into national tests and such) were written with the trope of revolutionaries leading the people away from the 'corrupted' feudalistic government and also, the poor protects each other and are always good. Whether the authors of those dogshits wrote them according to his artistic interpretation or to the will of the Party is up to you to decide (search up Nhân văn giai phẩm). But then again, this country is not known for its' ability to protect and nurture its literature. Vietnam is the worst of the Sinosphere, economically, cultural-heritage wise, and literally.
>>25211144Damn thats shit. And I sit here seething because we had to read some YA shit no one has ever heard of.
>>25211146It's trash vs garbage; I can relate to the feeling though. It really discouraged me to read more, but in the end I made it through like you. Can't imagine anyone else doing it though, most people from this shithole don't read and don't preserve old books (even libraries don't allow publishers to get an old copy of some rare books written by an author of the last century).
Because it's a fucking scam. The publishers and the board of education are working together. >publish your jewish nephew's piece of shit novel >it sells zero copies >give it some fake awards and push to have it added to the national curriculum >now that your nephew's shitty book is part of the core curriculum it's got millions of guaranteed sales year after year >money printer go brrrrrr
>>25211184That’s pretty sad. But yeah, I got through it, but I’ll admit there were a couple of comfy little books we read even if I thought them boring, of mice and men for one. Romeo and Juliet I had to read to and I hated it actually, I still do, I think it’s awful and it made me (like a retard) think little of Shakespeare and it wasn’t until I left school that I read Hamlet and it was an absolute masterpiece. I hate school retrospectively for making Shakespeare boring. Anyway, as I said, it’s kinda sad about the state of readers (or lack thereof) over there, how do you acquire your books these days? You use an e reader, or order online?
>>25211207You should think of Shakespeare's comedies (Romeo and Juliet is a comedy) as of Lewis Carroll. Full of wordplay, whimsy, free associations. I also hated Romeo and Juliet, but revisiting it after reading Love's Labour's Lost (one of Shakespeare's greatest plays imo) gave me a new appreciation of it.
>>25211209>Romeo and Juliet is a comedyI know where you’re coming from with this, but by the definition they used then, it isn’t quite a comedy, what with its ending. I’d definitely sooner call it a satire. I can sort of imagine a Carroll like reading, thanks anon, I’ll try that. Cymbeline is probably my favourite behind Hamlet, it’s pretty underrated and is definitely more strictly satirical than most of his other works.
>>25210832It's not just the quality of the books, it's the fact a sluggish vapid government worker is trying to tell you how to 'analyze' the text and what to take from it.I love Hawthorne and Billy Budd/Bartleby, but if they had tried to 'teach' me those texts in school I would've hated them
>>25211081i think it was only one of the volumes. i realize i have probably never read the whole thing
>>25211212Damn it, I've been thinking about satires a lot lately, how come I didn't think to classify Shakespeare as a satirist? Satire as a genre keeps growing better and better in my mind.I think a Carrollian reading would work best starting with LLL, as:>Love's Labour's Lost abounds in sophisticated wordplay, puns, and literary allusions and is filled with clever pastiches of contemporary poetic forms.[17] Critic and historian John Pendergast states that "perhaps more than any other Shakespearean play, it explores the power and limitations of languageJust take a look at the text below, and the quadruple repetition of light (all with different meanings) in one line. BEROWNE Why, all delights are vain, and that most vainWhich with pain purchased doth inherit pain:As painfully to pore upon a book To seek the light of truth, while truth the whileDoth falsely blind the eyesight of his look. Light seeking light doth light of light beguile.So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.Study me how to please the eye indeed By fixing it upon a fairer eye,Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed And give him light that it was blinded by.Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun, That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks.Small have continual plodders ever won, Save base authority from others’ books.These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights, That give a name to every fixèd star,Have no more profit of their shining nights Than those that walk and wot not what they are.Too much to know is to know naught but fame,And every godfather can give a name.
>>25211237Well, I haven’t got around to LLL myself but after reading this, I really want to. Naturally, since we’re talking about an interpretation of Shakespeare by way of Carroll, it also feels apt to say that I see a lot of Joyce here too. As everyone knows Joyce loved the employment of musicality in his prose and as we know he’s influenced by both Carroll and Shakespeare, greatly so. >Light seeking light doth light of light beguile.Of course, I’m aware of this line, and what a line it is, and timeless in its context too. But the rest of it, specifically>These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights,>That give a name to every fixèd star,Is so immensely beautiful you can’t help but fixate on it despite it being as simple as “when it’s your job to observe stars and name them, it’s kind of boring actually and loses its magic.” Gotta love the spear shaker. He’s be my absolute favourite were it not for Milton.
>>25211237Omfg this guy just said pain 3x in a row :/ AĤHHHH HELP ME NIGGERMAN
>>25211263Joyce actually wasn't influenced by Carroll. At least not until Finnegans Wake according to his letters, I got into an argument with an anon who claimed that Carroll didn't influence FW at all, which is absurd.>All old Dadgerson's dodges one conning one's copying and that's what wonderland's wanderlad'll flaunt to the fair.>Though Wonderlawn's lost us for ever. Alis, alas, she broke the glass! Liddell looker through the leafery, ours is mistery of pain.
>>25211207I loved Hamlet but it was the only Shakespeare I've read that seemed to have that profundity and depth. Some of the others, like Macbeth for example, just didn't have anything there like it. Julius Caesar was great as a way of bringing history alive but besides those two everything has been 'meh' to me.
>>25211207I made a long-ass reply but 4chim got hacked or whatever. Anyhow, we have a forum called TVE-4U which is the source of 93% of all Vietnamese ebooks (they are either scans, commissioned/free epubs etc. or just a new book entirely in PDF form [for Buddhist or Confucionist texts]). Recently, like 2 weeks ago, the shitty gov decided to nuke all of the ebook-sharing communities by saying that whatever channels sharing "currently sold" books will be investigated and fined or put in prison. The forum has since shut down its' download feature. I used to just print out PDFs of whatever books I could get hold of; when I was able to live on my own I spent some money to get a bw Kobo and got my books on zlib. But paper is still better I think. I tried to read Shakespeare but honestly I prefer watching plays. We also didn't really read a lot of foreign literature. The only Western work I could remember in our books was an abridge The Old man and the Sea; but of course its content hadn't been put into tests.
>>25210832We didn't have to read Ender's Game but the rest were kino as a kid. Idk what you're malding about. What should they have made us read instead?
>>25212848Shut up, cuck.
>a race war erupts in the classroom after the white boy says nigger whilst reading Of Mice and Men to the classTeachers really didn't give a fuck back then.
>>25212853Concession accepted
>>25210842Bit rude
I liked a decent amount of the books I read in school. A bigger problem was the rubberbanding where you'd be forced to slowly read through a book over the course of sometimes months, when if it was interesting I'd have already read it in a day or two. I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird in a single night, and then having to sit through the class slowly go through the book for the next month with reading comprehension tests on individual chapters that meant nothing to the overall themes of the book. Same thing happened to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest, where I read a decent portion of it, and then stopped when I realized that the class was going to slowly go over the book for the next 2-3 months.There's only a couple of books that I thought were just completely awful. The Crucible was such dogshit, why not just pick any Shakespeare play to read instead.The House on Mango Street I also remember being the most boring pile of shit ever, but I also read it in 8th grade, so I was probably just too immature to care or understand it. I have no idea why they thought it was a good idea to have 8th grade boys read it. That book really destroyed the classroom environment for the rest of the year.
>>25210832Most of the other books you listed range from mildly boring to decent, but Tangerine is the biggest piece of shit I have ever been forced to read. I would rather rip every single individual hair off of my testicles one by one than open that godforsaken book ever again. If you're going to waste a kid's time with a book about FUCKING NOTHING, at least try to make sure it isn't the most agonizingly retarded series of nothing events on the planet. Holy shit what an awful book.
>>25210832Part of the problem is being forced to read something you don't want to read.I can understand encouraging kids to read books that are a little outside of their comfort zone, but schools ought to provide a list of books for students to choose from. Forcing kids to read 200-400 page books that they have zero interest in is a good way to turn them away from reading forever.
>>25211191Education is so messed up. Publishing too. Everything
>>25210832I had to read Das Parfum
>>25210832If you think our generations had it bad, know that kids today are being forced to read tranny propaganda by some literal who flaming homo who is then invited to the school to personally touch all the white kids. And all the moms clapped because it's good when your child has AIDS and a gaping asshole.If they read a classic they're usually made to read it as globohomo commentary saying it's about feminism or something.Our society and culture are imploding. The jews have won it's over. They are like a cancer and we let them fester for a century
>>25210836I’m reading Lord of the Flies for the first time now. Interestingly my father read it at High School. It wasn’t on our lists, he said it’s good
>>25210857What did you read for school? We read;One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s NestBrave New WorldTo Kill A Mockingbird Macbeth (I also read Hamlet in drama)
For GCSE English they made us read Macbeth, Animal Farm, An Inspector Calls and Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeI don’t really have a desire to reread any of those except the former cause it’s Shakespeare and have much more of a preference for international late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature They’ve had the same works on the syllabus for several generations worth now and I’m not surprised it doesn’t get british zoomers more interested in reading, if their attention spans and sense of wonder about the world hadn’t already been seriously damaged by a constant diet of instantly gratifying, low quality, mass produced media entertainment
>>25213334Animal Farm is good
>>25213254Tf are you talking about
>>25213340It is but there’s a reason why conservative boomers love it
>>25213341He's deranged
>>25210832enders game was fun
>>25213449It was masonic disclosure for demolay agents to get the signal that the addictive video games were literal and literary computer simulations of 3d environments to train war AI, that the people playing them were being pacifier and trained on reward schemes, and that the idea was they'd be so dumbed down they'd then become drone users for the future militaryThe Black OPs 2 designer actually did become some kind of govt war planner for the military because of how scared black ops 2 made them
Liked enough to reread after HS: A tale of two cities, The Martian chronicles, MacbethLiked but not enough to reread; The Great Gatsby, Julius Caesar, Romeo and JulietDisliked: To kill a mockingbird, A death in the family, A separate peace, Death of a salesmanCould not finish: Tess of the Derbervilles, The scarlet letter Managed to avoid: Catcher in the Rye, Brave new world, 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the flies
>>25210832Ha. I loved my strong education in literature and I was a book nerd that hung out in the school library and my local public library. I love literature and I've never heard of these three >1. Tangerine>2. Hatchet>3. The Giver >Ender's GameThis name vaguely rings a bell, could be a video game or movie for as vague it is to me>The OutsidersRead this one my own and liked it. Was like a sophomore in high school and I saw it when looking through one of my younger brother's book shelves. Later in college we did have a friend they nicknamed after one of the characters but I had forgotten the book so much by then I didn't remember him much from the book. >Catcher in the Rye This one sucks. If I was a literature teacher my stance would be to tell the class about it, briefly go over the various aspects of why it was considered literarily significant then tell them they can read that on their own if they want and not have to worry about getting graded on it! If they ask for extra credit I would say no to Catcher but I would give them extra credit for the Outsiders. While the literary value is weak I like the "peek at historical culture" merit of the Outsiders
>>25213484Brave New World isn't bad at all. One of the few good pieces of dystopian fiction. I'd check it out if I were you.
