Edit to say because I kinda feel bad now: I have nothing against English teachers! Please don’t send your mafia of learned lit nerds after me! …Or do, lit nerds are hot.
Edit to say because I kinda feel bad now: I have nothing against English teachers! Please don’t send your mafia of learned lit nerds after me! …Or do, lit nerds are hot.
You mean ‘Great Expectations’? The most fucking boring book ever written in the history of mankind?
I disagree and offer Old Man and the Sea.
I get it, there’s a bunch of symbolism and blah blah blah… I could sum the book up in a sentence and not miss much.
Lol you are missing a lot. You just don’t give a shit about what you are missing and that’s entirely fair to have that experience
Grapes of Wrath. My class spent an hour and a half discussing a 2 page chapter about a turtle crossing a road…
It was torture.
That was roughly my experience with East of Eden.
The Glass Menagerie. Introduction of sad, boring characters. Nothing happens. The end.
Of Mice and Men: a book in a hurry to get from nowhere to nothing at all.
I’m talking about Touching Spirit Bear (a book that contains two chapters worth of graphic descriptions of a boy, having been mauled by a bear and barely staying alive, doing things like cramming a live mouse into his gullet to survive). I’m talking about The Jungle (a book my brain has blocked out most of which involves a lot of main character deaths, committing horrific sins just to survive and then not surviving anyway, and a general endless barrage of “so there’s this guy, right, and his life sucks. I mean, it sucks. His wife just died, he watched his coworker get chopped to bits, his boss is raping his sister and if he speaks up about it he’ll be fired and they’ll both starve, everybody has shunned him, oh his life might be looking up never mind he just got outed as a fraud, suffice it to say, his life SUCKS. Also communism is good.”) I’m talking about Fahrenheit 451. I’m talking about Lord of the Flies. I’m talking about books that make kids hate reading.
Why can’t we read Discworld instead?
Those books are all fucking awesome.
My brain is having trouble with the idea that anyone could read any of the books I just listed and come away feeling anything othet than revulsion
Terry Pratchett is great and all, but don’t you have any interest in learning new things? The Jungle is essentially journalism, it exposed real shit that was happening in our own country… and being fed to us. It changed minds. It basically led to the creation of the food and drug administration. It saved lives. That’s a powerful work of art. Revulsion is the intended response. It’s kind of a horror novel.
The other books you listed…. How about wonder? Hope? Fear? Fascination? Dread? Excitement? At least they make you feel something. Boredom is what kills love for reading in my experience. None of the books you listed are boring.
And Terry Pratchett is boring? Reading Thud! and exploring racial tensions through the lens of British humor is not worth doing because it doesn’t give me the thrill of watching someone go out of the frying pan and into the fire, only to realize the “fire” was just a bigger frying pan which he has just come out of and is currently on a downward trajectory, over and over again, for 300-odd pages?
Even apart from that, you of course do you, but if I’m going to read a book for high school, boredom is WAY preferable to revulsion. I’d rather read a physics textbook word for word than be forced to continue reading every time someone dies.
Books like The Jungle are undoubtedly important from a journalistic standpoint, and having students read them and analyze them as such is important, but 1) I’d like to do that and not talk about what the main character is thinking and 2) I’d like some books that aren’t …that… thrown in for variety. If my parents didn’t thrust their Pratchett stash upon me at an early age I might’ve grown up thinking all Serious Grown-Up Literature was like that.
I’m absolutely not denigrating Pratchett or calling him boring. I sincerely think he’s great. I just think those other books are pretty great too. They’re all really interesting reads. I don’t mind reading disturbing material though, my first grown-up novel was The Shining swiped from my dad’s bookshelf.😅