Books you had to read for school that you loved/hated

[Alex]

Reading a lot of the books sucked for me, because it wasn't "read them once", it was "read them 10 times, then analyse each freaking page in class til you can recite the entire thing".

Same thing happened with the 'film as text' that we did. To this day I can pretty much do a 1 woman performance of the movie Lantana, just because I watched it so many times.

We did Heart of Darkness too in Lit. Hated it. 4 page paragraph, anyone?

[Xandra]

For this year, in English...

I'm unsure about Their Eyes Were Watching God, liked All the King's Men, loved The Great Gatsby, am meh on Native Son, and have started Catch-22 and am totally failing to see the point of it. It's boring.

and I know we totally read at least one other book, but I can't remember what. D:

Macbeth? Or was that last year...?

[fzun]

Loved:
- 1984
- Oliver Twist
- Their Eyes Were Watching God
- The Jungle
- The Fountainhead (just finished this one, wow, I wanna read Atlas Shrugged now)
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Liked:
- Romeo & Juliet
- Grapes of Wrath
- Pride and Prejudice
- Daisy Miller (short story)

Neutral:
- Animal Farm
- Jane Eyre
- Of Mice and Men
- Julius Caesar

Disliked:
- The Odyssey
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (interesting but so boring!)

Hated:
- Catcher in the Rye
- Things Fall Apart
- Wuthering Heights
- A Separate Peace
- Heart of Darkness
- The Scarlet Letter (couldn't even bring myself to finish it)

[Chivewarrior]

I actually liked The Great Gatsby. Until we watched the movie and got to see the suicide scene on video. Ever since then I haven't been able to read the book without picturing that scene.

I despised Life of Pi. It's just such a boring book... and waaaay too ambiguous.

Blink was wonderful summer reading.

[Ange]

I actually liked The Great Gatsby. Until we watched the movie and got to see the suicide scene on video. Ever since then I haven't been able to read the book without picturing that scene.

Is that the one with Robert Redford as Gatsby?

[Callie]

We just finished the Screenplay to To Kill A Mockingbird.
I liked it. Now we're watching the movie. I'm not really liking the actors all that much lol.

before that, we started Cold Sassy Tree, but didnt finish it because of the short amount of time left in school. I really liked that and wanted to finish

[Siniri]

Loved:
To Kill a Mockingbird (to those who hated it: give it another chance -- I first read it at ~11 and hated it, had to re-read it at 15 and thought it wasn't half-bad, and have since read it about 4 more times and liked it more each time -- it's one of those books you really get a lot more out of with each reading)
Murder in the Cathedral (the only one in my AP English class who liked it -- my teacher said each time she reads it, she gets something different out of it, so I guess it's like TKaM, though I haven't reread this one yet)
Le Petit Prince
The Crucible
Microbe Hunters (a really cool history/biography of the scientists who helped discover bacteria and viruses -- the chapters on Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur alone make this book worth the read -- Pasteur was the Dumbledore of the scientific world)
L’école des femmes

Hated:
Chesapeake (Michener is sooo long, and his chapters so short -- we had to summarize each chapter, too)
A Light in August (what's so great about Faulkner, anyway? he just seemed like a racist turd to me, and darn difficult to read, too)
The Pearl (uggh, I couldn't take honors English in 10th grade because they did this weird humanities combo with "world studies 2," and I wanted to take AP computer sci instead -- this book just epitomized how dumb 10th grade English was)
Cyrano de Bergerac (I liked it up until the ending, but that just ruined it for me -- Cyrano was such a hypocrite)

I liked a lot of what I read in school, but these are the ones that stand out the most. There were a few things I loved reading en français, but I've forgotten what they were now. Many were poems, anyway, I think (Paul Verlaine's Chanson d'Automne comes to mind immediately). Most of my favorite books I read on my own instead of for school, though some of them are on other people's school lists (one example is A Little Princess).

[Chivewarrior]

I actually liked The Great Gatsby. Until we watched the movie and got to see the suicide scene on video. Ever since then I haven't been able to read the book without picturing that scene.

Is that the one with Robert Redford as Gatsby?

I actually don't know- I was in seventh grade when we watched it and I've never been one to pay attention to the names of the actors.

[John]

Jane Eyre (tell me if the spelling's wrong)
Anyways, it was really boring.

[Byakuya San]

Miracle at Philadelphia

Okay, so I haven't actually finished it yet, but REALLY--"Over Philadelphia the air lay hot and humid; old people said it was the worst summer since 1750"--need I say any more?

[fzun]

Jane Eyre started off boring but it got really good by the end.

The Great Gatsby was the last book I had to read for AP Language and I thought it was great, although the ending sort of took me by surprise.

[Sakura]

Well for summer reading this year, we're reading The Road by Cormack McCarthy, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracey Kidder (What I'm really talking about here), and A Poisonwood Bible by somebody.

Well ok, I've got to say I really really liked Mountains Beyond Mountains. It's a nonfiction almost-not-quite biography that has to do with this unconventional Doctor who does a lot of his work in Haiti and other impoverished areas. It's kind of makes you guilty and at the same time, inspires you or compels you to think about what you're doing with your life. As far as nonfictions go, this one is pretty much amazing.

[LunaFortuna]

Loved
Blackbird House
The Giver
Ender's Game
House of the Scorpion
Julius Caesar

Hated
To Kill A Mockingbird
House on Mango Street
2001: A Space Odessey
The Odessey

House on Mango Street was probably the worst book I have ever had the misfortune to read. And we spent MONTHS studying it!

[stephanie<3]

In 7th grade, we read A Long Way From Chicago and that was OK, but I really HATED The True Adventure of Charlotte Doyle. That was really horrid.

[machinedreams]

Books I read that I hated:

Catcher in the Rye
The Secret Sharer
Heart of Darkness
The Great Gatsby
To the Lighthouse
The Awakening

Books I read that I loved:
My Name Is Asher Lev
Hamlet (okay, it's a play, IT STILL COUNTS!)
The Return of the Native
Ethan Frome
The Scarlet Letter