Crap books that you were forced to read at school

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It's been my experience that most plays make lacklustre reading. They're meant to be experienced as performance pieces, not as bone-dry scripts.

Sorry, I have to join the "bash Catcher in the Rye" bandwagon... it was truly a horrendous experience. (I had a bad teacher too - so that probably contributed).

I just found the book boring.


also... in a predominantly boys school - Jane Austen's Emma.
What were they thinking.

The Bible... Admittedly, there are good bits, but one year, we spent several months reading Deutronomy and Numbers. Those books really suck. I'd rather have had the gospel of Judas.

I liked "Catcher" and keep a copy of it nearby at all times. I actually quoted from it in a major paper!

Books I didn't like that I read in school include:

The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Patterson
The Slave Dancer (not sure of the author)
We Shall Not Be Moved (not sure of this author either...it was about women's history)
The Witch of Blackbird Pond (again, don't recall the author)
The one about the guy who taught evolution named Bert Cates...don't remember the name of it
From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I think it was by EL Koenigsberg
Any of the Sherlock Holmes stories

I remember another one that really annoyed me...

Watership Down.

Damn, those rabbits took forever to do anything.

We had some good books too, but I might start a new thread on them.

oh, and I liked Macbeth - fast, horror/thriller Shakespeare. Try comparing that to Romeo and Juliet.

Even Hamlet (or as we used to call it, piglet) wasn't too bad. It just wasn't too good either.

Mythology by Edith Hamilton-Lady sure could make a good thing dull.

All the short stories I had to read in sixth grade when I was surely ready to read novels. Public school English classes before high school were really awful because I was always three years ahead and there were no advanced classes I could take.

Maus by Art Speigelman made me want to smash things. I guess they thought that we would find WWII more accessible in comic-book form. I am so jealous of everybody who had to read Night, because that book was so much better.

That's about it, really. I like most books they make me read for school.

Atlas Shugged and The Fountain Head by Ayn Rand. She has to be the worst author ever. Having to read those two pieces of useless crap made me almost want to pluck my eyeballs out.

City of Light

About Buffalo Ny, where I live.

That is the ONLY reason we read it.

If not for it's "history" it would have been long forgotten.

It's supposed to be some classy murder mystery, but I say it's a long, boring piece of garbage not worth the paper it's printed on. At the end, the author kills off a few characters to tie up storylines. This is most likely because if these books were any longer, they would collapse in on themselves, becoming intellectual black holes and halt all human development.

"Clock Without Hands" by Carson McCullers
"L'herbe rouge" by Boris Vian
"Flight to Afar" by Alfred Andersch

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - 400+ pages of some hick kid rafting the Mississippi River
The Rich Boy - Paula Hagerty was a b***h. "HI ANSON I GOT MARRIED AFTER YOU REJECTED ME SO I'LL SUCK FACE WITH MY DARLING HUSBAND PETE SO YOU FEEL LIKE s**t."
O Pioneers! - Boring as hell.
A Separate Peace. - That kid died because he broke his f*****g leg. Jesus. What a lame way to go.
The Picture of Dorian Gray - The only character I liked was Sybil, and she died. Boo.

There have been some stinkers mentioned indeed, but these are my top (or should I say bottom) six overall:



1. "Wuthering Heights" -- overall the most depressing story I've ever encountered. Don't get attached to anyone... they're most likely going to suffer a slow, miserable death at the hands of their own health.

2. "The Scarlet Letter" -- Seriously, did Roger Chillingworth have nothing better to do with his time than harass Arthur Dimmesdale? I know it was the 1600s and things were primitive, but damn...

3. "The Wind in the Willows" -- something about toads and bunnies having tea parties in the woods just doesn't compute with me.

4. "The Telltale Heart" -- Yes, don't we all want to be reminded what paranoia is like?

5. "Siddhartha" -- Three letters: W, T, and F, followed by a "?" -- Never got this one at all. Way too boring to even get the gist of it.

6. "The Odyssey" -- I sure hope Odysseus hires himself a navigator the next time he makes a voyage. With his sense of direction he might die of old age before he comes back from the next one.

Some of the books listed, I read and I like very much because they made sense and had passion inside build up. The Things They Carried was a great book in 11th and Beowulf was good as well. Night remind me of what I horribly said because people shouldn't be killed off like that.

Reading A Passage To India was a horrible experience. I wish I could find my annotated copy, just to see how my personal notes degenerate from functional, concise bits of relevant info into venom-filled rants on how awful the book was... dear Zod, I hated it.

Given the fact that I ended up doing the GCSE syllabus twice (my teacher in the two years before I did the two-year exam course decided it would be in our best interests to prepare us for it by actually doing it, without getting the certificates at the end. I still find this incredibly infuriating, even sixteen years after the fact), I have had all love for Animal Farm leeched out of me. Studying it four years in a row was about as much fun as chewing glass.

Tess Of The D'Urbervilles made me want to claw my own eyes out, it was so bad (and melodramatic, too). As with A Passage To India, my copy comes complete with notes that get progressively more viciously disparaging as the book goes on.

Maybe I was too hasty in listing Moby Dick as one of the worst books. The truth was that there were so many books I had to read that term that I wasn't able to read it in full. I could not get past the first five pages. Maybe now, under considerably less pressure, I could read it through.

I would have to agree with you, Mr. Sinister. Any book that you have to read four years in row, or over and over for more than one class, can get pretty tedious.

All the stuff for primary school children. . .
Made me hate literature until I was in my teens. . .
I liked writing stories - it's just that the stuff I was given to read was sometimes so dull; I found it insulting.
I had the same issue with bad TV shows and TV ads for kids - I'd be standing up, shouting and bitching. . .