How come high school lit class made me want to burn books? Why are there no good required lit highschool books?
>>8065678
Quality of the books reflect the quality of the people
>>8065678
lmao my HS lit class is dope I get to choose whatever books I like I chose Joyce and Kafka and my teacher thinks im a prodigy
Books I had to read in highschool
Catcher and the Rye
Moby Dick
Old Man and the Sea
Ulysses
Hamlet
Romeo and Juliet
Various poems by Poe
Mocking Bird
Odyssey
Great Gatsby
Each and everyone made me hate literature so much that I've never read a non-textbook after that.
Tell me /lit/; after being raped by shitty books could I ever enjoy reading a book again?
>>8065708
oh yeah and the scarlet letter fuck that book too
I'm both lucky and unlucky in that we read none of the classics in my English classes. We read Night by that Jewish guy, Anthem by Rand, The Things They Carried, Pushing the Bear, Things Fall Apart.
I got into reading when I was a NEET after high school, and the classics blew me away
>>8065678
We read some book about gooks invading Australia and rural Teenage guerrilla fighters.
pretty fun desu.
Hogg was required reading in my grade 9 class.
>>8065708
Maybe one of those isn't great. Either this is bait or you need to grow up. I find it hard to believe anyone had high schoolers read Ulysses though
>>8065708
All of those books are amazing, fuck you anon.
>>8065730
I read this in high school, back when I finished every book I started, and I fucking hated it. I wanted that book to be over so badly. Everytime one of the boring, sitting around parts ended and the kids geared up to go into battle I groaned. I know that sounds weird but I hate YA books that just switch back and forth between slow parts with lots of contemplation to action-packed parts. That was the main reason why I never finished Shade's Children.
>>8065678
>tfw your highschool literature class doesnt read Infinite Jest, like, what are you: a big pleb?
I hated reading in high school and now I literally get paid to study the Greeks
I think a lot of the dullness that comes from reading in high school comes from the fact that teachers never ever talk about funness of reading and instead only talk about the underlying meaning of what the author is trying to say
It doesn't really matter the book, high school students English will make anything miserable as fuck. When we got assigned a book I was actually interested in I'd just read ahead of the schedule and finish it in a week or two, only way I could enjoy it. Reading along with all the plebs and hearing their retarded theories and the teachers banal official interpretation is mind numbing.
>>8065708
I wish they made me read these when I was still young.
It's not the books. It's the setting, the atmosphere, the curriculum, the teaching, the barely visible panties on that cute girl two seats up and to the left.
>>8066542
mostly that last one
>>8066715
When I was in seventh grade there was a girl two years older than me in my class, it was the first time I had seen a thong. I couldn't take my eyes off it. I think I had a boner the entire class. Real distracting.
>muh slavery
>muh Indians
>muh Holocaust
Repeat until sick
This is what happens when jews run your school district. Everything is white guilt
>>8066723
In middle school I'd get boners all the time and it was terrifying. I'd wear baggy pants and big sweaters everyday, even in (read: especially in) summer, because the outfits only got skimpier.
>>8066744
>because the outfits only got skimpier.
There was a resurgence of boner warning when the yoga pants craze hit.
>>8065678
My high school had some pretty good books,desu, maybe its just you.
>In Cold Blood
>Of Mice and Men
>The Great Gatsby
>Brave New World
>The Divine Comedy (only the Inferno)
>>8066763
Conrad?
>Holocaust book
>Slavery book
>Segregation book
>Slavery book
>Holocaust book
>Holocaust book
>Segregation book
>Colonialism book
>Holocaust movie
Rate my self assigned HS reading list:
Count of Monte Cristo
Don Quixote
Toilers of the Sea
Lolita
All Quiet on the Western Front
King Lear
>>8066782
Problem, goyim?
>>8066757
>>8066744
I can't even imagine how hard it must be for kids these days. The attractive girls were all wearing skirts when I was in school. Short colorful ruffled skirts with tube tops that left two inches of belly exposed and no bra beneath.
My school also, because of stupid financial regulations at the time, didn't turn on any sort of air conditioning unless it was over a certain ridiculously high temperature. So girls would be pouring sweat, their collarbones and bellies slick with it. They'd have their legs spread wide, a ruler or pencil sitting firm between them to keep their skirt shut.
A few times I asked to borrow their pencil and they'd hand it to me and it'd be so warm and I'd try my best to be inconspicuous about smelling it.
Some teachers allowed hand-fans, so during some classes, a girl would be waving across her neck and hair with the fan, her smell, all her naturally seductive pheromones, blowing right into your face.
This thread got hot fast.
>>8065942
I have no sympathy for heretics who fall for the poe meme
>>8065678
Very few high school English teachers are lovers of literature. True enthusiasm is infectious, anyone really in love with something can't help but make it inviting and intoxicating.
And if your teacher would just honestly rather not read Shakespeare, so will your students.
I read Les Miserables in 10th grade English. Still my favorite book. Granted, they had us read the abridged version and I was the asshole that always had to be superior so I read the unabridged version instead. One of the few times that worked out for the better.
>>8066916
skirts are actually more arousing than yoga pants because more is left to the imagination
I had some nice experiences in high school literature and some shitty ones. By far the shittiest was when my AP Language teacher had us read books in the span of a month, and the only thing we did with them was take quizzes and tests and didn't sit down to discuss or write about them once. The quizzes were unreasonably hard, too, so you had to read the chapters the night before which screwed up the flow of the book. It was designed to catch people who didn't read but you could still pass quite well with sparknotes.
I had an amazing experience going over Hamlet the year before, though. The teacher is incredibly important in lit classes, and mine sat us down for several school days in a row just to talk about symbolism and allusions in the books we read. It was easy to bullshit your way through, but the lazy students will always find a way so it doesn't matter.
>>8065678
http://lcps.org/cms/lib4/va01000195/centricity/domain/2376/i%20know%20why%20the%20caged%20bird%20cannot%20read.pdf
Good essay on this by francine prose "I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read". She goes after the shitty canon, 'issues' related teaching, symbolism hunting etc
>>8065678
Because in my experience, most english students actually read mostly scifi and fantasy and most teachers only teach because they didn't get the career they really wanted and therefore don't approach it like a person who is in love with stories and characters and wants to show you all these worlds.
>>8067706
idk desu
skirts you see a lot of skin but not form
leggings you see form but no skin
>>8067060
I had the fortune of having at least two very good English teachers who birth respected us as students and wanted us to love lit as much as they did.
I didn't really love it till later, but they did a good job.
>>8069022
both*
Fuck phone keyboards
I don't think it's so much the quality of the books, but the manner in which the class is taught. At least for my by the point we started reading real literature and shit, we were so jaded with the educations system and had pretty much figured out how to pass the class without doing any of the work. Another problem is the time constraints, in senior year we were given Heart of Darkness on monday, and expected to have finished and written a 15 page summary and critique by friday, along with a test on it.
>>8065912
Likewise
>>8069594
the fuck kinda high school did you went?
we had 2 books to read together in class for the whole year
>>8069006
I'd argue that form is more arousing than the flesh
>>8068827
I bet you're a hit at parties.
>>8065678
You went to an American school. That was your problem.
>>8065678
>why are there no good required lit highschool books?
Probably because there are no /lit/ highschoolers. Or at least, not many. I posted here during high school and was a giant asshole to everyone over how much hot shit I knew. All my teachers and peers who actually cared about the class (maybe 1/4) hated me but I felt like such hot shit.
Good books/plays they made me read in high-school
>Of Mice and Men
>Othello
>Macbeth
>Romeo & Juliet
>Catcher in the Rye
These are all good but I didn't like the school's approach to teaching, which consisted of 90% guided reading and 10% interjection for explanations of who's doing what and why, which we would need to memorize to write our exams.
>>8065730
That book is such fucking garbage, just seeing it brought up here is making me angry. I feel like my teachers failed me and everyone else by not only failing to shield us from this shit, but even actively pushing it on us. I think teenagers need to be given more credit. I was reading more complicated books than this when I was 8.
Our school had summer reading and this is what the juniors had to read. YA dystopia that's an obvious cash grab piggybacking off of Hunger Games.
The year before we had to read some Jodi Picoult garbage.
>>8068428
You make it sound like reading a book a month is hard
I read a book every 3-4 days when I took college lit courses and we had discussion and quizzes
>>8065678
>how come
because you're an illiterate.
>>8065678
Things gotta be accessible to everyone there.
>>8066729
I agree.
This was my experience with our forced literature.
We ignored the literary classics and observing great writers and their unique styles of expression.
We focused on holocaust books to make us feel guilty, slave books to let us know white guilt, and so on...
Such a shame.
I am 24 now and would never touch such a victimitus book
I think a lot of it has to do with characters.
The Great Gatsby is a great example of a terrible book for high schoolers. The characters and setting are all unrelatable as hell. The symbolism and subtext of the book are why it's read. But a different book with relatable characters AND literary value should be chosen for high schoolers.
>>8070812
It's not, it's just less enjoyable spread out to last a month. I wish we had read them in the span of a week.
>>8065683
First post worst post
>>8071186
Fucking highschool students, you're all such edgy little shits. No one gives a fuck what you think, you know that right? Gatsby was loved before you got your grubby hands on it, and it'll continue to be loved no matter how many smart ass facebook posts you make.
>>8071203
I'm not in high school. Making high schoolers read it makes no sense though.
>>8071203
>>8068827
My ninth grade English teacher was the opposite of that, she quit her high-paying prestigious job to teach English. Yet she was still pretty bad at it.
>>8066080
I read Catcher in the Rye recreationally as a pre-teen because it was one of the only books I could find in someone's house I had been staying at for a week and enjoyed it.
Then I hit high school and the curriculum shoved half a semester of it down my throat with the other half of the semester devoted entirely to Great Gatsby.
I internally retch whenever I consider reading either book again.
>>8071567
I really find it kind of pathetic that people hold grudges against books. Or music, or movies, or anything. It's fucking stupid. Kids have SHIT opinions, why are you basing your life around what you did and didn't like as a child?
>>8071574
Maybe it's not so much a grudge, as a desire to never read it again? The books are literary greats, there's no denying that.
If you're the type of kid who regularly dropped by the library every other day to get a new book to read, and your class was reading a book that you'd finished twice by the time they even got midway through their first reading, and every single assignment was involving that book, would you not tire of it?
>>8069871
Highschool in upper Idaho, pride of the north baby
For many reasons.
For one, you are being forced to read and you are being graded on your ability to read. Thus in the back of your mind, the phantom thought of "I am being graded on this" lingers and thus your thoughts on matters are bound by the idea that you must arrive at a proper conclusion to receive your passing mark.
Your thoughts are being structured by what you are expected to get from the book and more often than not you will be punished from not arriving at the correct message.
Beyond that, you are being forced to read this book with 30 or so more peers who all have various feelings on the matter and their own interpretations, but are all also being haunted by the looming specter of the all important GRADE.
Even more so your thoughts will be herded by the peer pressure of those in your group and you may receive punishment from them if you try and engage too heavily in analysis because the teacher might simply let you have free time if you all shut your mouths and don't say anything against the grain. They would see your thoughts and feelings choked and strangled for the sake of their own comfort and think nothing of it.
Lastly, nothing kills the enjoyment of a story more than being forced to read at the pace of people who are not engaged. Any class in which class time is utilized with everything reading together aloud is crushing to the soul.
>>8071567
Fucking hated Catcher in the Rye. I read it as an adult in college and I could not bring myself to finish it. I half-assed the test and I still passed that shit.
>>8066788
Enlightened/10
>>8065708
>Moby-Dick
>Ulysses
>high school
I'm having trouble believing you.
>>8072420
Moby dick maybe, but definitely not Ulysses in high school
they made us read one called 'The Siege' about the famine in Leningrad it was fucking bleak
>>8066916
Highschool senior here, I get a nice wank after school every day.
>>8065730
I enjoyed
>>8066916
W E W L A D
>>8072511
While you're jerking off your curved little cock CHAD is getting his HUGE DICK absolutely SUCKED DRY by your oneitis. He's not crazy about her but she kept offering, so he thought WHY NOT? When you're CHAD and you have an ABSOLUTELY PERFECT FACE with the HEIGHT and PHYSIQUE to match who cares what you do? It'll all work out 11/10, let's go eat some pizza.
>>8065678
I managed to get Barbara Kingshitter's Poisonwood Bible taken off our reading list :^)
That was senior year though. Junior year I had this chill af bald teacher in AP lit, and we only read Hamlet, Fences, Song of Myself, and My Ántonia the entire year. We were supposed to read Godot too but baldy took too long discussing Hamlet. He also had a dope taste in poetry.
>>8067706
Skirts are definitely far more arousing because of this reason and also because you know there's nothing besides a thin layer of panties covering her pussy, and the small chance that you might get the chance to look up it once in a while
>>8071186
idk, personally I thought Catcher in the Rye was the most relatable thing I'd ever read and I loved it but most people I've talked to seem to have hated it.
>excerpts from the Odyssey
>The Hunger Artist by Kafka
>Inferno
>Oedipus Rex and Antigone
>Siddhartha
>The Prince
>Edgar Allan Poe
>Hamlet and Macbeth
Took honors/AP except in 12th grade because I did a ton of drugs and got burnt out. Attending college and doing just fine now though.
My world literature teacher was GOAT but I think he hated my guts because I was an edgelord 15 year old and I probably gave off Columbine-kid vibes. One of the few classes that changed my outlook on my life and certainly improved my reasoning and intellectual capabilities. My ideal for teachers.
My American lit teacher was some boring old lady. I still want to strangle that bitch for calling on the retard class to read and consequently butcher writers like Eliot or Poe and being unable to blow them the fuck out when they gave cliché criticisms like "durr why is this important" (pic related, mfw). She gave us corny assignments like "this is a quote from some guy who survived the Holocaust, what do you think?" or "what is the American Dream to you?".
I had a crush on my early-40s British Literature teacher, she was knowledgable and gave off motherly vibes. She was super-feminist but she still respected the greats like Yeats, Shakespeare and such. Fucking her while she quotes Canterbury Tales will continue to be a fantasy of mine.
HS english got me into shakespeare, other than that it was trite
>>8065688
In my grade 12 year I did a novel study project on Ulysses. My teacher thought I had aspergers because I didn't really care about school and had bad grades
>>8070868
>reading about slavery, a hugely important part of America's history, means you're being controlled by jewish overlords to feel white guilt
/pol/ logic, everyone
>>8077264
he/she can read *
>>8072449
I read moby dick (in translation) in primary school
I probably didn't get any of the deep literary shit, but moby dick is quite doable as a high schooler
>>8065678
Maybe you just have bad taste in books...
>>8077264
Sure, they could, but no high school class is going to put Ulysses in the curriculum, because it's just going to be way above what the students will be able to follow, as most of them aren't going to be active readers, let alone interested enough to get through it or analyse it properly. Same with Moby Dick, though on a lesser scale.
But yeah, no way a high school class would ever set Ulysses as mandatory reading. It's very unlikely they'd set Moby Dick either.
My high school english class was reading fucking nigger poems and books about how bad whitey is. Also of mice and men.
>>8065678
My high school English class options:
UAS Biblical Literature introduces students to the extraordinary writers of ancient Israel. We constantly remind ourselves that the Hebrew authors, however much separated from us by time and culture, were nonetheless human beings trying to make sense of the world and themselves. Their hopes, fears, ambitions and observations are not nearly as remote from us as they appear on first reading. By recognizing the Bible as a collection of works in varied forms, gathered over a 1,000-year period from oral and literary sources, we can begin to read this unique and exciting rendering of the human story. (1/2 credit)
UAS American Romanticism delves into a body of literature that emerges from 19th century New England but concerns itself with the “true places” that aren't written down on any map. We’ll study the distinct styles, motifs, themes, problems and ideas in Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, and the poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. While these works may seem, at first, to have little in common, we’ll endeavor to find the threads that connect them as they lead us into unmappable mysteries: life’s origin, meaning, and destination; the vast universe outside of us and the vast universe within us. We readers—like our authors and their characters – will explore such mysteries, as well as the limits of our ability to understand them. (1/2 credit)
UAS Global Literature: Nigeria explores the literature and cultural forms of a nation with remarkable diversity: languages (Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, English, among many others), ethnicities (more than 250), and religious belief systems. This region hosted some of humanity’s earliest civilizations, its recent history includes colonialism and civil war, and Nigeria is now the largest economic power on the continent of Africa – these factors contribute to the content and complexity of its literature. As we dive into the diverse perspectives of this nation, we will read works by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole and Chris Abani, as well as other artists whose works exist outside of conventional publishing formats. Through these literary voices we will listen to how some Nigerian writers dramatize and express their inner and outer landscapes; how they inherit and integrate the legacies of their past; and how they view themselves against the broader backdrop of other African nations and the increasingly globalized world. (1/2 credit)
>>8081784
UAS Harlem: Veils of Identity Considering the complexities of multiracial identity, our class will explore the proliferation of Black literary and artistic achievements in America within the White gaze. We will examine the generational tensions, interracial exchanges and class controversies related to the expressions of “high” and “popular” culture, "passing" for white, and questions of racial representation and racial construction during the Roaring Twenties in Harlem, New York. We will also examine the systems of artistic organization in literary publications of the times and their coming to terms with DuBois’ idea of “double consciousness” and living "within and without the Veil" of racial identity. Texts may include The Souls of Black Folk by WEB Du Bois, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson, the novels Quicksand and Passing, both by Nella Larsen, The Harlem Renaissance Reader for poetry, and various essays and short stories in the course reader. (1/2 credit)
UAS Joyce and Woolf focuses on the early modern period in the writings of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, both of whom contend with the quest for meaning and connection in an increasingly dissonant, complicated world. Joyce investigates the problematic nature of identity (against the complicated history of Ireland) and the beauty and inadequacy of language. Woolf, equally concerned with the problem of affirmation, invents a "form for a new novel" to express and explore her sense of the tension inherent in a life shadowed by death. We will read short stories and two novels by each author, including Joyce's Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. (1/2 credit)
UAS Russian Literature: Dostoevsky and Chekhov introduces students to the rich literary tradition of 19th century Russia through two of its great writers. We spend several weeks on Fyodor Dostoevsky's big novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Then we read about 20 short stories and two plays by Anton Chekhov. Assignments and discussion emphasize close reading and informed interpretation of a body of literature that provokes us to entertain questions and problems whose sources lie in the philosophical foundations of existence and the complexity of human character. Like the writers, we are most concerned with the intersections. (1/2 credit)
>>8081788
UAS Faulkner introduces students to the tragic and lyrical vision at the heart of William Faulkner’s best and most difficult novels and stories. Faulkner writes about the American South – the parochial anxieties and legacies and contradictions of the “Lost Cause” culture – but also about the moral calamities intrinsic to southern (and, by extension, American) history, chiefly but not uniquely racism and slavery. A deft storyteller, as well as a searching and profound philosopher, Faulkner lures us through the troubled waters of our nation’s past as a way of attending to the less circumscribed domain we call the human condition. The course features the novels The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, the novella The Bear and 10 short stories. (1/2 credit)
UAS Poetry: Form and Meaning uncovers some of the mystery in reading and analyzing poetry by exploring a variety of poetic forms, from traditional sonnets to experimental performance art. The goal of this course is to engage in active study of the exciting and complex worlds that poems create. We'll investigate the freedom found in structure and the limitations of working without meter and rhyme. We'll write critically about poetry and honing our skills of poetic analysis; at the same time, we will grapple with the challenge of writing our own poems. Readings may include poems by William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, e. e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Carson, Michael Ondaatje, Sharon Olds, Derek Walcott and many others. (1/2 credit)
>>8065678
My HS English literature syllabus introduced me to Henry James, LP Hartley, and Chinua Achebe, that I can think of. I'd already started reading Shakespeare. For Latin, we read Catullus, Ovid, and Vergil. So I can't complain.
>>8066916
good post
>>8065708
You're right about R&J, Mockingbird, Gatsby, and arguably special-snowflake-boy-fucks-his-little-sister book
The books one reads at school are in a weird middle ground where they aren't usually "exciting" but the concepts behind them are almoat insultingly simple. I remember being asked by my teacher how classism was represented in Life of Galilei and thinking she was fucking with me.
>>8075440
Upon inspection, she might have been right.
I'm here, after all.
My high school classes were great. There were a couple books I didn't like much, My Antonia and Scarlet Letter come to mind, but we got to read a lot of stuff that I really enjoyed: Huck Finn, Frankenstein, Grendel, Beloved, Heart of Darkness, As I Lay Dying, and Great Expectations.
>>8065708
Given an opportunity I would break your spine.
>>8073058
>Hamlet
>Fences
>Song of Myself
>My Ántonia
10/10 right there lad, I envy you
From "Why Read the Classics?" by Italo Calvino:
>In other words, to read a great book for the first time in one’s maturity is an extraordinary pleasure, different from (though one cannot say greater or lesser than) the pleasure of having read it in one’s youth. Youth brings to reading, as to any other experience, a particular flavor and a particular sense of importance, whereas in maturity one appreciates (or ought to appreciate) many more details and levels and meanings. We may therefore attempt the next definition:
>2) We use the word “classics” for those books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them.
>In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, owing to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s “instructions for use,” and inexperience in life itself. Books read then can be (possibly at one and the same time) formative, in the sense that they give a form to future experiences, providing models, terms of comparison, schemes for classification, scales of value, exemplars of beauty—all things that continue to operate even if the book read in one’s youth is almost or totally forgotten. If we reread the book at a mature age we are likely to rediscover these constants, which by this time are part of our inner mechanisms, but whose origins we have long forgotten. A literary work can succeed in making us forget it as such, but it leaves its seed in us. The definition we can give is therefore this:
>3) The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.
>There should therefore be a time in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth. Even if the books have remained the same (though they do change, in the light of an altered historical perspective), we have most certainly changed, and our encounter will be an entirely new thing.
>>8065683
Thus desu
>>8071186
I guarantee Fitz is ten times more relatable than whatever smut you jerk off to on a Zimbabwean farming board
Because it's propaganda rather than literature.
>>8066916
That's just because girls in middle school are way too erotic.
>>8070868
>We focused on holocaust books to make us feel guilty
uh... what? Do you feel guilty cause you're a stormtard? They're just novels you fucking idiot, you shouldn't be getting real world attachments you fucking retard
