THEME DAY: Required Reading that Shouldn't be Required

[livingshinigami]

First time poster here -
but in honour of today's theme I'd like to dedicate a post to almost every.single.book that I had to read for school during my last 2 years of high school.

Comments

[icanseenow]

Werther was the best book I read in school.:x I hated most others. Except for "We Need To Talk About Kevin".

[elettaria]

They always feed Macbeth to the teenagers in the UK, I think because it's one of the easiest plays to pretend doesn't have any sex in it. It also has some of the densest language Shakespeare wrote, so it just tends to bore the kids to death. I have no idea what the solution actually is for Introducing Shakespeare To Young Minds, but it would probably help if they were less prudish and spent less time frantically scrambling away from anything sexual (which is quite a job in Shakespeare). The one that is particularly odd is A Midsummer Night's Dream, which somehow has the double reputation of being a great book to shove at the 11 year olds (because it's all about fairies dancing in the forest!) and is simultaneously considered by the literary critics to be all about orgies.

[ohmypersephone]

I moved around a lot in high school, so I managed to get stuck with Midsummer what feels like a fair few times. I *love* Shakespeare - I moonlight as theatre director; my boyfriend's a Medieval-and-early-modern-literature-specialist-turned-Shakespearean actor - but I can't say Midsummer's anything near as spectacular as his best work, and if anything might turn students off to Shakespeare. Whereas my senior year Shakespeare elective - Antony & Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, Lear, and Measure for Measure - changed my life

[nyxalinth]

Looking at Dooi, the plot is the last one I expected from the cover! I'd expected some "Olympic skater hopeful chooses between romance and her dreams". Don't judge a book by it's cover, indeed!

[livingshinigami]

There was an ice skater in that book somewhere though. Some mysterious young girl that visited the old boring man on his ship. I didn't care much for neither character, I was just like "eww old man stop drooling over the young red-headed beauty you creep".

[icanseenow]

Ha, they had those ugly book covers in Holland to. But I only when there for a year and got out of the required reading/asked to read other stuff. Thank god.

[livingshinigami]

Haha, they were the same covers (and books) for Belgium and The Netherlands, so your school probably bought the book sets from the same publisher ... as I said in point 1 they obviously didn't bother adapting their list for poor Belgian students, so we had the same list as people in Holland ...

So so lucky that you got out of having to read them though! =P

[elettaria]

So the covers look as if they have been condescendingly aimed at toddlers, while the content was actually too old for the targeted audience? How very clever of them. It sounds like a lot of it was the mid-life crisis genre which quite frankly is boring for most of the people who read it, unless they happen to be having a mid-life crisis of the type covered in the book. My partner has a few of the "middle-aged middle-class Jewish man living in northwest London angsts about his comfortable life" genre on his shelves (non-fiction, supposedly), and all I can think when I encounter them is, "See! This is why I left northwest London!" He's a non-Jewish working-class Scot, I suppose that for him it's escapism or something. Anyway, if you're going to go for the "angsting about this crucial time in your life in a way that no one cares about at any other age", they may as well have given you teenage angst stuff at least, made it bit more relevant.

[livingshinigami]

the mid-life crisis genre

Wow, that term describes exactly what those books were about. Never would've thought of calling them that myself, but it's perfectly accurate! =D

Indeed it was very very mid-life crisis, and I couldn't care less about these characters or their problems. The books for younger students (14-15, the two lower years) were actually the teenage angsty stuff. For some reason at 16-17 they 'upgraded' us to the even more boring adult angsting.

[elettaria]

I also mentioned the Adultery Angst genre in the post about The Great Gatsby. They seem to be very popular genres, probably because an awful lot of writers are middle-aged men with crap sex lives. Admittedly, the Teen Angst genre is alive and kicking as well. The good news is that there are still plenty of writers leftover who are grownups and are not obsessed with married academics who shag their students, or what have you.

[livingshinigami]

Yeah, well, but as far as I'm concerned all those middle-aged sex-obsessed authors can write about whatever the hell they want - but whyyyy do teachers force us to read those books in class?

The thing that bothered me most of all was - if they had just told me to read at least 5 books per year and I was free to choose the books, I would've done that happily and would've really enjoyed required reading.
I know for English we were free to choose our own book - though there were a bunch of short novels available in class (like The Old Man and the Sea) - all the other students chose books with as little pages as possible (mind, English is a third language for us) but I showed up with a 300-page book ...
I loved reading, so there really wasn't any need to shove such mid-life crisis shite down my throat.

LJ seems to give me trouble with commenting ...

[livingshinigami]

Hopefully I haven't completely spammed this thread by now (but if I have I'll delete, for some reason I don't see my comments show up). Let's just try seperate comments instead of hitting 'reply':

hisietari:
the publisher would decide what you read?!
Well one publisher came out with a set of 5 books - different each year - but they weren't necessarily their newest books that they wanted to promote. I do believe these books were real 'good literature'. It was just easiest for the school to force every student to buy those sets of 5, but I never really agreed with that ...

Reading stuff I liked, and reading fiction (opposed to the non-fiction and "educational" fiction I had to read for my classes) was a guilty pleasure I often wouldn't allow to myselfSame here! I always feel guilty if I read something else when I still have unfinished required reading lying around, and I *always* have unfinished required reading lying around! I have the latest book from A Song of Ice and Fire, it's been on my shelf since July 2011 and I still haven't

Re: LJ seems to give me trouble with commenting ...

[tabular_rasa]

I also enjoyed Werther, though I read it on my own and at a rather angsty time in my life. If I were just introduced to it now, I imagine I'd find the protagonist much more annoying.

Re: LJ seems to give me trouble with commenting ...

[livingshinigami]

Haha, yes, well he is annoying, isn't he? =P
I completely understand anyone who says they disliked the book because of Werther's whining, but I kinda enjoyed that over-the-top dramaticness he displayed -