I actually loved The Old Man and the Sea. I stayed home on a Saturday night to read it in high school. (Yeah, I was a weird one.) I never finished Huck Finn. My English teacher mother gave me the Cliff's Notes the morning of my test on it so I wouldn't fail. LOL.
I actually find Brave New World fascinating, but it's been a struggle for me to read it for whatever reason.
Reading The Awakening by Kate Chopin/Chopan in high school was miserable. I failed the test because I refused to bow down and write an essay on how she was making a feminist and heroic choice to swim out into the darn ocean and drown herself when she had 2 kids. I don't care if you don't love your husband and you feel trapped you don't kill your darn self when there are kids that need you. She should have sucked it up, shacked up with her poor(er) lover and dealt with it. Yes- over 10 years later and I am still irrationally mad at that book.
Reading The Awakening by Kate Chopin/Chopan in high school was miserable. I failed the test because I refused to bow down and write an essay on how she was making a feminist and heroic choice to swim out into the darn ocean and drown herself when she had 2 kids. I don't care if you don't love your husband and you feel trapped you don't kill your darn self when there are kids that need you. She should have sucked it up, shacked up with her poor(er) lover and dealt with it. Yes- over 10 years later and I am still irrationally mad at that book.
I'm curious - did you fail because you refused to write anything at all,, or did you fail because you wrote an essay about how she was a douche?
Reading The Awakening by Kate Chopin/Chopan in high school was miserable. I failed the test because I refused to bow down and write an essay on how she was making a feminist and heroic choice to swim out into the darn ocean and drown herself when she had 2 kids. I don't care if you don't love your husband and you feel trapped you don't kill your darn self when there are kids that need you. She should have sucked it up, shacked up with her poor(er) lover and dealt with it. Yes- over 10 years later and I am still irrationally mad at that book.
I'm curious - did you fail because you refused to write anything at all,, or did you fail because you wrote an essay about how she was a douche?
I failed because I wrote about how abandoning your chosen adult responsibilities was not honorable and how running away from hard decisions was the easiest and not most difficult decision to make. I am sure it wasn't the best written essay in the world, but my 17 year old self was PISSED at this crap. Especially coming from an all-girls Catholic high school. No divorce, no abortions but just go kill yourself in the ocean. Yup, that's a good way out of it.
Post by lyssbobiss, Command, B613 on Jun 22, 2012 10:45:32 GMT -5
Oh Jesus, anything by Thomas Hardy. Eat a dick, you lunatic. Fuck right the fuck off. And for fluff, of course I'm going 50 Shades of Kiss my Ass but also I read the memoir Bloom, by Kelle Hampton, and I wanted to like it. I did. She seems sweet and all, but the book made me so crazy it took 4 months to finish it. Every other page was some moment of clarity and deep sadness and loss and then clarity, lather, rinse, repeat, barf. Edited for clarity!
"This prick is asking for someone here to bring him to task Somebody give me some dirt on this vacuous mass so we can at last unmask him I'll pull the trigger on it, someone load the gun and cock it While we were all watching, he got Washington in his pocket."
Real book - Wuthering Heights. I've tried and just, no. Not happening. Trash book - Twilight. Read the first one and then read the wikipedia entries to find out the rest of the trilogy.
ETA - Oh and Bel Canto. It dragged and then bam! Total WTF just happened there?
I failed because I wrote about how abandoning your chosen adult responsibilities was not honorable and how running away from hard decisions was the easiest and not most difficult decision to make. I am sure it wasn't the best written essay in the world, but my 17 year old self was PISSED at this crap. Especially coming from an all-girls Catholic high school. No divorce, no abortions but just go kill yourself in the ocean. Yup, that's a good way out of it.
I hatehatehated it when teachers knocked the grade for writing a different perspective (i.e. not the lens they used in class) on a book, particularly in college when they kept nagging at "finding your voice" and "looking at the material creatively."
As an English major, it is hard to pinpoint a worst, so many to choose from A Seperate Piece was pretty awful, also Lord of the Flies. I think trying to push through Beowulf may have been the most godawful reading experience I've had.
Oh, I also so badly wanted to like The Brothers Karamazov, I've tried picking it up every year for the past five and I just can't do more than a chapter or two.
I'm curious - did you fail because you refused to write anything at all,, or did you fail because you wrote an essay about how she was a douche?
I failed because I wrote about how abandoning your chosen adult responsibilities was not honorable and how running away from hard decisions was the easiest and not most difficult decision to make. I am sure it wasn't the best written essay in the world, but my 17 year old self was PISSED at this crap. Especially coming from an all-girls Catholic high school. No divorce, no abortions but just go kill yourself in the ocean. Yup, that's a good way out of it.
I cannot express how much I hate the concept of failing someone for their POV rather than on how they wrote the essay or how well they advocated for their POV.
I failed because I wrote about how abandoning your chosen adult responsibilities was not honorable and how running away from hard decisions was the easiest and not most difficult decision to make. I am sure it wasn't the best written essay in the world, but my 17 year old self was PISSED at this crap. Especially coming from an all-girls Catholic high school. No divorce, no abortions but just go kill yourself in the ocean. Yup, that's a good way out of it.
I cannot express how much I hate the concept of failing someone for their POV rather than on how they wrote the essay or how well they advocated for their POV.
Ditto. That's why I asked. I was hoping you pulled a 17 year old snit fit and refused to write the essay (like I did with my 11th grade history class and our essay assignment on dropping the bomb). But no...your teacher was an ass.
I have a vendetta against english teachers who do stuff like that. MH had the same teacher two years in a row, and she did shit like that all the damn time, and I really truly blame her for beating the love of reading out of him. He used to read when he was a kid. Doesn't anymore. Her fault.
lazy bitch.
(I base this assessment on what his parents have told me - not just straight from his biased view. He is a good writer so i refuse to believe that she was failing his essays on their lack of technical merits) And yes, I've chatted with my IL's about MH's high school english classes. I'm weird.
The worst book I ever read was actually CEP-related. Let me paint a picture: I was about to go on a long trip, so I downloaded a bunch of free Amazon books. That was my first mistake. I like politics, so I figured "The Last Election" sounded kinda interesting.
Except. No. It's the worst book ever written.
It's about a president who won the U.S. election in 2008 on a platform of hope and change. His mom is African. His name . . . is Bonsam.
And he's a megalomaniacal narcissistic killer. He believes it is his destiny to win re-election in 2012, so he murders the Democratic primary challenger. Bonsam orchestrates a fake assassination attempt against himself, and starts race-riots in Detroit (including blowing up a large part of downtown Detroit) to garner political points. And . . . he's obsessed with the Mayan prophecies about 2012 and the end of the world.
I hate to spoil the story, but in the end Bonsam murders a bunch of secret service agents with a machine gun, steals the nuclear codes, and blasts the world into a nuclear holocaust, killing all life on the planet. It turns out the Mayan prophecies about a great evil appearing in 2012 were about crazy ol' Bonsam.
The worst book I ever read was actually CEP-related. Let me paint a picture: I was about to go on a long trip, so I downloaded a bunch of free Amazon books. That was my first mistake. I like politics, so I figured "The Last Election" sounded kinda interesting.
Except. No. It's the worst book ever written.
It's about a president who won the U.S. election in 2008 on a platform of hope and change. His mom is African. His name . . . is Bonsam.
And he's a megalomaniacal narcissistic killer. He believes it is his destiny to win re-election in 2012, so he murders the Democratic primary challenger. Bonsam orchestrates a fake assassination attempt against himself, and starts race-riots in Detroit (including blowing up a large part of downtown Detroit) to garner political points. And . . . he's obsessed with the Mayan prophecies about 2012 and the end of the world.
I hate to spoil the story, but in the end Bonsam murders a bunch of secret service agents with a machine gun, steals the nuclear codes, and blasts the world into a nuclear holocaust, killing all life on the planet. It turns out the Mayan prophecies about a great evil appearing in 2012 were about crazy ol' Bonsam.
Seriously. Worst. Book. Ever.
This is HILARIOUS! Was it written by a fifteen year old Tea Partier?
I don't know if I can quantify worst book ever, but I really hated Running with Scissors, mostly because I think the author is absolutely full of shit and his writing sucked. I also hated Middlesex.
Real - Watership Down, The Pearl Funsies - Daughter of Fortune and Blackwood Farm/Blood Canticle. I am BEYOND pissed that Anne Rice found Jesus and fucked up the ending of the vampire chronicles all b/c she didn't feel like writing about them anymore. And she pulled in the Mayfair witches in that shit too and just took a dump on all of her works the prior 20 years.
Those bunnies are awesome and I don't think we can be internet friends anymore.
As for the anne rice thing, I will now take comfort in the fact that I never got around to reading the last few books.
I HATED Life of Pi. It wasn't poorly written, it just enraged me.Also Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Ugh.
So I guess you won't be seeing the movie when it comes out this summer..... I didn't really like it either.
I didn't even know they were making it into a movie, but no. Definitely not. I'm still angry with that book and everyone who raved about how amazing it was.
Did you have to read that in school? We read it in 7th grade and I hated it. Made me hate Steinbeck for ever after.
I also hated Siddhartha, which I read in 9th grade. I probably should read it again because it might just have been too difficult, even though it was in honors Social Studies.
Oh, and I'll add that I hate things like the DaVinci Code, but that's just popular fiction, IMO.
This is HILARIOUS! Was it written by a fifteen year old Tea Partier?
Maybe I'll just let this Amazon review do the talking. . . "I freely admit that when I read a book heavy in politics I find myself trying to figure out the political leanings of the author. I know it doesn't really matter but I still do it, and many times I can peg a definite lean one way or another. Mr. Carrigan, however, did not let anything show. The story was a very good example of the impartial narrarator [sic]."
Sure, Bonsam and Obama happen to both be biracial, fans of "hope and change," won presidential elections in 2008, have goofy VPs, married with two kids, and sure they're both former Senators from Illinois . . . but, see, Bonsam's MOM was African, and Bonsam has two BOYS, so clearly it's impartial.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom. 1000+ pages of sand, colonialism, and veiled sadomasochistic tendencies. I had to read it for a freshman writing course and wanted to hurl it across the room.
I never finished "Hard Times" sophomore year of high school because it was just too brutally boring.
I had to read "A Nietzsche Reader" in high school and hated every second of it. I'm pretty sure I would read it with more nuance and understanding now, but the parts I could even begin to understand made me believe this guy was just a delusional, pompous megalomaniac.
Real - Watership Down, The Pearl Funsies - Daughter of Fortune and Blackwood Farm/Blood Canticle. I am BEYOND pissed that Anne Rice found Jesus and fucked up the ending of the vampire chronicles all b/c she didn't feel like writing about them anymore. And she pulled in the Mayfair witches in that shit too and just took a dump on all of her works the prior 20 years.
I just stopped reading the vampire books at that point. I like to remeber the good times Anne and I had.