Literally any book that you now dislike due to school. This also applies to other literature styles as well.
Mine is The Hunger Games. I had to read it las year in school and it drove me insane. We started doing the novel study in early February and didn’t finish until May. I finished the book in less than two weeks, so I was pretty much just reading personal books all through English class for close to two months.
It’s not even like we had to analyze it super intensely. It was projects like ‘Make a playlist for a character of your choice’ and we had vocabulary tests every week, that were a joke. It was multiple choice for words like quest and forage. I know that English wasn’t everyone’s first language but come on.
I didn’t even like the book that much in the first place, so all of this was just adding to the misery.
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omg, can’t count them all! The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, A Separate Peace, … As an adult I realize they are excellent books, but as a kid they just drove me nuts with boredom. The problem was the reading lists (this is back in the 70’s) were not relavant. I couldn’t relate to these books. It wasn’t until I was in college and beyond that I learned to love reading again.
I will not say about novels because I liked most of them and would have read them even if they were not in the curriculum. But regarding poetry, school definitely made me hate it Instead of introducing me smoothly to some of the greatest poets, what it did is taking a poem of 10 lines and stretching it to a month of analysis of each syllable of the said poem. I had to reach 30 to open a poetry book again, and thankfully this time I appreciated it fully.
I wouldn’t say ruined but I used to read for fun and being told what to read and how made it feel like a task, but it soon vanished after i joined a boarding school, there was little to distract me and i found myself excited with all the books we were assigned
School didn’t ruin any books for me. Sometimes analysing them was a slog, but I love reading and I liked the variety of books we read over the years. Jean Valjean, Cue for Treason, Lord of the Flies… Some of them I’ve gone back and re-read again.
The opposite for me. I had to read Watership Down in Year 7 and it came in a year of personal tragedy. It really helped me escape my reality and, while I don’t think I did that well in the assignments for the book (can’t recall, but did pretty badly at school that year), I loved the book enough to buy my own copy and have regularly reread it over the years, including quite recently. I still love it and would be happy for it to be the last book I ever read when that day comes.
To kill a mockingbird
Instead of reading the book like a normal human being we had to highlight and analyze paragraphs of each chapter of the fucking book. So my copy has a fuck ton of post-it notes. Instead of enjoying the fucking story I was too focused on finding the right sentence to highlight
Fuck you Mrs. Brown
I simply can’t do assigned reading. I took a Black Hstory class which I read about on my own time… Hell nah. I couldn’t stay awake for a few pages.
fahrenheit 451! though i fully believe that had i picked up that book out of my own free will, i would have hated it just as much. if you had to pick a dystopian, there are so many better examples to choose from
I have gotten over a lot of the school taint in books, and the Scarlet Letter and the Awakening are still boring regardless.
sorry… “relevant”