Required reading

[supergee]

11 Classics we hate [LitHub]

Comments

[supergee]

I liked The Sun Also Rises (but haven’t looked at in 60 years) & didn’t think Animal Farm and Moby Dick were that bad.

[weofodthignen]

Yeah this list was clearly intended to provoke discussion about personal taste :-) It's (to me) an interesting testament to what this particular group of Americans think everybody in America has been forced to read, or hasn't considered that they may be unusual in having been forced to read. So from the perspective of a former college comp teacher who didn't do high school in the US, it's an interestingly slanted list :-)

I would never have put Wuthering Heights on such a list, but then I'm surprised an American class would read that in high school. And aghast that anybody but an English major would be required to read Pamela. I'm also sad that US schools continue to force-feed Hemingway and Melville, but not surprised; after all British schools hammer away at Dickens, who was paid by the word and is playing emotional piano keys that have relocated, and Shakespeare, whose stuff wasn't even intended to be read, as well as the shared bad choice of Animal Farm. I'm kind of glad to see the rising tide of disapproval of Hemingway's stylistic quirks, though I didn't mind reading his novels. (We had to read The Old Man and the Sea in high school, a peculiar experience in a London girls' school. We also had to read Wuthering Heights; the main problems there were the dialect—I was the only one in the class who could understand much of it, and I never liked dialect/accents in novels—and the love stuff, which is probably what the reviewer is talking about as romanticism. Something there about adolescents being embarrassed by frankly steamy stuff in class that educators should probably take note of.) The novels I was surprised not to see were The Great Gatsby and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I am entirely sure The Catcher in the Rye is a horrendously boring piece of dreck, though this particular review makes me wonder how the writer would find The Sorrows of Young Werther by comparison. Much better writer, similar self-absorbed young man perspective. I've never read Moby Dick, so it may just possibly be as boring as A Tale of Two Cities (which I've made several attempts at, never getting past page 2), but as for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, suck it up. What I would get banned if I could is none of these, it's Pride and Prejudice and absolutely anything by Henry James. (At least Austen was an admirable person, but being forced to read and be tested on her stuff is probably responsible for more reflexive loathing of women's novels than even Twilight. Henry James has absolutely no redeeming feature and should have been thrown in a dungeon for what he did to English style, alone. Even George Eliot I can read the way I take cod liver oil. Henry James, it's indecent even to speedread what he vomited onto the page.)

[minoanmiss]

The Great Gatsby and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

For some reason people think they like _The Great Gatsby_, and since Americans FINALLY realized _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ is anti-racist, putting it on such a list would stir up trouble. (I personally love _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ but I can see how many people wouldn't for many reasons.)

[supergee]

The Great Gatsby would definitely be on my list.

[minoanmiss]

What even WAS that? decades on I still don't know why I had to waste my time reading it.

[mrissa]

playing emotional piano keys that have relocated

yessssssss this exactly this

[firecat]

I didn't read Moby Dick in school, which maybe explains why I like it. When I got around to reading it, the chapters on whales delighted me because I recognized a fellow geek in the author.

[supergee]

Those whale-fi writers aren’t good enough to write real books, so they have to put in expository lumps—blubbery ones.

[cmcmck]

Well, I have to admit to loving six of those. The other four I haven't actually read.

[sturgeonslawyer]

H'mmm. Read four of these, loved three, barely remember Catcher in the Rye what I read when I was about sixteen, which is more years ago than I care to think about.

Hemingway I simply can't read. I've tried.

[supergee]

Catcher should be read at 16. I was a couple of years older, but immature, and a few years after that, outgrew it.