The Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge is hosted by Long and Short Reviews. This week’s topic is: books I had to read in school and didn’t like.
This is actually pretty easy. Not becuase I hated everything we read in school, but because on average, I enjoyed it all. So, when I didn’t care for something, it stuck out. On the bright side, only two books are coming to mind at the moment.
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.
I don’t know what I was honestly supposed to learn from this book because my god did it DRAG on and on. I’m generally a pretty easy to please reader, but good lord, this was bad.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
Now this book I think I might have been to idealistic to embrace but it put me off so much. My senior year English Lit teacher was apalled too, by the way. She could not wrap her head around the fact that I didn’t like it. I would like to reread it now that I’m an adult, however, and see if my opnion has changed any.
Honorable mention: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.
I didn’t like this at all when I originally read it because it seemed so pointless. He gave his everyting to wrangle that fish only to wind up with nothing in the end. Looking back, however, I get it. These are the struggles of our lives. Sometimes, we give and give and give and wind up with nothing but an empty stomach and a headache. So, while I didn’t exactly enjoy the book at the time, I didn’t hate it like I did The Good Earth either.
Before I go, I have to say this much. My kids are 17 and 19 and I’ve been so grateful that they’ve been able to read more modern things like Ready Player One and The Hunger Games, along with other, more classic novels like To Kill a Mockingbird. I think having something the kids can relate to helps them be more eager to actually read.
Nerdy Reader Girl 
We’re total opposites this week! I loved The Good Earth and Brave New World. It’s so interesting to see how two people can have such different opinions of the same book. 🙂
My post.
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That’s good though that we have such differing opinions. 🙂 And as far as Brave New World goes, I think I was much too young and naive at the time I read it. 🙂
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The only thing most people remember about The Good Earth is the wife working in the field, going inside to deliver and then coming back out to work. When I studied Chinese history it told the story of Chinese family cycles. Peasant work hard buy land, children buy more land get wealthy, children wealthy live off money, children sell land, children peasants.
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Interesting and you’re absolutely correct. I think it’s something that should be taught later in high school – I read it my freshman year long before we’d even touched on world history.
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It really does seem like a lot of these reactions are shaped by how we approached the books and what sort of expectations we had going into them — I feel like several of these would be much more enjoyable for students if they were given some idea of what the author was doing before they started the book. (One of the big ones for me is Byron’s Don Juan. I hated that thing the first time I read it. Then I read it again a year later, and suddenly realized that Byron was being sarcastic and… it was a whole different poem from what I remembered. Also, apparently in my head sarcasm wasn’t invented until the mid-1960s? Or something? Like, it literally never occurred to me as a possibility.)
My answer is here: http://nagamakironin.blogspot.com/2019/08/challenge-books-i-read-in-school-and.html
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Exactly this! I get that the teachers are trying to get their students to think for themselves, but most 16 year olds don’t know what they want for dinner, how on earth are they going to dissect a novel written forty years before they were born?
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I tried to read a Brave New World, but it dragged and I gave up. Lol
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Right? How do they expect kids to stay interested in these things? 🙂
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Exactly.
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