Required Reading
As my spring semester is about to begin, I’ve started reading one of the books for my Brit Lit class– Oliver Twist. The book list for the class includes many titles that I feel like I should have read, but never have (Sense and Sensibility, Mrs Dalloway, Heart of Darkness, Picture of Dorian Gray). As much as I would rather be reading a book of my own choice, I do enjoy lit classes; they force me to read books I otherwise would never have picked up. I’m only a few chapters into Oliver Twist, but I’m already liking it more than I thought I would. Of course, every once in a while there’s a Makoika Sisters, which while I haven’t read it personally, my friends who read it for a high school English class four years ago still talk about the trauma it inflicted on them.
What books did you love (or hate) reading in an English or literature class?
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Put me down as one who didn’t like Hemingway, and I read two of his books too (one I picked myself for a project, thinking I needed to give him another shot).
On the other hand, I loved Lord of the Flies. I also liked The Scarlet Letter, and pretty much every Shakespeare play I read in high school and college.
Some I didn’t like the first time around, but liked more when I read them as an adult (The Grapes of Wrath).
I don’t know if it is considered a classic but we had to read “A Tale of Two Cities” and it still has a profound affect on me and that was 40 years ago. In grade school “The Secret Garden” is still close to my heart.
My absolutely favorite required reading goes back to grade school, when we had to read To Kill a Mockingbird. Now the teacher — absolutely awful — almost ruined the book for me. Fortunately, I decided to ignore a lot of what she said, and it has become one of my very favorite books.
I took a lot of lit classes in college, and honestly, nothing ever compared to To Kill a Mockingbird for me. I’m glad I read a lot of what I did, but the one piece that has stuck in my mind is Huis Clos (No Exit) by Camus. I ended up having to read it both in French, and in an English version. I’ve never felt the need to read it again, but it remains vivid, and can invade my thoughts at the oddest times.
Have to say, reading Oliver Twist at school left me with no desire to read Dickens ever again.
I’ve a bit of a theory about it, because I disliked the majority of authors we studied in school. I think a lot of them wrote for adults, and if you’re immature when you study them (and I was), you either don’t engage with them, or engage with them significantly differently that you would as an adult. So while I’d read Pride and Prejudice as a child, and then studied Northanger Abbey as a young teenager, I didn’t see Austen’s charm till I read the books of my own accord in my late teens. At that age, I suddenly realised she was fabulous.
Books I remember hating at school include Lord of the Flies – loathed that book. And while we didn’t study Poe, our Latin teacher read us one of his stories and gave me a complete phobia about being buried alive. So not him either.
Oddly enough, while I don’t remember really liking any of the more classic books we studied, I did enjoy a lot of the poetry – and I don’t really do poetry – and nearly all the plays.
Sorry to hear that xina. I know how you feel. Dr. Lautz was my Dr. Lell. He made joy in literature almost a physical, tangible thing. I was very sad indeed when I learned of his passing.
Back OT: We’ve all commented on books/authors that we are glad we were assigned to read. I won’t lie, there are a few I could have done without. Among them are pretty much anything by Johns Milton, Bunyan and Berryman and George Eliot, St. Joan by G.B. Shaw, Moby Dick, and The Last of the Mohicans.
Just looked up the professor I mentioned on Google and discovered he had died. So, RIP Dr. Lell. You were a fantastic teacher.
OT….sorry
I loved my literature classes from the beginning. However, when I was a freshman in college I had an outstanding professor who made the time in the class fly by because he was (still is) a gifted teacher. When my daughter was looking at colleges we brought her to the college my husband and I attended thinking she may be interested (wasn’t…too small). As we were walking by a lecture hall I recognized his voice. I asked our tour guide if that was Dr. Lell and she said it was. Still going strong after all these years.
Anyway…I loved Hemingway as well. Also, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Leo Tolstoy, DH Lawrence. I can’t remember feeling forced to read anything except maybe Chaucer.
I was a Lit major, so I have always been inclined to read the “classics,” but I may not have read James Joyce if not for Lit classes, and that would have been a shame. I still have to tackle Ulysses, but Dubliners and especially Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were eye opening…affected how I responded to literature and art in general.
My daughter is a junior in high school, attending boarding school. I recently received a text message out of the blue in the middle of the day saying “I love Hemingway.” She was assigned The Sun Also Rises in English class and has fallen very hard for Papa indeed. I was assigned the same book the first time I read Hemingway as a sophomore in college. I liked it but didn’t love it, which is pretty much how I feel about his other work (with the exception of A Moveable Feast, but that is more about how I feel about Paris than about Hemingway.) Anyway, that means that there is not much Hemingway hanging around my house, and DD may never have found one of the loves of her life without English 3AP!
I never liked being forced to do anything either, but there are many (from the English/American list) I ended up liking and have/will read again, so in the end I was glad about being forced to read them: Jane Austen, the Brontës, Edgar Allen Poe, Ray Bradbury, Gerald Durrell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Ray Bradbury, Charles Dickens, Tolkien, PG Wodehouse and, my personal favorite, Daphne du Maurier.
I took a survey course in British Lit too. For Dickens my prof had us read A Christmas Carol (which was great, and gave me a new perspective on the movie adaptations I’ve seen). We also did Mrs Dalloway and Heart of Darkness which went onto my list of more difficult reads to push through, but by far my favorite from that class was actually reading Frankenstein. It was fascinating to me to contrast the original with the pop culture version I know so well, not to mention all the interesting discussions you can have analyzing the themes…
My class also read a bunch of poetry from the Romantics and knocked Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass off my should really read that pile. Sadly we didn’t read any Austen but then there are entire classes devoted just to her stuff available…
Jane, what a great question. I was just thinking about this the other day for whatever reason. I really disliked those classes where they forced you to read certain books. Many of them just didn’t work for me they way I’m sure the teacher wished it (or whoever plots these things.) I’m glad, though, that they do it. Because you never know what you will get from it.
What I do recall enjoying a lot were the books from Edgar Allen Poe. So I guess even back then, there was a bent in me toward the suspense in novels. I loved his stuff and couldn’t get enough of him. Somewhere along the line in my reading life, I abandoned mystery, but have returned to it in full force the last five years or so. Long live Poe (well, at least his books!).