Reminds me of the nightmares I had while reading Lord of the Flies.

They made you read that too, huh?
Yay universal Canadian Education!

*hated that book, also, Great Gatsby*

They made you read that too, huh?
Yay universal Canadian Education!

*hated that book, also, Great Gatsby*

I hated both of those books.

Edit: ...that was my 10,000th post.  Damn.

It's horrible, but you learn a lot.

Gatsby was so boring and pointless =/

Haven't read Lord of the Flies yet, but I kind of wanted to at one point. But everyone says it's really bad.

Not everyone. i think it's a great book, and should, at the least, be familiar just because it was such a huge influence on literature, and is referenced enough it's a cultural literacy issue.

I didn't mind Gatsby, but loathed Moby Dick.

Wow, I never read Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby or Moby Dick in school.

The only books I remember reading were The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World and 1984.

I remember parts of the Illiad and the Odyssey. I'm not sure we read those in their entirety. The was also a lot of random bits of greek mythology, much to my mother's dismay.

Oh, and of course we also had to endure some Shakespeare. I fucking hated Romeo and Julliette. The Tempest was tolerable and the only thing I remember about Macbeth was getting to watch a movie version after we read it and our english teacher letting us repeatedly rewind the part where the beheaded head bounced down the stairs.

We read The Stranger, Romeo and Juliette, The Scarlett Letter, and Bridge to Terabithia.  All those other books that you guys were forced to read, I read on my own and for the most part enjoyed, though I never could bring myself to actually finish Lord of the Flies.

My least fav school read was Ivanhoe.  Ugh.

I enjoyed Dante's Inferno (and also Purgatorio and Paradisio), just remember that 1) it's been translated from early 14th-century Italian, and 2) Dante made a whole lot of jokes and references about people who were alive at that time - not all of whom are remembered today.  A lot of people I know who've read it were turned off by the archaic style and/or confused by the references.  I say give it a try, especially if you can find a copy illustrated with the woodcuts of Gustave Doré.

Larry Niven's retelling of Inferno is really good, too, and easier for a lot of people to get into.

You really need to have a footnoted version to enjoy Dante's Inferno, because of the number of time-sensitive cultural references and in-jokes. They're terrific if you have any idea who he's talking about... you'll still get about half of them if you know classical literature, because he uses characters from Greek and Roman history and mythology, as well as Biblical history... but you won't get all the bits about medieval characters, especially about Dante's own contemporaries. You can't, as they say, tell the players without a program.

I find that reading Niven's Inferno first helps. It sets the stage, and you'll get the twentieth century references, which are made the same way Dante made his. There's a Niven/Pournelle sequel, too -- Escape from Hell -- it updates the story into the twenty-first century. Hell is many things... apparently trying to redesign the NYC World Trade Center is one of them.

Never read Ivanhoe. Is it worth it for people who aren't taking English? Or should I just catch the movie?

Bridge to Terebithia is awesome, and that goes double if you're a fan of Narnia and similar stories. Recommended even without an English class.

Old Yeller struck me as masochism.

We liked Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade English because they let us watch the sixties version... with a (tastefully shot) nude love scene. Racy stuff for teenagers in the Deep South in the early nineties.

Animal Farm is really only enjoyable if you study it in parallel with the real history being allegorically described. As an actual story it's loathesome; but it's meant to be, because the real point is to make you understand (and loathe) the real people he's actually talking about. The last movie adaptation updated the story with one more scene... the exiled animals returning once Napoleon's regime has collapsed of its own weight. Just like the real one did.

But none of you know pain until you're forced to read a Faulkner novel in its entirety. Every Mississippian has to do so to graduate high school, since he's the only Nobel laureate the state has yet produced. As I Lay Dying is pure pain in Roman characters, and I dare anyone to say otherwise.

There will come soft rains by Ray Bradbury. One of my favorites, too.