Worst Book You've Read for School

[Count Igor]

Regeneration...
*shudder*

 

[Steven McDriverson]

Though there's nothing inherently wrong with the book, The Great Gatsby pissed me off when I realized that it was a bunch of rich people creating their own problems and then complaining about them...Wait a minute, OMG Great Gatsby is the 1920s' The Hills.

Also Fahrenheit 451 pisses me off. Actually most of Ray Bradbury's distopic works piss me off. Shame too, because I love Something Wicked This Way Comes

 

[Summerspeak]

The Summer Holiday.
365 pages of "Nothing", I don't understand how you can write a book in which nothing happens in the plot. Oh boy, did that book turn me brain dead.

 

[Fraught]

Mmm, my teacher is awesome in the way that he lets us choose the books we want to read, but one of the only books he's ever made us read, is the one I didn't really like. It was Little Prince by...whatever that France fucker's name was.

It wasn't really that atrociously bad, but it was just boring, in my opinion. Also, the whole book was supposed to be a string of allegories, but I thought it wasn't clever in any way. Allegories integrated into a coherent, believable story would've been far more impressive, rather than the bullshit that was in that book.

 

[Hellgate]

Quo Vadis ;p i had to read thou this whole peace of shit when i was in the 6th grade

 

[Crystal Cuckoo]

Jane Eyre. The only book I didn't finish because I could not stand it (and I read Northanger Abbey after that). Yes, I know it's a feminist text, yes, it is (fairly) well written, but Christ she's uninteresting.

 

[Aardvark Soup]

For some reason I really disliked Catch-22, but luckily I could swap that one for The Mosquito Coast, which was great. Unfortunaly, for my Dutch reading list, I had no choice but to read a 1900 called The Hidden Force by Louis Couperus. It was AWFUL.

I read pretty quickly so usually I just finish boring books as fast as possible but I just found it unbearable something only happened every five pages, and with something happening I mean someone speaking one single line of dialogue. The rest of the book solely consists of describing Indonesian scenery and some vague supernatural crap.

The bible

Actually, shakespeare was worse than the bible. I remember covering a different shakespeare book every year for english in highschool. Many of my classmates had poor writing skills, bad spelling, bad grammar, bad punctuation, and weak vocabulary. I found it very frustrating to witness the school system focus on shakespeare when students needed to learn proper english language skills. IMO covering shakespeare is not an appropriate use of class time. The goal of highschool english instruction should be to improve written and oratory skills in modern english. The language style and format used in shakespeare is irrelevant.

Schools shouldn't let you read Shakespeare to begin with. Considering he was a playwright it's far more logical to watch plays or movies based on his work. Adapting a Shakespeare play to a novel (even though generally not much is adapted and you're just reading the transcript of the play) is like adapting a video game to film. It just doesn't work.

 

[Sporky111]

The Bean Trees. Ugh, it was so long and boring. I mean, from a critical standpoint it was a decent book, I can admit. But damn, was it ever dull.

 

[feather240]

Absolutely, undeniably, and extremely emphatically: The Scarlet Letter. The worst book ever written. Dear God that was awful.

You sir, I admire. That book was absolutely horrid, the symbolism in it was downright pretentious if nothing else.

...and yet my teachers seam to enjoy that. I feel like a sell out when I write it though.

 

[AndyVale]

Anyway, I do a literature degree so I read at least one book a week. I'd rather talk about the favourites

Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange (It's a real skill that he could make the language so understandable, by the end of the book you could get all the slang despite it never being explained.)

Question: What exactly is your opinion of A Clockwork Orange? It seems from your post that you're mentioning it among books you hate, but you didn't actually say your opinion of the book, only that you thought Burgess was a skilled writer.

I thought it was an excellent book. I listed a few that I didn't like, then I said ones that I had to read at school/uni that I did like. Thought I made it obvious, but I suppose it does look a little ambiguous.

 

[bleepbloopsheep]

Moby dick

good God it nearly killed me

 

[Spencer Petersen]

Fahrenheit 451
Im sorry to any fans but I really could not get immersed in any way in that story, we read 1984 that same year and the superiority of Orwell's work over Bradbury's was astonishing.

Sometimes I wonder if some teachers make you read a book that they know is shit but try to convince you that it is the most amazing thing ever just to test you

 

[cAmber]

Great Expectations. I managed to pull a B grade paper out of nowhere on that one, which was surprising since I read around 1/3rd of it, but it was one of the worst things I've ever tried to read.

 

[Tdc2182]

Probably "All Quiet on the Western Front", this year.

I really did not enjoy that book.

Did you not enjoy it because it was a little to graphic and viseral, or because it was dull?

OT: I honestly cannot tell you how much I despised Lord of the Flies. The first book I used Spark notes on.

 

[Tdc2182]

Sometimes I wonder if some teachers make you read a book that they know is shit but try to convince you that it is the most amazing thing ever just to test you

I am with you there.

 

[Tdc2182]

Anyway, I do a literature degree so I read at least one book a week. I'd rather talk about the favourites

Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange (It's a real skill that he could make the language so understandable, by the end of the book you could get all the slang despite it never being explained.)

It was not my most favorite book. But I respected the shit out of it. It was pretty amazing how you understand everything towards the end.

 

[Avelestar]

Deadly, Unna?

It's about a bunch of Australian country teenagers who play aussie rules football...racism, broken family etc. etc. Then they made us watch the movie retitled Australian Rules and it's even worse.

 

[Womplord]

Pride and Prejudice... it's a story that could have been 10 pages long, it's filled with babble and uses an old, obsolete style of writing that's old and obsolete for a reason.

Edit - although I never finished it, so not sure if it counts... had to watch 6 hours of movies based on it. I read about 5 pages and got an A-

 

[feather240]

Beowulf can die multiple times. Why would the oldest peace of English literature even be good? What could possibly make someone think that? If it wasn't so old people wouldn't even look at it.

The Summer Holiday.
365 pages of "Nothing", I don't understand how you can write a book in which nothing happens in the plot. Oh boy, did that book turn me brain dead.

What did the plot do for the 365 pages then?

 

[Simriel]

I honestly was mature about reading the books we were required to throughout school. None of them were terrible but some of them were boring as fuck.

I'd say the biggest over hyped piece of shit I had to read three times in my life would be Romeo and Juliet. It's the worst Shakespeare play (in my opinion). I have all his work in a giant, super well made book. I don't like this story. Sucks ass.

The issue is, that school curriculum force you to read it as a serious story of love e.c.t, whereas Shakespeare meant it more as a parody of love stories of that kind. When read in that way its actually quite amusing.