I remember reading the Great Gatsby in high school and I hated it. Actually my whole class hated it. This seems to be the general consensus if you read the book in high school. I plan on reading it again without a teacher beating me over the head with "tell me about the symbolism, what does this symbolize, what was this a metaphor for." Some books you just won't appreciate in high school, especially when you have to dissect it to death.
The funny thing is suddenly everyone is all excited over the Great Gatsby movie coming out this summer and I'm all "remember how we all hated this book in high school? Remember that??!" Granted the movie does look good but I'm not going to pretend I've always been a Gatsby fan. I'm going to admit that I hated that book in high school and need to re-read it before I see the movie.
I wonder if it's a good idea to force the classics on high schoolers. A lot of the time they don't really appreciate the book and just end up avoiding the classics as adults because they remember not enjoying them in high school. But then what would you have them read? It's a fine line I suppose.
So the Great Gatsby is on my list of books to re-read. I know my tastes have changed and I think I'll appreciate it more the second time around. I'll still see the movie no matter what because I love Leonardo DiCaprio. Will this be his Oscar movie?! I hope so. I want him to finally win.
Any books you remember reading in high school that you hated? (Grapes of Wrath anyone. UGH!)
Also, I hope you were not forced to go see Moby Dick the musical in school. There are some books that just do not need to be made into a play and especially not a musical. The whale was awesome though. Kidding there was no whale, I would have enjoyed it if there was a singing whale or even someone dressed as a whale singing.
Also part II when I googled Moby Dick I discovered there is a restaurant called Moby Dick House of Kabob. Weird.
Huh, that surprises me because I remember everyone (including me) loving The Great Gatsby. Books we hated included The Mosquito Coast, Ethan Frome, Silas Marner, Madame Bovary, Heart of Darkness, but The Great Gatsby is definitely in my top five books that were assigned in high school.
ReplyDeleteIt very well could have been the teacher that ruined it for us. Sometimes the right teacher could make all the difference. I was just so sick of talking about all the symbolism in the book, I couldn't enjoy it.
DeleteOh I forgot to add that I hated Ethan Frome. HATED. So depressing and just awful.
DeleteI'm the opposite! I really liked the book, and I was disappointed by the movie preview (I had high expectations...)
ReplyDeleteI think I might be biased on the movie preview because I love me some Leo.
DeleteI hated Gatsby in high school, too. I don't have a clue why. I just remember really hating it. I'm planning on rereading it before I see the movie as well.
ReplyDeleteAnother one I couldn't stand was The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which caused me to swear off Tolstoy. But apparently Anna Karenina is really good, so I may have to give up on my "I will never read Tolstoy again!" vow that I made as a high school sophomore to figure out why it's so amazing.
I can't remember why I hated it either. This is why I plan to re-read it.
DeleteThe Death of Ivan Ilyich was awful. That book was just painful to get through. I've been attempting to read Anna Karenina for a while now. Some parts I really like but others I don't care for. I don't care about the number of trees in the woods and how much you want to sell them for. Let's get back to the scandal please.
Ha! I have no idea how anyone else felt about it, but I loved The Great Gatsby and Grapes of Wrath. But, I also love dissecting literature. I'm trying to think of something I hated - it was Hamlet. Mainly because the teacher made us read it silently to ourselves, then out loud as a class, then she read it to us...torture.
ReplyDeleteSee I loved Hamlet. I think a lot of it has to do with how the teacher approaches it. Reading out loud was awful. I'm a fast reader and I would actually just skip ahead and read and zone out because I couldn't stand slow readers, and I know it wasn't their fault. I then got put in honors English and that was much more my pace.
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ReplyDeleteI think I liked it in HS, but our teacher Ms. Shannon/Bonilla/Whoknows had us dissect it to the point where it wasn't fun reading it anymore. I just remember we had to figure out that F. Scott Fitzgerald, was talking about a billboard for a doctor in one chapter. I was like, really?!
ReplyDeleteI liked Grapes of Wrath, I did a report on it for her class as well. Maybe I enjoyed it because I was able to read it at my own leisure and didn't have to analyze it to death?
I was planning on re-reading The Great Gatsby, but I cheated after I saw the previews. I read the Spark Notes.;) BTW, a bar in Boston named themselves after a character in the book (Daisy Buchanan's).
Yes that damn billboard! We spent a whole class on that stupid billboard. "the eyes in the billboard" This, this is what made me not like that book. Having to dissect a billboard for a whole class. A fictional billboard in a book!
DeleteThis is one of my favorite books since high school! I took alternative English in school so I missed reading a lot of the classics and got to read books like Sula and The Joy luck Club. But any war related books I had to read I hated.
ReplyDeleteI've been meaning to comment on this for awhile. I made a mental note after seeing the title of the post and immediately thinking, "YES. I HATED THAT THING."
ReplyDeleteWhat's funny is I'm pretty sure I'd like it now, or at least appreciate it more. The movie DOES look good -- and I'd like to reread the book without the pressure of essays and metaphors as well.
I actually liked MOST of the books we read in high school, but I hated Lord of the Flies (too masculine maybe? or just stupid?) and A Farewell to Arms. I really, really liked Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird... and Brave New World. Brave New World is awesome.
Oh, and I hated The Canterbury Tales. Yuck!
Yes! It's no fun writing out long paragraphs on the symbolism eggs and clocks! But then you re-read it as an adult and suddenly, you see the mastery behind one of the most edited books of all time.
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