What Required Reading book could you not finish?

[Verdant]

Required Reading books are books that schools and colleges force you to read. They typically revolve around some common themes.

In my case, I literally cannot finish this book called “How the Garcia Girls lost their accents”. It’s not even that long (200 pages) but I have never in my entire life not wanted to do schoolwork than read this book. It’s been at least one month since I started… I won’t go too much into details but
1: I find every single character annoying/ insufferable/ shallow/ boring. The four sisters all feel the same, and feel so bratty, unfunny, and mean for zero reason
2: The reverse chronological progression makes the book difficult to read, especially as its pratically an anthology.
3: Historcial context is barely provided.
4: I have to annotate this book. Mainly this.

Before this, I read Dracula (500 pages) in five days while annotating. It was a decent read but this is proof that this isn’t just page length lol.

I wonder if the school system made anyone else feel like me? If so, what book(s) made you literally rather do math than read them.

 

[KoyukiMegumi]

All the books in high school and my colleagues for English were passed by using SparkNotes. Why? I couldn't find them intriguing enough to finish one chapter. I read for fun, more than learning, but that's just me.

 

[QuercusMalus]

So, so many... Madame Bovary, Grapes of Wrath. Anything by Charles Dickens.
Nothing kills the joy of reading like high school English.

I still remember a conversation I had with my English teacher:
Me: Why do we have to read this?
Teacher: Because it's a classic.
Me: Why?
Teacher, after hemming and hawing a bit: Well, it's old....

 

[2wordsperminute]

For every year I was in high school, there was one required reading book I didn't finish. Still somehow managed to pass. Okay, it's not entirely true for freshman year, I did finish the odyssey, I just didn't read all of it. The others were: We Are Not From Here, Things Fall Apart, and Klara and the Sun. I actually liked what I did read of Klara and the sun, but I don't really feel like going back to read it. Instead I read The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (not the hentai).

 

[ConansWitchBaby]

The fucking, "Garcia Girls" was also my bane. Good thing I figured out that I could just ace tests and leave the peasants to suffer from doing homework during their free time. Just take the "skeleton" of stories to heart, apply it to everything you read, and do half assed reviews/essays. You'll be fine. At least it won't be a 0-grade.

 

[georgelee5786]

The Iliad. Idk why but I found the copy I had confusing and never finished it. I intend to read it it for real soon

 

[JasonDKarl]

Required Reading books are books that schools and colleges force you to read. They typically revolve around some common themes.

In my case, I literally cannot finish this book called “How the Garcia Girls lost their accents”. It’s not even that long (200 pages) but I have never in my entire life not wanted to do schoolwork than read this book. It’s been at least one month since I started… I won’t go too much into details but
1: I find every single character annoying/ insufferable/ shallow/ boring. The four sisters all feel the same, and feel so bratty, unfunny, and mean for zero reason
2: The reverse chronological progression makes the book difficult to read, especially as its pratically an anthology.
3: Historcial context is barely provided.
4: I have to annotate this book. Mainly this.

Before this, I read Dracula (500 pages) in five days while annotating. It was a decent read but this is proof that this isn’t just page length lol.

I wonder if the school system made anyone else feel like me? If so, what book(s) made you literally rather do math than read them.

I couldn't finish, or even make much progress in, The House of Seven Gables. I loathed, but just barely managed to finish, The Great Gatsby.

 

[EliseValkyria]

When I was in school around the age of eight, the teacher had the brilliant idea of asking us to read "The Silver Key" a story that she liked, what she didn't say was that it was by this author called H. P. Lovecraft, so I didn't learn anything in the story and failed the homework and the exam. It wasn't until later that I found out why I didn't understand anything.

The other one was "Don Quixote de la Mancha", they gave us a week to read it, in exam week, nobody had time for that, I just read the summary of another summary and hope for the best.

 

[RepresentingCaution]

I finished every book that was ever assigned to me. "The House of Sand and Fog" was the one I detested the most.

Then, there was that piece by Marquis de Sade that my professor didn't assign, but we all read it because we were honor students, and then she asked us why none of us stopped reading it.

 

[ElijahRyne]

Required Reading books are books that schools and colleges force you to read. They typically revolve around some common themes.

In my case, I literally cannot finish this book called “How the Garcia Girls lost their accents”. It’s not even that long (200 pages) but I have never in my entire life not wanted to do schoolwork than read this book. It’s been at least one month since I started… I won’t go too much into details but
1: I find every single character annoying/ insufferable/ shallow/ boring. The four sisters all feel the same, and feel so bratty, unfunny, and mean for zero reason
2: The reverse chronological progression makes the book difficult to read, especially as its pratically an anthology.
3: Historcial context is barely provided.
4: I have to annotate this book. Mainly this.

Before this, I read Dracula (500 pages) in five days while annotating. It was a decent read but this is proof that this isn’t just page length lol.

I wonder if the school system made anyone else feel like me? If so, what book(s) made you literally rather do math than read them.

Hamlet

 

[Tempokai]

Thankfully my school didn’t had the required books readings. I couldn't finish the War And Peace though. Especially when it was translated to my language and it was tedious to read.

 

[Hans.Trondheim]

Required Reading books are books that schools and colleges force you to read. They typically revolve around some common themes.

In my case, I literally cannot finish this book called “How the Garcia Girls lost their accents”. It’s not even that long (200 pages) but I have never in my entire life not wanted to do schoolwork than read this book. It’s been at least one month since I started… I won’t go too much into details but
1: I find every single character annoying/ insufferable/ shallow/ boring. The four sisters all feel the same, and feel so bratty, unfunny, and mean for zero reason
2: The reverse chronological progression makes the book difficult to read, especially as its pratically an anthology.
3: Historcial context is barely provided.
4: I have to annotate this book. Mainly this.

Before this, I read Dracula (500 pages) in five days while annotating. It was a decent read but this is proof that this isn’t just page length lol.

I wonder if the school system made anyone else feel like me? If so, what book(s) made you literally rather do math than read them.

In the Philippines, junior high schools are required to read the following novels:

G7: Ibong Adarna (Adarna Bird, author unknown) -- the story is about three princely brothers looking for the famed Adarna bird whose 'song' can cure their father's sickness. Typical of the romantic hero trope, the main guy is a paragon of virtue. Also, they turn into a stone once they got shit upon by the said bird.

G8: Florante at Laura (Florante and Laura, Francisco Baltazar) -- Christians vs Muslims theme; this work can be called racist by the woke society nowadays. Good thing the Philippines isn't the West. Main character is another paragon of virtue, and the 'righteous' Muslim character gets converted into Christian in the end. Context: it was written during the days of Spanish Colonial rule in the Philippines. The Spanish are Catholics, so go figure. It has underlying tones of rebelling against the abuses of the authorities, and was performed in the local theater (sarzuela) during the American Occupation of the Philippines.

G9: Noli Me Tangere (Don't Touch Me, Jose Rizal) -- Jose Rizal is the Philippine National Hero, and he wrote two books before he was executed by the Spaniards in 1896 (a political victim after the start of the Philippine Revolution). Noli Me Tangere is his novel embodying his and his friends' concept of writing something about the Philippine culture (as opposed to Spanish one) where they will talk about the society, the food, the traditions and the women. Sadly, Rizal's friends all wanted to write only about the women, so he got pissed and broke off with the group, preferring to write on his own.

Noli Me Tangere is a story about an Illustrado (a wealthy, educated native of the Philippines during the Spanish period) coming home from Spain. His ideals soon attract the ire of the friars, who believe natives can't learn and be civilized.

G10: El Filibusterismo (The Filibuster, Jose Rizal) -- El Filibusterismo is the sequel to Noli Me Tangere, and is darker in tone than the first novel. It continues the story of the MC in Noli Me Tangere, now a changed man trying to spark a revolution to overthrow the Spanish regime.

Needless to say, as a high school student, I only got to finish El Filibusterismo. Noli Me Tangere was too 'bright' for an edgy kid like me before, while Florante at Laura and Ibong Adarna are both 'lyric poems,' so I can't appreciate it.

However, when I became a Filipino language teacher, I finally learned why those novels are required 'reads'; not only do they give cultural appreciation to our Hispanic past, those novels also encourage democratic ideals in our society. With those in mind, I tried to teach my students similar things.

Sadly, most of people in the education sector view those for what they think it is: needless assignments.

 

[Deleted member 146224]

When I was still in school, the required reading nearly made me believe that I hated reading. It didn't help that we usually did multiple books per semester, so it was a constant rush to finish any of them. From that period, I still have 2 books that I absolutely hate with passion. Anne of Green Gables is the one that I remember agonizing over the most. Absolute fukin slog. Boring. Terrible. It should be a crime to force children to read this. I was going insane trying to finish that. Eventually I gave up. Found a chapter by chapter summary in a bookstore and read that instead, only going to the source for chapters that seemed to have anything important in them.

 

[Woolen_Monkey]

If I didn't I don't remember... That checks out.

 

[Jerynboe]

I read the overwhelming majority just fine, even managed to draw out a little bit of enjoyment from most of them. I open with this to emphasize the sheer hatred I have towards The Pearl.

It was deeply, deeply cynical in a way I don’t particularly like. One of those stories where it’s made abundantly clear that not only everyone who ever appears on screen but everyone in the setting who could have possibly altered the outcome of this situation was a near purely malicious trashfire of a human who didn’t even have a particularly good grasp on the concept of self interest.

If literally anyone other than the MC’s immediate family had managed to be marginally less awful, this story would not exist. MC would have haggled with a middleman who was willing to give him a price that looked somewhat plausible to a rural fisherman, got a price that was a bit lower than he wanted on the McGuffin (probably still pretty much screwed over, but subtly), and moved on with his life with a nice cash infusion. Instead, after what felt like 10k pages of the MC getting screwed over for very little reason, he gave up and threw the macguffin into the sea out of spite.

It was trying to illustrate how bad colonialism could be, so fair play on the themes front I guess, but it was just such a simple and unpleasant story drawn out to be as long and tedious as possible. It never surprised me. It never challenged my worldview (and I’m not even particularly anti colonialism by modern standards). It was just a tragic, pointless trek from shore to jungle and back.

 

[RepresentingWrath]

War and Peace.

 

[AstreiaNyx]

Othello.

Not only did I have to read it, but I also had to watch it!

 

[2wordsperminute]

I feel like I should also say that I liked a lot of required reading books from middle school, because my English teachers there were usually great: Eragon, Abarat, Mortal Engines, The Martian, Ender's Game, and I even liked Fahrenheit 451.

 

[BearlyAlive]

I had to read through most of the German classics, and they were ok for most of their parts. But I reject the ending that is Faust II. The two books the theme and style were of "those that make deals with the devil are beyond salvation" and painted Faust as a heathen. Then comes the effing ending and to this day I'm still of the opinion that it wasn't written by Goethe himself but by those that read it after his death and in their fear of god added the "ending"...

Just never read Kafka. Period.

 

[SRB]

War And Peace. Tolstoi is a good author, but man, his descriptions are fucking long. Three chapters spent on a metaphor with a dying oak, - if I remember it right - why? I understand that in his time it was normal, but holy hell.

And the French that the man decided to sprinkle in the book. Yes, Russian aristocraty was largly speaking French, some of them even bragged about not knowing Russian, but why not add a translation note on the page? Why do I need to look it up in the very end of the book?