Which Books Did You Hate in School but Enjoyed in Adulthood?

[Barrister]

So I can remember one other novel from high school (other than my great hatred for Tess of the d'Ubervilles) - In Search of April Raintree.

Because even in high school in the early 90s you had to get in your Canadian Content.  A story of a young Metis girl growing up.

What I actually remember - in school they gave us the sanitized version just called "April Raintree".  But my mother had gone back to university to get an advanced education degree, and she had the original version "In Search of April Raintree".  So I checked with my teacher and I wound up reading that.

The rape scene was very eye opening.

[Syt]

I didn't really hate any books or plays we read in school ... I just never finished any of them. Whenever I *had* to read something I basically resented having to do so, even though the book might interest me.

Some of the material I recall:

A semester of "classicist literature" (i.e. Weimar Klassik): Sophokles' Antigone, Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris (which contains a programmatic quote of German classicism: "seeking, in my soul, the land of Greece"/"das Land der Griechen mit der Seele suchend"), Goethe's Faust I&II.


Alfred Doeblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (in German class as part of a rhetorics focus, in English class because Shakespeare).

Gudrun Pausewang's The Last Children of Schewenborn (Threads or Day After as German youth novel.)

Two stage plays by Max Frisch: Andorra (a play about ostracization of minorities) and The Fire Raisers (Biedermann und die Brandstifter), a farcical play about an average guy in a town plagued by arsonists who lets arsonists settle in his attic, and though those guys are pretty openly preparing to burn down the house, the everyman keeps making excuses/accepting their flimsy lies. Obviously a thinly veiled parody of the rise of fascism in Germany and the complacency of the general populace.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit (Der Besuch der Alten Dame). Dark, somewhat surreal comedy about an old rich lady coming to her decrepit old home town, offering to renovate the city and wads of cash, if the man who impregnated and left her is killed.

Carl Zuckmayer's Des Teufels General, somewhat based on Ernst Udet, about a general who loves flying and opposes the nazis but is caught between his duty and his conscience. In parts quite lighthearted IIRC. There's a good movie version of it with Curd Jürgens.

Alfred Andersch's Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund, about a group of people in a small Baltic town 1937 who consider fleeing across the Baltic from the nazis and struggling to do so/fighting with their moral conundrums.

Bertold Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan. Set in a fictionalized China, a prostitute tries to be a good person, and, well, it doesn't go great for her.

Gottfried Keller's Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe. A mid-19th century novella of two star crossed lovers in rural Switzerland who end up committing suicide because their families are dicks to each other. Besides the obvious Shakespeare inspiration I seem to remember that Keller based it on a short newspaper article that he read at the time, so I guess it's "loosely inspired by actual events."

Plus short stories/poems, obvs., most of them from between 1945 and 1970s. Cheerful stuff.

In English class we had to present an author and one of his works in English class. For the UK, I picked Graham Greene's The End of the Affair and for the US Ray Bradbury's anthology The Illustrated Man. I picked books for which our local library had good English language summaries/interpretations. We also read Lord of the Flies. And short stories by James Thurber, Hemingway, Roald Dahl, and more.

I'm probably forgetting a lot of stuff.

[Savonarola]

I was going through a poetry anthology when I came across Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  I remember reading that in high school because we had the cool teacher who let us listen to the Iron Maiden version.

(Still a great poem, even without the guitar solos.)

[Josephus]

I was going through a poetry anthology when I came across Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  I remember reading that in high school because we had the cool teacher who let us listen to the Iron Maiden version.

(Still a great poem, even without the guitar solos.)

I do remember reading that poem in Grade 12 I think, and the teacher did bring out the Iron Maiden song for us to listen to

[PDH]

This might have been said earlier, but the reverse is mostly true for me.

I remember being quick caught up by "See Spot Run" when I was in Kindergarten, but now it just seems flat with a poor plot.

[Barrister]

Sort of the flip side of the question - I remember finding in my english book, even though they were NOT assigned, the poems of Ozymandius by Shelley and Kubla Khan by Coleridge, and thinking they were pretty badass.

They no doubt tapped into my latent history nerd side.

[crazy canuck]

This might have been said earlier, but the reverse is mostly true for me.

I remember being quick caught up by "See Spot Run" when I was in Kindergarten, but now it just seems flat with a poor plot.

Some classics just don't grip you like the first time you encountered the prose.

[Josephus]

The Dick and Jane books that I read were the British Janet and John. Funny, I still remember we had to read the book in class out loud. And I still remember the first sentence. So, I'm pretty sure, this was the first sentence of the first book I ever read: "It is summer time. School is over and the long summer holidays are here."

Ok, that's two sentences.

[Admiral Yi]

The Dick and Jane books that I read were the British Janet and John. Funny, I still remember we had to read the book in class out loud. And I still remember the first sentence. So, I'm pretty sure, this was the first sentence of the first book I ever read: "It is summer time. School is over and the long summer holidays are here."

Ok, that's two sentences.

  That's pretty sophisticated shit for first book ever.  Mine was "See Dick run.  See Jane play."

For some reason the very first line of my first French textbook has stayed in my head. "Ou est Sylvie?  A la piscine."