Can't understand all the hate for Cather in the Rye.Always been one of my favorite books.

Brave New World, for me. Perhaps in its day it was something, but it's so trite to me now. I mean, no duh the Utopians (as the book points its finger at you) are the real savages. It's as if Huxley wrote it with high school term papers in mind.

The Scarlet Letter
Shakespeare
Grapes of Wrath
Moby Dick
Great Gatsby
Raisin in the Sun
Miller the Salesman
Last of Mohicans
Shane


Basically every book I was forced to read in high school, I hated. My English teachers had terrible taste in books. The goal of English teachers should be to turn students into life long readers, not shove old books down their throat so they never want to read again. I always wanted to read classics like 1984, Lord of the Flies, Lord of the Rings, Stranger in a Strange Land, On the Beach, Farenheit 451, IT, and Dune. But instead, I was forced to read the girly books I posted above. Maybe it was just my English teachers that had poor taste.

I can understand not liking the books, but girly books? Really?

There's nothing more girly than gunfighters, whale hunters, and Indian warriors.

Of the books you said that you always wanted to read, why not read them now? I read most of them in high school on my own time.

I'll agree that Shakespeare should be seen before it's read. It's hard to understand the language unless it's translated first by a good actor.

Agreed. It's also helpful to have read (and understood) at least some Elizabethan poetry. Most English teachers (well, mine, at least) never really explain the poetic details, many of which help to make sense of the language.

I'll agree with the LotR. I love fantasy. I love how Tolkien basically created modern fantasy. I loved the movies and i have read tons of analysis of LotR (I actually really like the mystery the character Tom Bombadil presents). However, i can't make it through the books. The tedious details describing every single crack in the bark of a random tree drives me insane.

I'm intending to read it slowly to my daughter and maybe make it through the series that way.

I do love Catcher in the Rye and i also really like Tale of Two Cities.

I don't know why, but this just made me laugh. Bravo.

To summarize this thread: Most Overrated Classic = required reading in junior/high school

Many of the classics just need a good teacher for you to appreciate them (of course, one could argue that you shouldn't need a teacher, but not all of us are equipped to understand and appreciate shakespeare without one).

CITR was an awesome book, but some people here commented on how it didn't "speak to them", which is legitimate. It hits a very specific note, and if that note doesn't resonate with you, it will seem silly or self-absorbed or whatever. But if that note does resonate with you, holy shit does that book nail it.

You act as if public school teachers have a lot of choice. First, they have to meet state standards, then they have to meet local standards. Then, if the school buys the books, there has to be money and justification for buying them (ie, will be used more than one year). I'm not saying that there's no way to teach other books, but I'm just saying, it's not like a teacher in a required English course is just "cool" and can stock the list with whatever he/she wants.

Luckily, many libraries do stock the books you mentioned. I remember, in middle school and high school, reading 1984, Animal Farm, Farenheit 451, and Catch-22 on my own.

Not me. The books I was required to read included Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, Madame Bovary, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I thought they were great!

It was only Catcher and two other required books that were duds. One of the duds was a movie novelization, and the other was a local author. Neither was considered a classic then, and neither is remembered now. So the only serious clinker from a dozen years of public education was Catcher in the Rye.

Well said.

If I had a choice, I'd teach some of my favorites like Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Chang Rae-Lee, Russell Banks, Mark Bowden, and Tim O'Brien. Instead, my hands are tied by my library's offerings and district- and state-mandated "grade-appropriate" reading. My syllabus includes To Kill a Mockingbird, Great Expectations, Fahrenheit 451, Of Mice and Men, the Odyssey, and Romeo and Juliet. Not necessarily my favorites, but with some interesting lessons and a lot of energy (and humor), most of my students leave my classroom with at least an appreciation for the lit.

As LurkerDan said, a good teacher would have made all the difference. A former colleague of mine loved Moby Dick. It's a much-reviled novel, but his approach to it won his kids over. Slow going at first, but his passion for the story was infectious. Great Gatsby is also a popular novel at my school because it's so easy to draw parallels between it and society today. A shame more English teachers haven't figured out how easy it is to get kids to buy into the books.

I've read a lot of the biggies in school and i've never been insulted by any of them except for Shit Falling on Cedars and to a lesser extent Catcher in the Rye both by the same teacher, she was in her 30s so she didnt know squat i'm guessing (this is 12th grade), the other book she made us read i did like, Angela's Ashes, but that was a true story.

The Anarchist's Cookbook: The vegetable lasagne recipe sucked

Webster's Dictionary: What a know-it-all asshole

this thread is funny because my least favorite book of all time was ABOUT catcher in the rye... "Nowhere Man: The Final Days Of John Lennon"
http://www.amazon.com/Nowhere-Man-Fi..._sim_b_title_1

(4 out of 5 stars on amazon = grossly overrated)

if you've ever seen the South Park episode on Mormons (where the music in the background is repeating the words "dumb dumb dumb dumb") you can appreciate how i felt about this awful book.

So not only is catcher in the rye overrated, books about catcher in the rye are overrated. Go figure.

agree with the required reading ones. actually I quite enjoyed most of the required readings. However, I didn't care for (some already mentioned):

The Scarlett Letter
The Awakening
The Sun Also Rises

Has anyone gone back to some of these required readings from junior high, or are you relying on your taste when you were 13? 99% of people were dumb in junior high. Would you ask for movie recommendations from a junior high schooler, for instance? There are a LOT of masterpieces being listed in this thread, but they're not all books that can be enjoyed or appreciated by kids who've barely hit puberty. And yeah, that's a curriculum problem.

99% junior high dumb? I think that's way off.

I think a lot of these are "classics" mainly because of the subject matter, and not for the actual storytelling. I could be wrong, but there are plenty of classics that I read that really connected with me, such as "1984," "Animal Farm," anything by Shakespeare, "The Great Gatsby," just to name a few.