Literally any book that you now dislike due to school. This also applies to other literature styles as well.
Mine is The Hunger Games. I had to read it las year in school and it drove me insane. We started doing the novel study in early February and didn’t finish until May. I finished the book in less than two weeks, so I was pretty much just reading personal books all through English class for close to two months.
It’s not even like we had to analyze it super intensely. It was projects like ‘Make a playlist for a character of your choice’ and we had vocabulary tests every week, that were a joke. It was multiple choice for words like quest and forage. I know that English wasn’t everyone’s first language but come on.
I didn’t even like the book that much in the first place, so all of this was just adding to the misery.
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i loved every book my school made me read
Lord of the flies. We analysed it to death. Like over chewed food. You can dissect a frog and learn things but the frog dies in the process.
I read it 30 years later after hating it for so long and it is a masterpiece when not read one sentence at a time with a discussion inbetween.
You got to read Hunger Games…try Jane Eyre, written 100+ years before we had to read it.
Slaughter house 5. Had a strict time constraint to read it and summarize it aswell as other things going on in my life at that time. I couldn’t read it the way it was meant to be read
It didn’t ruin the book for me but I remember in 6th grade English class we had to fill out a form and write down a summary slip every 10 pages from a book of our choosing. I think I did it on one of the Percy Jackson books and o feel like the process just made it go by so slowly
That works great with kids who would read the book willingly. What about the 70% of the class that doesn’t want to, can’t because they can’t read well, or the kids with 504s, or the ESOL students who need dictionaries and their parents don’t read in English?
I have definitely finished books prior to the class but it’s never bothered me. I either like it or don’t, the fact that the class takes forever has no bearing on it for me.
Into the Wild was assigned reading my senior year. It was far beyond my reading level and comprehension. I needed to be challenged in highschool.
The count of Monte Cristo. The teacher was amazing, but not a literature one, she had plenty of money (time to correct or even pay people to correct, insane loads of work), and would change what she’d asked for the week before it was due(1/3 of the whole grade).
Thankfully, I have a pretty common name and she accidentally assigned her grade to me on the school’s grade system. If the circumstances were normal I’d have told her, but I was sick and went to the hospital that day. She gave me a 30%. It was literally what she’d just asked us to do. That being said I cannot touch this book, I spent 2 weeks doing the project she’d asked for nothing, asking for tiny details. It was well made, I’d put my soul, swear and tears into it.
Reading The Great Gatsby aloud as a class in summer school while recovering from a shoulder surgery took all possible enjoyment out of that book.
The great gatsby through and through. I would also argue to kill a mockingbird but not on the same level. First time I read the great gatsby I thought it was so boring, hard to read and nothing substantial. In fact I actively remember engaging in conversation about how much I hated it. It was until a couple months later I started thinking about it and realized how good the story was. I re read it twice since then and now it’s one of my favourite books of all time. To kill a mockingbird was a bit better in the sense that that I could appreciate the story even in the school context, but I hated how we were pressured to read it. It made what is otherwise one of my favourite book as well, initially a bit of a drag and uninteresting.
Great Gatsby is mine. It was so boring and pointless, still can’t bring myself to give it another shot. I absolutely love To Kill a Mockingbird on the other hand, it’s up on my tops list.
Great Gatsby. It was hyped up in my school since I started attending. The junior class had a big Great Gatsby party after all the assignments and reading. I was actually looking forward to reading the book but my teacher made it difficult to enjoy it, very snarky woman. And then Covid came around and the whole party was cancelled. I would have enjoyed reading a classic but considering everything, I hate that book.
My first Shakespeare experience at school was Julius Caesar. Just a bunch of men making convoluted speeches about honour before running on their swords. Totally failed to connect with me as a 14 year old school girl. Fortunately the next year we did Macbeth, which saved Shakespeare for me!
Any book I was forced to read was ruined for me specifically for that reason. Even if I might have liked it otherwise, I still hated it more than any I picked up on my own. If I disliked one of my choice books at least it was my choice and not because someone else decided I couldn’t live without it or took my time.
So, yes, many were ruined because ‘school’.
Sucks that what they wrecked for you was the hunger games.
Of Mice and Men