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.
Shakespeare can be rough if you are forced to listen to your classmates read out the words at a dreadfully stumbling pace.
But in general I’m with you, I have never understood why a great book becomes bad just because a teacher suggested reading it.
Had a classmate that read the ending of words with the ed ending as a separate entity unto itself. Never explained why. Teacher never explained why. It was just accepted. Still totally confused about what happened in that case. 10th grade regular level class, not honors level or anything like that. Kifd wasn’t very nice either, so it rubbed me wrong.
Maybe this is a hot take but I dont think Shakespeare should be taught in middle/high school.
Back then, understanding the message of the text was a the hard part and you miss out on all the good writing. When I got to uni and started reading Shakespeare on my own, I could comprehend it fine and really started to appreciate the prose and humor.
I still crack up thinking about hearing “what, Lucius, ho?” as “what luscious ho”