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.
Several.
Great Expectations- I like most Dickens, so I would probably have liked this, but for school.
The mill on the Floss - George Eliot-something about being forced to read this spoiled it for me. The teacher took a weird approach of just reading the first ten chapters or do, then the last chapter. I’m guessing she was skipping over religion or sex, it being a convent school.
All poetry whatsoever. I completely and utterly hate poetry because if school, except for Japanese haiku, which we never read. Special hate points for the Lady of Shallot, The albatross and the war poets.
Dickens had the same effect on me: he just wasn’t that deep, and so it’s easy to go overboard in analyzing it. Maybe A Tale of Two Cities deserves it, but most of his stuff is just soap operas from a century ago. If you just read it as light reading it’s fun.
I read Great Expectations as a freshman in high school, then again as a sophomore in college. It was MUCH a more enjoyable as a more mature person who could be trusted to learn about the social context of the time it was written in, talk about sexuality and gender relations in class, and appreciate some of the dark humor in it. I think it’s a great example of a book that commonly gets taught to kids who are too young to really appreciate it, and the public school setting also muzzles a lot of what’s interesting about it.
I loved GE when I read it after college. Recently reread it and was surprised at how dull most of the ending chapters were.