I thought Of Mice and Men was a beautiful story but my teacher insisted on analysing it as a product of the 1930s and focusing in on the characters’ clothes and attributes and how the whole thing was influenced by life in the Great Depression. I guess that’s important the beauty of that story to me is not in the history, it’s much more about the relationships between these characters because of what they’re going through and it just really turned me off having to write papers like that. Usually when a teacher has a really specific interpretive lens it turns me off because then they expect you to write that.
This was me with Huckleberry Finn. I ended up reading Huckleberry Finn once a year for four years.