Personally I love Bradbury’s prose style, it’s almost poetic and extremely descriptive, but because it’s not straightforward it’s certainly confusing at times.

I’ve always loved “A Sound of Thunder” for a smaller bite of his style. The way he described going back in time and the skin of the T Rex are lovely.

He also famously copied instructions from a Zelda video game into one of his novels because he couldn’t be arsed to read more carefully. He’s awful and dumb to boot.

It’s funny, you’re getting downvoted but if this were a thread about the very real criticisms of The Boy in The Striped Pajamas you probably wouldn’t. Don’t care if he wrote one good book, his work has been actively harmful in teaching about the Holocaust to children.

This post and all of the OP responses feel like an AI is trying to run a focus group here lol

Former middle school teacher and yes, it is very challenging to have everyone read their own chosen book when trying to teach concepts that every student has to learn. ELA’s not just about reading, so the book chosen has to serve multiple purposes and often act as an anchor for a unit based on a more universal theme or skills being taught.

My approach was always to choose several novels we’d read together, at least one small group unit where 3 or 4 kids would read a novel they chose together, have at least one unit that involved short stories, and then assign one or two completely individual at-home novels that could be anything the student wanted.

A caveat: As a middle school teacher in my particular district I got more leeway to do what I pleased—as long as we covered the standards—than a lot of teachers do. Many (if not most) teachers have little say in what they have to assign because of district chosen curriculum. And high school teachers have to get kids graduating with the assumption that they will need certain background information to take college level English, and those profs need kids to already have a cursory knowledge of authors like Shakespeare in order to build and deepen knowledge.