I am older now; I have more than what I wanted, but I wish that I had started long before I did

[primroseburrows]

When I was in high school, we had to read things like Flowers for Algernon and other depressing fare.


Kids have it better in today's English classes.

What books did you have to read in school? Did you find books you'd read forever? What books did you hate? What about books from the outside? Is there one book that forever defines your youth? Is there one book you WISH your English teacher had used in his/her curriculum?

I really, really wish there'd have been more SF and Fantasy, but. Books like I Never Promised You a Rose Garden still haunt me. I don't know how many times I read it as a teenager, and I first discovered it (along with Go Ask Alice and Lisa, Bright and Dark) in my school's Resource Room (where I used to hang out, geekily, because d00d, teh Books).

Geez, it's no wonder I'm a psych nurse, with what I read as a kid. Of course, I also read Helter Skelter so many times that at one point I had memorised the first few paragraphs. *ponders*

Comments

[littlealex.livejournal.com]

Oh man reading the other comments -- I totally forgot To Kill A Mockingbird and Of Mice And Men! I think the former was great, I really loved it, but the latter was the first book I ever cried at. It was terrible, I was just sitting there on the couch in the living room doing my homework when all of a sudden - ouch. I finished the book and just started crying.

Also, unrelated sort of, but a movie my parents got my sister and me into young was the Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing. So while it's not necessarily reading the play I like, I think it's still really cool that parents can get their kids into Shakespeare. But there's a whole other rant about movies being as good at moving people and transporting them to another place as books are, and that'll be for another time.