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

[crikkita.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... this guy teaches at a boarding school in NH ... I wonder whether a friend of mine had him ... or it could be that other one of which everyone has heard ..... Geesh, if reading skills are that poor at the best prep schools in the nation, then I weep for America's youth. (A sad, sad thing for a 30-yr-old to have to say!)

I was extremely lucky in HS. My junior- and senior-level classes read things like Joy Luck Club, Love Medicine (Louise Erdrich), Beloved, poetry by Langston Hughes, Going After Cacciato (a Vietnam-era novel whose author's name has escaped me at the moment, but he was on NPR the other day), The Invisible Man (Ellison, not the other one), Frankenstein, Dr. Faustus, Othello, a whole course on Modern Poetry, from Dickinson and Whitman to the present.....

... and I spent all my free time reading Stephen King! *facepalm*

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

... and I spent all my free time reading Stephen King! *facepalm*

Heck, I do that now. Nothing wrong with that. The guy's brilliant.