Literature Survey - Help Appreciated!

Hello,

I have been conducting a survey for a college course and need more data. This seemed like a great place to get some additional feedback. All input is highly valued!

I am trying to conduct a survey of high school experiences in regards to particular literature titles. If you wish to take part in this survey, simply make a reply post with two (2) lists. The first list will be literature titles you read in high school with which you attach a "positive experience." The second list will be literature titles you read in high school with which you associate a "negative experience."

This is a qualitative study and you are welcome to list as many titles as you wish.

Thank you very much.

-Zen

I'm currently in highschool and I haven't really had many books to read.

I did read "The Giver" by - Lois Lowry

I utterly despise this book, not because I've read it numerous times but because of the way it is written. It's bland and there is no excitement. It is very slow paced and there are very few interesting parts. Overall I would give this book 3/10.

Actually I believe that is the only book I've read through highschool so far, sorry I coulden't be more of a help.

Through grades 10 to 12 I either could choose between several books or choose freely so I haven't had any really negative reading experience.

Of the few that were forced upon us I had a very positive experience of the following two short stories.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

I also had a very positive experience with American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis but it was a free choice.

I can only remember some of what I read.

David Copperfield (Dickens)--loved it
Everything that Rises Must Converge (Flannery O'Connor)--loved it
The Scarlet Letter (Hawthore)--tolerable
My Antonia (Cather)--liked it
The Secret Sharer, Heart of Darkness (Conrad)--good
Jude the Obscure (Hardy)--loved it
Brave New World (Huxley)--really loved it
1984 (Orwell)--liked it
Long Day's Journey Into Night (O'Neill)--in hindsight, I didn't really understand it, but loved it
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)--loved it
Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)--really wish we had read the original, but we read some watered down, modernized version. Still liked it. Read the real version in university, much better.
To the Lighthouse (Woolf)--loved it
Portrait of the Artist (Joyce)--loved it, but my crap teacher didn't know how to teach it.
Shakespeare, various including Troilus, Midsummernight's, Henry V, Macbeth--loved most, but the teachers were generally useless.



Middlemarch (Elliot)--hated it
Sherwood Anderson, those stories about gnarly weirdos--hated it
Emerson and Thoreau--icky, boring, lumped together in head
Sinclair Lewis, Babbit or something--similar to Sherwood Anderson, yuck
Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men--hated it
the Turn of the Screw (James)--boring

Positive:
To Kill a Mockingbird - own it and still re-read occasionally.
Canterbury Tales
Othello
Macbeth

Negative:
A Separate Peace - John Knowles - boring
The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck - also boring

Also forced to wade through the depressing world of Emily Dickenson for WAY too long!
Thats all I can remember-mostly we had free choice, which was all positve for me

High school was a looooooong time ago, so I can't remember most of the titles. Here are the ones I do recall:

Positive
Shakespeare (various) - I love plays, period
The Glass Menagerie - ditto
Oedipus Rex - ditto
Catcher in the Rye - hit a chord, alienated teenager that I was (though nowhere nearly as alienated as Holden)

Negative
Great Expectations - if the class hadn't voted to read this, we would've done a cool mythology unit instead

Hard Times (Dickens) - loved it
Farenheit 451 (Bradbury) - Loved it
The Scarlet Letter (Hawthore) - Not too bad
My Antonia (Cather) - Hated it
Animal Farm (Orwell) - Hated it
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) - Hated it
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck) - Not too bad
To Kill a Mockingbird - Not a fan
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain) - Hated it
Ethan Frome - Loved it
MacBeth - Loved it
Hamlet - Loved it
Julius Ceasar - Hated it
Romeo and Juliet - Hated it
Jane Eyre - Loved it
Wuthering Heights - Loved it
The Joy Luck Club - Loved it
A Street Car Named Desire - Liked it
A Yellow Raft on Blue Water or something like that - Ok, I guess
The Awakening - HATED HATED HATED it...possibly the worst book I've ever read
Martian Chronicles (Bradbury) - Liked it

I know there were others, but these are the only ones I remember. It seems that I ended up hating most American "classics" and enjoying the British lit.

Well I took honors English sophomore through senior year so we had to read a lot more than the regular English class did But I definitely didn't like all of what we read!! And I also think most of these have been mentioned before, I guess every high school reads the same junk!

Lord of the Flies- Hated it
Julius Caesar- Hated it
Macbeth - Hated it
Hamlet- Hated it (Notice a pattern here... )
The Scarlett Letter - Okay
Sophie's World- Loved it!
To Kill a Mockingbird- Loved it
1984- Okay
The Great Gatsby- Hated it
Canterbury Tales- Loved it (We even acted out some of the characters!)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn- Okay

Same boat as Novella, can only remember some of what I read. I know, for instance, that I absolutely loved an existentialist play we read in French class, but for the life of me I can remember neither the author nor the title.

Enjoyed
Hamlet
MacBeth
Julius Caesar
The Catcher in the Rye
1984
Fifth Business
Oedipus Rex
Death of a Salesman
Le Cid
Brave New World
Lord of the Flies (this one comes with a caveat - I loved it the first time I read it in Grade 7. I abhored it the nth time I read it in Grade 11. I still like it, just would never want to be forced to read it again - there's such a thing as too much of a good thing.)

Hated
Great Expectations
David Copperfield
The Stone Angel (extra credit due to huge lack of class attendance in graduating year)
L'Etranger
Henry 4th Part 1
Twelve Night
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Midsummer Night's Dream
Three Men in Snow (translated title of German book. What I understood, sucked.)
The Handmaid's Tale
Wuthering Heights

Tale of Two Cities (I think I would have enjoyed this one if I had attended class and actually finished it)

To Kill a Mockingbird (I'm kind of iffy on this one... don't hate it as I do some of the others, but I could have gone through life without reading it and not felt too bad)

The Great Gatsby (this one I'm not sure where to place. During Grade 13, I thought it was dumb, but had potential. I read maybe a third of it. I've since read it in its entirety and very much enjoy it.)

Pygmallion (same story as Great Gatsby above, except with less emphasis on my enjoyment of it)

There's definitely more on the hated list, but I've done my best over the last couple years to purge from my memory all traces of those horrible forced reading experiences.

The Call of the Wild-loved it-
Romeo and Juliet-loved it
Great Expectations-tolerated
Animal Farm-hated
Barabbas-loved it-but it wasn't assigned, I found it on my own
A Separate Peace-liked it
To Kill A Mockingbird-loved it, own a copy today
Merchant of Venice-LOVED it-I had a great teacher and class
Hamlet- loved it
The Good Earth- loved it
Huckleberry Finn-loved it
Jane Eyre-loved it
The Sea Wolf- like it
The Great Gatsby-hated it
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber-hated it and every other Heminway story-too depressing for words
The Snows of Kilamanjaro-Yuck
Ivanhoe-loved it
Babbitt-tolerated barely-this was the same semester we read so many other depressing books and stories and I was really sick and lost three family members, so I wasn't up for depressing stuff..

Hey! Hope some of these titles won't be too lost on you as I'm an Australian:

Loved
Romeo & Juliet
The Leopard - Giusseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (awesome novel!!)
Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead - James Lee Burke


Didn't Love
Asturias - Brian Caswell
Mandragora - David McRobbie
Maestro - Peter Goldsworthy
Only the Heart - Caswell

Gosh, for some reason this seems like such a long time ago!

Loved:
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Romeo & Juliet (Shakespeare)
Beowulf (unknown)
Animal Farm (Orwell)
Brave New World (Huxley)
The Turn of the Screw (James)
The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
The Masque of the Red Death (Poe)
The Cask of Amontillado (Poe)

Hated:
Moby Dick (Melville)
Julius Caesar (Shakespeare)
Mythology (Hamilton)
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
The Scarlett Letter (Hawthorne)

I can't remember all of them but here are the ones I remember.

Positive:
Romeo and Juliet
My Antonia
The Scarlet Letter
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Brave New World
Pride and Prejudice
Main Street
Sense and Sensibility
Death Comes for the Archbishop
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
Roots
The Glass Menagerie
Jane Eyre

Neutral:
Cyrano de Bergerac
War of the Worlds
Othello
The Great Gatsby
The Stranger
Cold Sassy Tree
Of Mice and Men
The Little Prince

Negative:
Farewell to Manzanar
The Merchant of Venice
Animal Farm
1984
Oedipus Rex
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Washington, the Indispensable Man

This is from another thread, but I've ordered them to help you out. There's a few threads in the general book discussion about what people read at school - these might help you out too.

Positive Experience
Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Paterson
The Watertower - Gary Crew (a picture story book, would you believe, but it had themes and another story within the illustrations)
Obernewyn - Isobelle Carmody
Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare
Poetry - Pablo Neruda
Short Cuts - Raymond Carver
Hamlett - Shakespeare (J'ADORE!!!!!)
The Picador Book of the Beach (short stories, various authors)
The Riders - Tim Winton
The Cherry Orchard - Anton Checkhov
Tirra Lirra By the River - Jessica Anderson (LOVED IT!!!!)
Poetry - Robert Frost
Fly Away Peter - David Malouf
Montana 1948 - Larry Watson

Indifferent: These books just weren't to my taste, but they weren't a 'negative' experience.
Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry - Mildred Taylor
The Old Man and the Sea - Hemmingway.
Coonadoo - Susan Pritchard

Negative Experience
1984 - George Orwell
Othello - Shakespeare
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald