Classical Torture: Assigned Reading

Yesterday I asked you what writers inspired you and who you enjoyed reading from the first moment you could get lost in the pages of a book. Today I want to think about the opposite – assigned reading that completely turned you off.

Classical Torture – the dreaded assignments of literary teachers eager to share their favorite volumes with their students, who assuredly will love it as much as they did. Heads up – they rarely do. My kids had it better than I did. Their lists included a variety of old and new, including: Shakespeare, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Outsiders, Where the Crawdads Sing, In Cold Blood, and A Streetcar Named Desire. My assignments were: Canterbury Tales, The Red Badge of Courage, The Grapes of Wrath, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Of Mice and Men. I think Of Mice and Men and A Streetcar Named Desire were our only overlaps. Somewhere, someone decided for books to be good, they must be morose. In college, I was assigned to read the drug-induced poetry of Byron, Keats, and Shelley and I had a professor who was absolutely infatuated with Moby Dick, aka for me, drudgery. I didn’t mind the Bronte Sisters or Hawthorne, but the absolute soul-sucking torture of Melville was my breaking point – and I believe the only time I used Cliffnotes. The man was one of my favorite professors of all time. He was kind and we could debate and banter about all kinds of things, but never that book. Every summer he took Moby Dick to the shore and sat on the beach reading that oppressive tome from cover to cover. I could not get beyond the first few words.

What books were you assigned that made you question the literary tastes of your professors? What book did you find pure torture? Comment below.