Of all the famous novels normally studied in grade school I think this is the most popular I never read. I know some people did but the English teacher I had for that year msut have skipped it. It would have been cool to read and discuss, too bad I missed it.
shareYou still can, you know.
When I was in eleventh grade, our English class' novel for the year was Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." The students in the other "academic curriculum" class for eleventh grade had Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations" instead, so I ended up listening to them complain about how we "got to" read "Huckleberry Finn," while they "had to" read "Great Expectations."
Many years later, I picked up a copy of "Great Expectations" and read it myself, just to see what all the fuss was about. Rather to my surprise, I found that "Great Expectations" is a wonderful novel. One of my favorites, in fact. At least when you're not reading it because you "have to," it is.
"I don't deduce, I observe."
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I didn't get to read it in high school. The reason being that my school was too busy assigning me--IN TWO SEPARATE ENGLISH CLASSES (one of which was taught by the frigging football coach) "A Separate Peace," easily my pick for the worst novel ever written (or at least that has received any acclaim.)
I read the book very recently. I'm 29 years old now. I didn't like the book that much--it is definitely for high schoolers, and as several reviews have pointed out, kids today do far worse things to each other, particularly in inner cities, than what the kids do to each other on that island in the book. I didn't like the book very much because I found it repetitive (too much blabbering about the damn fire, for one thing) and too obvious to me in my old age. I suppose it is not wrong to assign it to high schoolers at least because they would be able to pick apart the symbolism and it would still probably be profound to them, but I went from "David Copperfield" to LOTF and found it a bit of a dropoff, to say the least. At the least it'd be better for them than the wretched "A Separate Peace."
To the guy below assigned "Great Expectations" - your school was aiming HIGH to assign that in a class--most kids would probably find it too difficult!
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I didn't. We were given a choice between 2 books and we had to read one of them over summer.
The first one was called Animal Farm.
The other was some medieval book with old English.
I picked the medieval one(what a mistake). I read the first few chapters and immediately stopped... not gonna waste my vacation with that crap.
I ended up failing the test, but who gives a *beep*
"Where'd you get the beauty scar tough guy? Eatin' pineapple?"
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I read it when I was a sophomore in high school. We read the book for english class then we watched the movie in class. Its an R rated movie and I was 15 at the time and I saw it in class, along with a whole bunch of other students who were only 15 to 16 years old.
shareI didn't read it for my own account until almost getting cast in the stage version in my first year of college.
shareI didn't read it in high school - my class was given a choice between this book and some other one (I don't even remember now) but my parents flipped out and refused to let me read it, so I had to pick the other book. Shame too, I finally read it when I was 25 and saw the value in the story and think I would have benefitted from it in school. On the other hand, I probably understood the book better and with a different perspective when I was older.
shareNo. I wish we could have. I'd already seen the movie a bunch of times by then. I was just telling my boyfriend that they didn't have us read much, if I can recall.
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