what book did you have to read the most during your formal education?

Huck Finn comes to mind for me, but i feel like there's something that supersedes it...the bluest eye? moby dick?

Frigging Heart of Dankness

haha

Wait, no, that would have been awesome. I had to read its correctly-typed ancestor Heart of Darkness. Assigned to me four times in my class-taking career.

THE SUN ALSO RISES

definitely^^

I had to read Turn of the Screw 3x

ugh

For the final year of GCSE English Lit, we were assigned Macbeth and Far From The Madding Crowd. That's all we studied for those three terms, just to make sure that we knew both back to front and could pass the exam.

I think I read the Metamorphosis at least three times (though I think I read it on my own first). Heart of Darkness too.

the whole thing of making people in hs read "serious literature" is slightly fucked-up. well-intentioned, but how can you possibly understand themes of this stuff until you are out on your own and have fornicated, had heart broken, "earned a living", etc.?

i had to read this in three different classes:

http://ysamphy.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/getting-to-yes.jpg

Oh no.

do you feel like it helped you? in life?

is that some mba canonical text?

Ha I was assigned Macbeth 3x too (eighth grade, senior year of high school, and then last year) but I only barely read it last year.

I read Twelfth Night every single year of college. Which was definitely not a bad thing.

My first year at university, about four or five of the profs recommended as the main text for their subject books that they had co-written. It got so bad that after the third time everyone in the class was rolleyes.gif whenever it happened.

Shakespeare, Hamlet x 5
Plato, Symposium x 3

Ha I was assigned Macbeth 3x too

It was for three consecutive terms. We did get to see the Roman Polanski movie as well, complete with sarcastic comments from the English teacher.

Heart of Darkness, the Trial, Hamlet + Mother Courage always seemed to come up a lot during school

i never had hamlet or macbeth but went through all the mimsy shakespeares no one cares about (measure for measure, twelfth night, winter's tale, etc) a lot

other than that, maybe the great gatsby

is that some mba canonical text?

it might be, but i was in a public policy program -- and in life you come across people with very strong opinions/emotions about politics, so the book illustrates how to get past that and actually *talk*.

my bff to this day is my bff in part b/c in ninth grade we watched old (pre-claire danes) movie version of romeo and juliet and he invested his energies in pointing his erasable ink pen at juliet's cleavage with most dogged consistency. also we had to memorize twelve lines from the play, and while everyone (including me) was doing flowery "wherfore art thou" passages, he did the "did you bite your thumb at me?" exchange

Do short stories qualify? Because John Updike's A&P.

I had to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for 2 different classes. Hated it. And The Tempest in both high school and uni.

probably Kant's 'What is Enlightenment', which I've been assigned probably half a dozen times.

probably.

I had to read that Nacerima paper about 4 times throughout my anthropology undergraduate, that's not really a book though. I've seen that footage of an older Raymond Dart playing around with bone weapons in African cave and saying "they'd use this to rip up the belly of the animal" more times than I can ever remember.

hah

At least you didn't have to watch that neanderthal makeout video more than once.

A single book doesn't spring to mind, but I studied the Nazi's rise to power no less than three times.

And WWI at least twice.

the only thing i recall reading more than once was Beowulf

and it was a different translation each time so it wasn't even the same thing exactly

frankenstein, 3x iirc

i did not read it any of those times

Macbeth x3

romeo and juliet 4 times

i did not read it any of those times

lol

for me it's macbeth and othello. both at least 3 times.

another interesting question is certain omnipresent texts that you somehow managed to avoid reading. i never read heart of darkness until i had to teach it.

had to read the triumvirate of animal farm, 1984, and brave new world a few times as well.

lol i think heart of darkness is my answer to this, at least 3 times

why did you have to read these texts so many times?

anyway, Othello and Far From the Madding Crowd stick out the most.

what put shakespeare over the top was an ill considered "shakespeare and film" elective.

maybe it says a lot about changing standards in education but sorta shocked that anyone could answer "moby dick" to this question.

Descartes's Meditations, I think. And then as a TA.

Midsummer Night's Dream, and I studied the rise of Hitler in some detail three times.

xp yeah my theory about heart of darkness is that the low page count makes it appealing to teachers who are on a tight timeline

students won't read long shit

TekWars

various Gabriel Garcia Marquez short stories. I think I was asked to read Eréndira 3x (hs and 2 college classes)
otherwise i haven't read a lot of these classics because i never took an English lit class after high school and i wasn't about to read most of them for pleasure

This is so weird. I can't think of any! And I was an English major!

Any that I had to read repeatedly, I mean. Hmmmmmm. I honestly don't think there were any that I had to read more than 2x.

Actually I think I have one. I think I read Jane Eyre 1x in HS and 2x in college.

Wait - if short stories count then "The Yellow Wallpaper" because I'm sure I read it at least 3x between English and Women's Studies courses.

If we're counting short stories, Flannery O'Connor (a Georgia thing, no doubt)

Macbeth and Othello too

but how can you possibly understand themes of this stuff until you are out on your own and have fornicated, had heart broken, "earned a living", etc.?

― dude (del), Sunday, 19 September 2010 18:14

lol

lol

I have never read Macbeth. How did I manage that? I did buy it recently and plan to but, yeah, I somehow managed to complete a BA in English and American Lit from an accredited and pretty well thought of University without ever reading the Scottish play. I know that nobody can read everything but it does seem like one of the things you'd just be required to read at some point and yet I never was.

Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion

(yes, I'm Canadian)

Probably Savage Inequalities. Infuriating, and well worth at least a single read.

There was a lot less required reading during my time in high school, and after two years of higher education I fled from the traditional major-based curriculum-heavy colleges to Evergreen State College in Washington State, an experimental school where there was no curriculum worth mentioning, but where I read a ton of Shakespeare, Homer and other classics, because they interested me.

What's the pedagogical mania for Macbeth? I had it too! But also Othello and, novelwise, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest... there must have been another novel or two...

I think Macbeth's ghosts, witches etc are understood to appeal to kids more than religious allegories or whatever in Shakespeare's other works.

that, and Macbeth is shorter than most of the other plays

In high school we did Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet, in that order. Not sure if that was intended to be a ramping up of difficulty. I think it wasn't until Hamlet that I started to feel any serious appreciation.

Weird. I seem to recall us doing the same texts in about the same order, minus JC (which I've never read/seen to this day). I'm wondering if the reasoning for this went something like, lets start them off with a comedy, then do the teen romance before we hit them with the really heavy stuff. I remember my classmates hating 12N, and while I don't remember what the consensus on R&J was, it wasn't til I did Macbeth that I started liking Shakespeare at all.

My high school ones were, in order, Merchant of Venice, nothing in 4th form, Romeo & Juliet, Antony & Cleopatra, and The Tempest.

I have never read Macbeth. How did I manage that? I did buy it recently and plan to but, yeah, I somehow managed to complete a BA in English and American Lit from an accredited and pretty well thought of University without ever reading the Scottish play. I know that nobody can read everything but it does seem like one of the things you'd just be required to read at some point and yet I never was.

I never read Hamlet until after I graduated. English lit major.