A fair warning

[Teenr0cker]

Lo and behold my companions! In my quest to read some of my AP English 3/4 literature, I have come across the single most horrid author of all time. From simply looking at the name "Herman Melville", one can make a variety of assumptions, which I leave to your speculation. Melville's main trait as a writer is his random digressions and tangents, often remotely related to the story at hand. There are many chapters dedicated to these digressions. Some examples are a chapter on how hardcore, honorable wooden fleet ships were dying out during that time, and how the wooden boat the story takes place on is the final, therefore most hardcore, wooden ship in the navy. Another describes the "innocence and beauty" of Billy Budd, where he is described as Hercules or Apollo. Another disturbing example is an entire chapter dedicated to stating that the antagonist perhaps has feelings of envy towards Billy because he is not as "clean and innocent, almost feminine" as Billy is. As in the antagonist, who is later killed with a single punch to the face (:shock:), is homosexual. THEN he talks about the works of an author of that time that also focused too much on homosexuality.

Also, Melville's works are riddled with double negatives and inverted sentence structuring (Think Yoda-speak) which only make the task of finishing the story seem unreachable

Final Summary: It's more interesting to watch the destruction of Namek in DBZ than read this 'short' story.

Anyone have any other books to avoid?

PS: All Barbera Kingsolver works are on this list. It just goes without saying.

Friggin Bean Trees

[Sage Of The Wise]

Now maby its just me, but I've been under the impresion that its some secret rule that any thing you're required to read in school always completly sucks. Being in an AP class must just amplify that rule.

[Jabbo]

The Poisonwood Bible by Kingsolver actually isn't that bad. It's about 100 pages too long and, as usual for her books, is centered around females (seriously, why doesn't she ever narrate as a male?), but pretty much everyone who read it thought it was a fairly good book.

The Scarlet Letter is the biggest piece of crap that anyone has ever called "literature" before. The whole book is just people whining about things that shouldn't matter, and then at the very end, something actually happens, and the theme of the book turns out to be something to the effect of "Doing good things is rewarded and doing evil things is punished." I think the only reason anyone cares about it is because it's American literature... and apparently American literature has some pretty low standards.

Read Death of a Salesman if you want to harvest some raw depression. It's one of those books that doesn't have a single happy thought in it.

I read some other terrible books last year, but I don't know if they're standard AP books though. I hope not. I think Catch-22 is the only AP book I've ever read that was incredibly awesome. The rest were either pathetic or tolerable.

[Teenr0cker]

I keep hearing "What about poisonwood bible?!?". Fuck Poisonwood Bible. Kingsolver is a feminist redneck hippie. I've done the reports on her shitty background. She was in the peace core, I believe. Oh, and in the Bean Trees, a retarded book that reflects her own 'life changing journey', there is not a single positive male figure the entire book. The teacher kept saying "oh, well you're just being paranoid," so I wrote 2 essays for that book. One to meet her standards and not fail when I didn't do the work, the other PROVING kingsolvers work was friggin feminist. It was a fine bit of work. I then promptly got out an axe, chopped the book up into chunks of evil, poured superglue, some ultra-fine gun powder, and some lighter fluid over the remainder and left a little trail 20 feet away. Two summers have passed since then, and my parents feel a little safer knowing it was a "one time deal" I assured them. Yet...My brother reads that book this year. Suggestions?

[Belthazar]

haha i totally avoided taking ap english for so i wouldnt read any of those boring books and write essays. Ah well kudos to you guys for having the guts to go through all that.

[EmperorJeramyu]

Too bad. I only had to read a novel called "Sophie's World" over the summer for my AP english. It's 500-some pages of pure boredom.

[Lord_Ehrgeiz]

Author, here, drink poison!!


ps: for those, who don't knew, "Jad" meens poison. it's russian!!

[Glenn47]

Damn, I have to read The Scarlet Letter soon in an English class where the guy already puts me to sleep. I'm gonna fail half the book's tests.

[Exiled]

Damn, I have to read The Scarlet Letter soon in an English class where the guy already puts me to sleep. I'm gonna fail half the book's tests.

I hate that fucking book...

[Sage Of The Wise]

I dont even know what I have to read next... I'm getting scared now.

Last year I had to read A Fairwell To Arms, that was the most boring book I have had to read in years, exept maby Antigone, but atleast that was short.

[Burning_Flame]

Any book for school becomes boring

[Sage Of The Wise]

Well, in 8th grade we did read The Giver,which was ok. But compared to everything else we read its great.

[Burning_Flame]

But you always end up looking to deep int othe book, not everything has to represent a feeling or sompthing! Like my teacher was like what does the baseball bat represent? And nobody new and she was like the conflict between the protagonist and the father

[Exiled]

That last post reminds me of this...
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/211117

[Jabbo]

Everything is a symbol for either life, death, conflict, hope, or some other abstract concept that sounds deep. You can generally pick one at random and force a connection. Try it sometime. Pick a random object and choose one of the abstract concepts and talk at length about how they relate. I've compared a piece of pine straw to life, a pile of rubble to the crushed hopes of humankind, and a clod of dirt to the morality of death.

For example: My friend and I have decided to call the pile of rubble in the back of the school (that's been there for 8-10 months) a work of modern art. I have named it "Forgotten Dreams," and its bricks represent the hopes of humankind; the broken bricks are man's crushed aspirations. The ties for the stacks of bricks, now lain askew and tangled, represent our interactions with others, and how they often get muddled, losing hold over what truly matters, the bricks, or our hopes. A stray board in the center of the stack represents a tombstone, showing us the result of a life of forgotten dreams: a grave of sorrow, buried in one's own crushed hopes.

And that only took 2 or 3 minutes to come up with.