<p>I definately know what you mean alamode. It took me a while to get used to the "Ahs" because I first read them as "ahhhhhhh" screaming...</p>
<p>I didn't think Wuthering Heights wasn't that bad...I guess if you're not very interested in reading dramatic romance stuff, then I can see that. :)</p>
<p>Well "Therese Raquin" by Zola was the most depressing book I have ever read. Therese cheats on her husband (who is her cousin) with his friend, and they murder her husband but then are driven insane and kill each other. And that same semester we read "The Stranger" by Camus, where the main character kills an Arab and is sentenced to death. There should be a law against reading too many depressing books at once.</p>
<p>Both were interesting, but I felt like jumping off a cliff at after reading them, if you get what I mean. X_X</p>
<p>The Jungle got really annoying. I just tuned out all the socialist propaganda towards the end.</p>
<p>Campbell's Biology can be... not fun... sometimes.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Wasn't hard to understand at all, just excruciatingly boring. I honestly don't understand why people consider it a good book. It has a very plain, boring writing style (almost as though you were reading a journal), and concrete characters who don't develop. I understand it's a philosophical statement but that doesn't justify it for me.</p></li>
<li><p>Beloved by Toni Morrison. Confusing and frustrating writing style.. Constant flashbacks with no warning (especially since they are written in present tense), and you wouldn't want to know what was going on in my head when some woman named Beloved who was supposed to be dead showed up out of nowhere, but I would probably think it was good if I could stay awake long enough to read a chapter.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I can't believe so many of you didn't like Pride and Prejudice! And The Old Man and the Sea! So good!</p>
<p>My least favorite English book ever (Maybe not so difficult to read, but I hated it): MY ANTONIA.</p>
<p>OH MY GOD. "And there was nothing! I felt lost in the nothing. The sky was so wide that it was like there was nothing. The corn went on forever; I felt erased in the nothing. I sat in the garden. There was nothing. I took a nap. I woke up. There was still nothing. There was nothing to do. I had nothing. There was nothing in the field."</p>
<p>OH MY GOD HOW ON EARTH CAN YOU WRITE A BOOK ABOUT NOTHING?!?!</p>
<p>The Old Man and the Sea</p>
<p>Oh, I loved Old Man and the Sea but my older two daughters did not care for it either. DD1 (senior) just finished Crime and Punishment and LOVED it and DD2 (sophomore) just finished Grapes of Wrath and HATED it.</p>
<p>-The Scarlet Letter: Way too much symbolism
-Pride and Prejudice: Way too much randomly traveling around the country.
-Call of the Wild: I read this in middle school and my teacher gave us quizzes afterward with questions like "What was the temperature at the beginning of chapter 6?"</p>
<p>What do mean The Scarlet Letter had too much symbolism?! What about Invisible Man? Entire chapters of the book were written in pure symbolism, even if it didn't make any sense in the real world.</p>
<p>I have to agree, though, about the criticism of Pride and Prejudice. The story is really obnoxious and fairy-tale -like, the characters just aren't real. </p>
<p>The old Greek books (i.e. Iliad, Aenead) are the absolute worst, as the entire family tree of the character is written (Hector, son of .., who was the son of ..., who was the son of ..., who was the son of this or that god).</p>
<p>Old Man and the Sea is also pretty bad. The entire story comprises of catching and losing a fish, in the plainest, most uninteresting terms.</p>
<p>Scarlet Letter. Enough said.</p>
<p>Hector, son of..., son of..., son off....</p>
<p>^I got really really used to skipping those parts. Also got used to skipping the parts where unimportant characters were introduced and then were killed three seconds later.</p>
<p>Beloved: I really love Toni Morrison. I wrote my term paper on this one last year. It was a little confusing at parts, but I think all her books are, and I like them better because of it.</p>
<p>Heart of Darkness. Kill me, please.</p>
<p>Winter of Our Discontent was too confusing and complicated to be read Soph year.</p>
<p>Scarlet Letter, anything by AYN RAND (not hard, but very annoying and bad dialogue)</p>
<p>How come nobody has mentioned Thomas Pynchon? Nobody has attempted to wade through Gravity's Rainbow or the Crying of Lot 49?</p>
<p>call of the wild = terrible. Agh.</p>
<p>Heart of Darkness.
And the Federalist Papers. Interesting and all, but incredably boring. Maybe if I hadn't read them in one sitting...</p>
<p>^ ouch, one sitting? I liked reading them piecemeal</p>
<p>One sitting, one night (no sleeping!). Then wrote a report on them.
An A+ thank you very much. I honestly don't even remember writing it...</p>
<p>"anything by AYN RAND (not hard, but very annoying and bad dialogue)"</p>
<p>Agreed; I had to read three books by her and do an entire research paper on them. Those books should not be allowed inside any English curriculum.</p>
<p>I also really hated The House on Mango Street; it's in the category of books called "making it unintelligible will lead to universal acclaim".</p>
<p>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. How many ways can you spell the word "the"? Canterbury Tales is nothing compared to Sir Gawain. At least Canterbury Tales is standardized within the text, has neither thorns nor yoghs, and is actually funny.</p>