(no subject)

Maybe I didn't so much hate texts assigned in high school as violently resist them. They had to win me over, and even in the cases where they did I was mad at them for all those hours of mistrust, misunderstanding, and exhausting widenings (temporally, spatially, and in categories transcending both) of my habitual spheres of sympathy. A sort of learning I didn't become used to - partly because each book was at least one more such sort, and never of a kind external hints really prepared you for, even the blurb on the back or the fairly simple ethical lesson the book had glaringly been selected to convey; whereas physics and math gave you little, intelligible bits at a time where you weren't pushed up against glass very long before falling through into comprehension. And those were math, physics: you knew what they were for, you couldn't argue they weren't important. Whereas a book some fool adult made up. Each author had to prove her selective unfoolishness in the face of a near-total skepticism. And usually I wouldn't acknowledge that they had - their various successes, my grudging and tentative agreements with them, started out as probationary hypotheses floating in my head, the way most teenage thoughts are hypotheses, contrary recurrences in a glial continuum of all the ways at once (hence similarly hypothetical) that any fresh missive from adults could be suspected as scornworthy propaganda. For good reason - surly teenagers have a similarly high batting accuracy in their assumptions about the world as depressives do, but unlike depressives aren't in danger of losing the few moments that really count through too high a rate of false negatives. Even what they hate they retain.

Assigned, booklength high school texts that had me and I knew it by halfway through: A Tale of Two Cities, My Life and Hard Times

By the end I was coming around: Silas Marner, Red Badge of Courage, Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Great Gatsby, The Crucible, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Stranger, Winesburg Ohio

Ended still annoyed or ambivalent, but thought about with increasing respect thereafter: The Sun Also Rises, The Catcher in the Rye, Romeo and Juliet, Lord of the Flies, Macbeth, Oedipus Rex, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, Inherit the Wind, Hemingway's stories, The Scarlet Letter, Brave New World, Flowers for Algernon

Thought I'd pretty much bounced off of, and yet remembered well years later: Animal Farm, Billy Budd, The Death of a Salesman, Of Mice and Men, Antigone, A Separate Peace, a couple Reginald Rose teleplays where I forget the titles

Skimmed or didn't finish at the time: Huck Finn, Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe, A Christmas Carol

Genuinely lost on me: Beowulf

Hard to state how divergent this is from how I'd rank these books now, of course. Clearly my high school had some kind of policy against long novels - I remember my sister's public school (an arts-centered one) had her reading things like The Brothers Karamazov and Middlemarch.