College killed my streak of reading way more than high school. And it wasn't really college's fault either, my teachers were great but when I had *that much work* and mentally difficult talks, the last thing I wanted to do was use my brain *more* in my off time.
I know education is changing, but when I was in high school my AP lit classes were full to the brim of useful skills and discussions that I still use to this day with media comprehension. But it would have been useless if I had simply disregarded all of it and decided it was stupid.
College killed how much I read mostly because I wanted to take advantage of it. Once I was done with classes, school reading, assignments, and studying there was usually *something* social going on at any given time, always *someone* to hang out with. And I knew I was never gonna get another time like college again so I wanted it all. Didn't wanna hole up in my room reading when I could be playing beer bocce!
No regrets, got the rest of my life to read books and tons of great memories for the road
Exactly this. Thought I had honestly replied already after I read your comment. Lol. One of my profs required reading was his self published book of crappy poetry he required us to buy.
Haha I had a professor do the same thing, but it was a novel about a clown, a person in a wheel chair, and I don't remember what else, I just ended up switching classes after hearing that.
I feel like college kills a lot of people's streaks, because it's just sooo much reading. Even if you don't take a Lit class you are reading a shit ton of not exciting textbooks. Plus studying for maths and what not. After all that, reading for enjoyment just loses its appeal.
Yeah I'd have to be really excited about a book for me to pick it up after I finish all my required reading for my classes. I'm sure I'll have the time and energy to read waay more once I don't have to read so much for assignments due.
My English teacher sophomore year made me loathe reading because they had a “everything has an interpretation - but only mine is the correct one, even if it conflicts with the author or everyone else.”
The curtain were goddamned blue because the author simply liked the color.
The curtain rail was made of copper because of the author's yearn of personal connections though.
I loved reading as a child, and still do decades later, but while I was in HS (11/12 during the mid 80s, in the US) I had the displeasure of having an English teacher that was utterly convinced that every book - no matter what genre, no matter who wrote it, no matter when - contained detailed information about how the author hated their mother.
You might scoff, and even to me this sounds like a hilarious situation to be in, but it was literal hell at the time. Our grades depended on not only finding where in the book this information was hidden, but we had to find the SAME location and give the SAME explanation as what this teacher pre-determined it to be. Our book reports, for both class assigned and personal readings, had to clearly identify this information, and we had to argue our case for books that this teacher had not read themselves in a way that the teacher could properly envision and agree with.
The lessons learned from the book were secondary, and you still had to learn them accordingly, but you could fail an assignment if your mother hating argument was not valid or didn't contain enough details to satisfy.
edit: bad phrasing
This sounds like hell on Earth. I grew up loving literature, reading, and writing because there was no set 'correct answer' and that a strong enough argument would hold weight. That teacher would have driven me nuts.
This 💯. I had the same HS English teacher for 11/12th. I was (and always will be) an avid reader. However, I was not a fan of her book choices (*Fifth Business* & *Hamlet* being the only exceptions). But she gave me an appreciation for poetry and brought my ability to analyze between the lines to a height that would have taken me a decade to develop on my own. I will always be grateful to her for that (even if it took her over a year to remember my name).
I often wonder if there's a better way to teach literature comprehension to middle and high schoolers.
On one hand, a big part of me feels like the way they pick books with an emphasis on "classics" doesn't really make sense and is misguided for a group of 12-18 year olds. I definitely tended to find the more modern/recent books more interesting and relatable on average.
But on the other hand, I'm skeptical that there's any selection of books you could force a group of adolescents to read without breeding some resentment. I loved reading ever since elementary school but still was often complaining along with my friends about a lot of those books (The Outsiders was probably the one I hated the most lol).
I was blessed to have very good English teachers and literature professors throughout my academic career. They were all smart people who understood the point of literature and reading. But brother, I have heard some horror stories. Many of us will have read that [letter to Flannery O'Conner](https://biblioklept.org/2012/02/22/my-tone-is-not-meant-to-be-obnoxious-i-am-in-a-state-of-shock-flannery-oconnor-responds-to-an-english-professor/), and it really is emblematic of just the worst kind of understanding of literature.
I absolutely loved English class all the way up until I was in my senior year of high school and had an awful teacher who was really unpleasant / mean and her class caused me to stop reading books for a little while just because I was so tired after reading of her assigned books that I just didn't have it in me to read for fun in my free time. Luckily I rediscovered my love for reading the next summer and I read all of the Andy Weir books that were out in one week. To this day sci-fi books always get me out of reading slumps
I began college studying English literature, and that letter really nails why I switched to another major. So much of literary studies is about reading entirely too much into literature. I went along with it but I always had a nagging feeling that the meaning behind stories couldn't be so hidden, that a writer was failing in their basic duty if they wrote something that was difficult to understand.
Now, conveying the subtlety and nuance of a complex idea often requires metaphors, allusions, and other literary constructs, and a good work of literature will encourage readers to think about and discuss the themes with others; and some works of literature are meant to be beautiful in their own right, just as some paintings are simply meant to be beautiful; but no decent writer is going to write something so complicated that only a person with a master's degree or PhD can understand it (or if they do, they've failed in their basic task of communication).
I'm paraphrasing Heller, but in _Catch-22_, there is a great line describing an officer who studied English at college: "He understood everything about literature except how to enjoy it."
Hmm, I think there *are* worthwhile works that an English degree definitely helps to understand, and I don’t know that it’s an absolute failing. They’re just writing for a niche audience. But many writers do.
At the same time, the whole lit professor industry of people writing extremely specific papers interpreting fiction seems a bit… useless, to me. I’m open to being convinced, but it’s hard to look at all that and see a valuable contribution to human knowledge. Especially when most of it is written in such a way, and arguing such abstruse points, that it’s only of interest to or really readable by other professors.
Huh. I don’t love her shooting down someone’s interpretation especially with her religious message—if the teacher thinks the story becomes surreal, more power to them? Plus I’m a proponent of Death of the Author when it comes to interpretation (though someone asking the author to validate theirs clearly is not)—but I definitely appreciate this part:
> If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.
That last clause especially is why so much of the English-class approach never did much for me. It’s hard to care about trying to interpret something that you didn’t like enough to want to keep thinking about it.
Her message isn’t religious per se. It’s pointing out the often surprising difference between someone who supposedly engages with the given material in the accepted way, and someone who *actually* does. It applies to a lot more than religion.
Yes! My women's literature professor. I'm a woman btw. This lady almost exclusively selected novels that Lifetime movies could've been based on. It was all so predictable and one-dimensional. Women can write about topics other than shitty men!
All of grad school made me quit reading for quite a few years. Texts were seen as something to be skimmed and mined for information, rather than something pleasurable.
I had a Con Law professor that made us read Roscoe Pound. His writings are so hard to read -even few pages at a time- that I still recall thinking I'd rather go blind than be forced to keep reading this. Made reading anything feel like a chore for the next several years.
Reading for a professional license made me completely ignore reading for fun for several years.
Kinda like having a desk job where I sat at a computer killed my desire to play video games as well.
Yes that's the perfect way to describe it! Instead of reading things carefully and letting it marinate in my mind, I felt like I had to skim and speed read through all the textbooks and papers that I had to read for certain english classes. There are definitely good teachers out there who care about creating an enjoyable reading experience though
I had good teachers in high school, but what killed my love was the time frames we had. I'm not the fastest reader, and if I read too fast, I absorb nothing. It was hell having only about two weeks to be able to read and completely understand all of Great Expectations and take a big test about it before immediately moving to the next book.
Ugh yeah I hated that. I'm not a fast reader normally and I'm really slow on stuff I'm just not interested in, so it was always hell having to read stuff for class. Thank god for SparkNotes. The only books I ever actually finished reading in high school were short.
Ditto. I don't know what a teacher would have had to do to make me hate a book: read it aloud while having me tortured?
I felt totally crushed by a grad seminar on Malory (secondary readings + the text meant whole days spent in the library) but I still love *Le Morte Darthur* to this day.
I think there’s this weird contingent of folks who convince themselves they’d love literature if only it wasn’t for these evil teachers who…made them read literature.
I think there is an argument that it might kill your love of a particular work, but you’re right, you never enjoyed literature if school permanently killed any desire to engage with it.
The complaints always boil down to "I didn't get to do what I want." It's insolent children. Look at OP, the crux of their complaint is that there were due dates and they didn't get to choose the pace they read at. Most other people are complaining their hs english teacher made them read Shakespeare instead of whatever YA dystopian scifi series they were into at the time.
I also like all the complaints that can essentially be rephrased as "I would love reading more except my English teacher didn't let me just read with my brain off, she actually wanted me to engage with the reading, which obviously killed my love for it." Yeah man, sounds like a deep passion for reading there
Eh I can understand people like me who majored in lit in college having difficulty reading for pleasure for a while. I loved my degree program, but it was exhausting. If you extensively do something very intensely in very short periods of time it can wear you out even on something you love.
If you have any anxiety around grades and/or how your professor and peers will evaluate your thoughts in the open during class discussions, that anxiety then can become tied to the act of reading. That association can take a bit to dispel after you graduate. I didn’t suffer from this exact situation but I had peers who did.
It also becomes mission-oriented reading to pick out specific things that the professor would like, or would be good for a paper, or that would be a good point for a discussion post, rather than enjoying the journey of the story. Which can still definitely involve using your brain and literary analysis, but doing so on your own for fun is still different than needing to worry about how your reading experience and interpretations will be judged by others and how it lines up with what you’re learning in class.
I never lost my love for reading and really enjoyed my program but getting burnt out even doing things you love is a legit thing.
> Eh I can understand people like me who majored in lit in college having difficulty reading for pleasure for a while. I loved my degree program, but it was exhausting. If you extensively do something very intensely in very short periods of time it can wear you out even on something you love.
That's completely different than what people say though. They aren't saying "my capacity was taken up doing so much for school that there wasn't room for pleasure." They're not talking about burnout. They're saying the fact that there's a class with selected books, assignments, analysis and due dates killed their love for reading. The fact that their teacher/professor asked more of them than simply reading the book cover to cover to get a good grade is what they're complaining about. You see their posts all the time "i just started reading again at 30 because my english teacher in hs chose the books and it made me fall out of love for reading" and it's just absurd.
Burnout is an understandable complaint. Their complaints boil down to the insolence of children who don't like there being an authority figure
Super rude to be calling others "insolent children" on here where people are trying to have an open discussion. I think the only childish person here is you for name-calling and looking down on people who had unfortunate experiences with reading at some points in life. Can you really admit that you've loved every required reading during high school and college?
> Can you really admit that you've loved every required reading during high school and college?
If this is your takeaway you should have paid more attention in class
Like u/ToasterCrumbtray said, you really do sound reductive and pretentious. I definitely have a deep passion for reading but I also struggled with the reading material that my professors provided for one reason for another. Those two things are not exclusive. It kind of sounds like you're scolding people for not enjoying all the assigned reading material they had in school.
Gosh, your comments are reductive and pretentious. It's like you're scolding home cooks losing their love of cooking as they have to adjust to more and more dietary restrictions.
Maybe your tolerance for the amount of things making reading a chore is higher than mine, but at the end of the day, shouldn't we want more people reading? Like maybe we can look at the responses in this thread and learn ways to not discourage people from reading?
Yall really love busting out that pretentious buzzword for anyone who holds an opinion you disagree with lol you'd think a sub dedicated to reading could come up with more than just that one single word
>It's like you're scolding home cooks losing their love of cooking as they have to adjust to more and more dietary restrictions.
No, it's more like I'm making fun of people who claim they love cooking, but show up to a cooking class and start bitching that having to follow instructions made them lose their love for cooking.
If we listened to people on reddit the solution would be "stop teaching" so nah, maybe we shouldn't do that. Just because people whine doesn't mean they have a valid complaint
I agree totally in terms of hating a specific book, but in terms of the original question “killing your love for reading” I can definitely understand it. If you enjoy reading as a pleasurable escape, but then a course makes reading all about break-neck pace, picking out specific details and pieces of information you need for assignments, and tying to self-worth in an anxiety inducing way (with grades and assessed discussions in class), it can become a tiresome chore for a while. Some people have difficulty being able to relax and love reading again as simple enjoyment.
I think a lot of people, such as you OP, just have a really hard time wrestling with the concept that just because you enjoy something as a hobby doesn't mean you're going to enjoy it in a more rigorous setting. For instance, you say this course killed your love of reading because it had deadlines to meet, but, I'm sorry, what did you expect from an organized course? To be able to finish the book whenever you want? That sounds like an issue with your expectations
Like it really feels like you guys have some idealized view of literature classes where everyone reads what they want, shows up and tells other people about it, and gets an A for discussion. People in this sub will legit harbor a grudge against their hs english teacher because they had to discuss symbolism in a literature course. Makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
At a certain point it just comes across as naive, if not a little anti intellectual, to not expect a class to have coursework and throw a fit about how it killed your joy when it does. A literature class is never going to be the same as leisure reading, they're not meant to be, they serve different purposes.
I still meet people who are in their late 20s who complain about having to read To Kill A Mockingbird in high school or something. People in university level Creative Writing/English courses who proudly and openly claim to hate classical literature because it's "boring" and they don't like being "forced" to read books. Like, I hate to say it, but you are in courses where you are paying to study literature. You'll have to read something other than royal court fantasy every now and then, and it will likely be on a schedule.
You're absolutely right and it baffles me that people a) can't see the distinction between books they HAD to read to get a deeper understanding of language/text/society/whatever, and books they read for fun and b) expect English teachers to make everything fun and engaging, but every other subject gets a pass?
I teach high school English (ESL, European mainland). For the first couple of years, we let students pick their own books and I don't care if they choose Charles Dickens or Colleen Hoover, as long as they *read*. But when they get to their exam year, especially the higher levels, we expect a certain degree of literary analysis to be done and you can't do that with books like *Fifty Shades of Grey.* And yes, subsequently they tell me I'm killing their love of reading.
I'm sorry, but it's a school assignment. You literally *cannot* do it with some books.
I don't think it's naive or anti-intellectual to admit that you were turned off from reading because of a few bad experiences during school. Not everyone has good professors after all.
There is a point. I love the old myths. My college “fun” class on fantasy made me almost hate the Odyssey for a year because of how badly the class managed the story. Gilgamesh also got mawed. Too much time was wasted on simple comprehension without going into themes or commentary.
Bad classes can definitely ruin books for you! I was forced to read a ton of Shakespeare in one class with a teacher that wasn't very nice and I had a miserable time but I started reading one of his plays in my free time one day and I enjoyed it way more that time around. It's easier to enjoy books without super strict deadlines and writing assignments due the next day
I read voraciously until I finished my lit degree, 9 years later and I'm still struggling to get back to it. I read about 8 books last year, which was the most I've read since 😂
Working in publishing made it hard to enjoy reading. I would be reading and editing all day long, so it was the last thing I wanted to do in my spare time.
Then, that job would end, and I would be reading – – until I got the next publishing job
Didn't necessarily "kill" my love for reading, but I definitely hit burnout with the density of reading (classical history, philosophy, law, etc...). Had to step back for a bit and explore other hobbies before returning with something "lighter". That mental sensation equivalent to "muscle strain" is real.
It's a weird mix. High school english never dampened my love of reading, but ny teachers rarely strengthened it either.
College gave me my favorite professor and completely changed my outlook on literature. Even the professors with too much reading usually had great outlooks. I only had one, an online course, that really ruined things for me.
My AP US History teacher in high school almost killed my love for history, but that's as close as it gets. He would talk with his eyes closed a lot and the students used to joke that the man would put *himself* to sleep. He somehow was even able to make major battles boring.
I didn’t experience this in school, but about two years into being an attorney, I gave up reading for pleasure. In my particular specialty, all I do is read and write all day everyday.
Nine years later, I stumbled upon a book I’d never heard of in a “Little Lending Library” at the park. I started reading it and, for whatever reason, a joy of reading for pleasure came back to me. I’m embarrassed to reveal what that book was, but I did write to the author thanking him.
Honestly, not really, but as a lit major I didn't read just for pleasure for a period of probably five years. Obviously reading for class demanded most of my attention, but even after I graduated I couldn't pick up a book without my brain going into analysis mode, so I didn't really read. I don't think I questioned my love of reading, I just had to figure out my way back to it as a hobby and for enjoyment.
I feel this. I dropped literature after the first year, but have never found my way back to physically reading for pleasure.
I just never figured out how to turn off the analysis mode.
Never.
Even if I had terrible teachers, reading was always something that I loved. Its not like a kid would stop playing Fortnite if he had to make a paper about it.
People don't hate reading because of teachers. People hate reading in schools because the reading is much more complex than in regular books.
Literature in school is used to enhance your critical reading skills, not to enjoy reading. If you read manga or Colleen Hoover you would not develop critical reading skills that are fundamental for college.
I'll never understand why people cite that book as the worst thing literature class had to offer. I read it voluntarily when I was sixteen or seventeen and I didn't particularly like it, but it wasn't hard to get through at all. I've struggled more with other books.
No, I’ve certainly had to read books I didn’t enjoy, or write essays that I didn’t want to write, but it never had an impact on my love of reading overall. Maybe at most, I took a break from reading certain types of content.
All of high school. The Scarlet Letter remains my most hated piece of literature decades after I read it.
Once I hit university and could take courses based on certain themes, I could choose things which were interesting and I enjoyed it a lot more.
Yep. In grad school I had to read several to many books and articles a week. That would have been fine (as an earlier comment said, it’s meant to stretch you), except I also worked more than full time, plus did fetish work on the side and was involved in trials and other gig economy things - my schooling was fully funded, but I had financial responsibilities with my parents and siblings. It fucking blew. It took me years to read more than a book a month after that.
I have a bachelors in English, I didn't read a single book for fun until the last semester of my senior year. All my time was spent doing the required reading and writing plus other classes and a job. I played video games for fun. When I graduated I knew I had to either pick the hobby back up or I'll never make it a priority.
Interestingly it was elementary school that was the worst for me. I was at a higher reading level than most of my classmates and we were often reading books in class that I had finished on my own 1-2 years previous. I remember loving "Paddle to the Sea," "My Side of the Mountain" and other youth books on my own and then found it absolutely soul-crushing to plod laboriously through them in class, with a teacher that insisted on spending 10 minutes on the title page and the table of contents with classmates who could barely sound out words.
High school AP English was ROUGH. It went fast and I had to read things I had absolute zero interest in. But looking back, those classes did more for my critical thinking skills and gave me so many lessons in nuance and context. Two concepts that have apparently been lost today. I was a little tuckered out of the heavy hitting literature during this period, but I definitely read lighter things outside of class.
College was….not as bad? I got to skip most of the introductory ones because of AP credit and my degree was biology/CJ so I didn’t have to take too many. But the ones I did take were just for the credits/requirements and I could pick ones that were more tailored to my interests. Didn’t lose my lifelong love of reading in either educational setting though.
My English teacher in college (UK) soley reading 'Death of a salesman' in a monotone voice for weeks and not letting anyone do any of the other characters, was hell on earth. It didn't even make sense!
Yes, it was called College.
In all honestly, nothing killed my love for reading like being forced to read things i didn't want to every day. Once I graduated and started working, i started enjoying it again!
For me, my job kills my want to read for fun. Im a lawyer and after 8 hours of reading basically all day long, I will have read 100+ pages. The last thing I want to do is pick up a book. Before law school, I would read fiction for hours at a time on weekends.
It depends highly on the reading material and the quality of the professor. I took 2 literature courses one year and I remember loving one of them because the material and discussions were deep. The books were sometimes dry, or challenging. But the professor really addressed some of those issues with thought provoking exercises. The other one, I remember only attending because she gave quizzes at the start of each class. The books were awful and tedious, and her discussions were shallow and vague.
High school English teacher made fun of me for reading a Stephen king novel 3 times because I liked it (Salem’s Lot). Just made me not read the books she assigned.
High school English killed reading for me for yearsss. I love reading in elementary and middle school and didn’t start regularly reading again after highschool till a year ago when I was 25
My college literature professor must have thought we were all naïve kids who needed to be exposed to the cruel world, because he assigned the most vile and disgusting books possible. Nihilistic main characters degrading and killing people for no reason whatsoever.
It was the only class where I skipped all the lectures - read the books and showed up for the tests. I didn't want to dwell on those books any more than I had to. I think I got a B in that class.
It never killed my love but I’ve had teachers super into just reading romance classics from centuries ago which just are not my thing at all. I feel like school kills a lot of passion for reading especially for younger people being forced to read and write about books they don’t care about.
I hated Tom Sawyer and, consequently, Mark Twain because of a group book report. My group mates chose this book, but didn't read it. I had to do most of the work on a book I didn't prefer to read. I still dislike Mark Twain lol
For some reason that book struck me as profound. I even gave it to a cousin who likes to read as a bday gift qhen she was a teen!...now that I am older I can't imagine why I gave her that as a gift! Or what I saw in that sad, maudlin story...tastes change as you grow
Yes, because of the amount of things I HAD to read for school. It’s like you get burnt out and don’t read for fun. After reading textbooks all day long, I’m not gonna pull out another book to read for fun 💀 now that I’m out of school, my love for reading has returned.
Yes. Ages 13-22. Middle school - college killed my love for reading because they started mandating what I need to read, when I need to read it, and how to properly analyze it. Reading became a job, not a hobby. Now that I’ve graduated, I’m back to enjoying reading whatever and whenever I want.
I took a best sellers class that was supposed to best sellers of every generation and how they became best sellers/what makes a best seller type of class, that was heavily discussion based.
What it actually was, was just the professors favorite books which were all fine (one of them I even really really liked) but the class aways ended up with him basically saying that there’s no criticism for the novel but when we would bring up any modern best seller in any comparison writing or really in any discussion we would be told anything published after 1980 isn’t good.
It made me dislike reading the books because I felt I could not earnestly engage with the pros and cons of the books or really engage at all other than “this book is good and here’s why” when I was expecting to engage in more of a “this book was a best seller and here’s why” which are not the same conversation at all since there are both well written and badly written best sellers so it was just frustrating and made me lack enthusiasm for the books we read.
Also I felt it was weird that we read a book from the 1800s and the 4 from the 1900s but did not even touch a book written past 1980 considering it would have been so fun to analyze trends in best sellers since the advent of the internet and such a good conversation about how that changed peoples access to books etc but instead it was just “this book good that’s why people liked it” which was just not fun for me
In high school, 3 novels made me truly hate reading:
- The Catcher in the Rye
- The Great Gatsby
- A Tale of Two Cities
As I've gotten older, and learned a lot more about Dickens and the social/political context he was writing in, I've come to appreciate all his works a great deal. I still loathe Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby though. Jay Gatsby and Holden Caulfield can both die in a fire.
I HATE Shakespeare's plays (the sonnets are fine) and considering I had an entire college course dedicated to his works, I dreaded everything about reading for a bit.
Alternatively, I loved my course on Geoffrey Chaucer. So it's not hard to read English I have an issue with - it's truly Shakespeare.
For sure. The amount of reading I had to do in grad school (and the stress from deadlines) burned me out on pleasure reading for several years. I was able to get back into it, thankfully, by remembering that when I read for fun, it's just for me. I can skip the boring parts. I don't have to write papers about themes or style. If I lose interest in a book, I can put it down and not care. Nobody's going to quiz me. It's great.
Grad school. I was spending so much time reading that I was exhausted of it, and it was a much more effortful type of reading to study than to read for enjoyment. By the time I was done reading to study I was not interested in reading for fun. Took me years to get back into the habit
No, never. Reading is natural state for ne, I don't care about anything while I am reading, hland I do and always had doing it FAST. Maybe it's some neurological stuff, but a week for a book is like a lot of time for me. An evening is maybe not enough, if you must think a lot through the text and writing your thoughts down.
I had a 7th grade english teacher who hated my guts. First, we had just moved from KY (college town) to upstate NY, and I couldn't speak English properly, and went downhill from there. (my allergies were non-existant and i was just causing a scene in class, etc)
Unfortunately this ruined 7th and 8th grade English where they concentrate on language structure. It has cost me learning foreign languages today.
Later I had a teacher that got me into reading on my own. I still have trouble reading "leisure" books for classes, even ones I would have normally read outside of class.
High school and college. High school because i had to read things i didn't choose myself
College ...well ..because college. I was burned out on even wanting to read until a few years after.
(Reread some as an adult. Actually really good. I dont know if have it in me for Dickens and Great Gasby tho)
Because I am a brilliant man, I took two literature courses during an 8 week summer semester. I know for a fact I was the only person to do all the reading for either course, let alone both of them. I didn't want to read so much as a cereal box for a while after that.
I didn’t really read for pleasure during college or for a few years after. Then I got back into it. I always felt like I had too much I needed to read for class to want to read more afterward.
Yes. While in college I had to read so many court documents and statutes and court case documents that the only thing I could read was romantic comedy books because they didn't require any amount of thinking.
Personally, I have not experienced such a situation, but I will advise taking time to explore books at your own pace, engage in discussions with fellow book lovers, and seek out courses or reading groups that prioritize thoughtful engagement with literature.
When I went to trade school for computer networking/administration I didn't have much time to read. After three years of studying something technical, my brain changed significantly.
Reading literature, something I used to love, was really difficult. I had to start out reading light fantasy featuring wizards and elves for a long while before I could work my way back to "serious literature". I became less of a book snob as well.
Junior High and High school English, 100%. I used to devour books until around the middle of Junior High, which is when a lot of those asinine book reports started becoming a thing. I didn't start reading for pleasure again until after I was in college.
Oddly, I stopped reading a long time during college, but I studied engineering. It was just so much work that I wanted to do anything that required zero mental effort after studying.
A level english for about two years knocked the love of reading out of me until i rediscovered it in 2023. We did the most intense books that really triggered me (The colour purple, A streetcar named desire, In cold blood)
I feel like the English curriculum in the UK really favours books that are gorey, violence against women in particular and abuse, and ONLY reading them was really depressing and affected me slightly. I know it’s kinda stupid but I feel like there should be a balance between those kinds of books and other works.
HOWEVER! I learnt to love to read again, because reading is awesome and just because you had a bad teacher/curriculum doesn’t mean you should never read again!
You guys were able to read books as uni students? Books as in not course litterature books?!😅 During my 6 years at uni I had zero time or energy left to read anything past course litterature. I was able to read a few books during summer breaks thats all
Not quite. I always loved the novels, short stories, discussions, and compare/contrast analytical essays we had in English classes I took.
The only thing that ever really bothered me was when teachers tried too hard to control how fast we were getting through the book. “Don’t read more than the one chapter tonight because we’ll have a class discussion and I don’t want anyone spoiling for the other students”—meanwhile each chapter is only about 10-20 mins of reading. The pace was too slow & it stretched out discussions far more than should be needed for anyone above grade 2.
Yes, 11th grade English I believe. The previous year, Great Expectations had really soured me on Dickens but A Tale of Two cities was literally the first book I read three chapters and went to the Cliff's notes.
Nope! But I'm kind of asocial and I know that there's books that I don't like. So when we were given books which we had to read I tried them and if I didn't like them I just dropped them and went with my TBR books.
But I've heard about literature classes where students were unappreciated when they wrote their honest essays about the books and that killed their interest, cause if the interpretation MUST be like what their teacher think, then what point is in reading any book if you can just copy from your classmates/internet while your own opinion and ideas don't matter in the slightest?
Yeah, right now. She has a tendency to be pedantic about small meta-commentary things in classic literature while ignoring larger issues and that gets under my skin.
Of course, this makes date nights with her pretty tense.
I was taking an honors English class in high school and the teacher required us to keep “page trackers” where we could annotate our reading. Being required to write a note minimum every other page of watership down made it damn near impossible for my adhd brain to read at all
No, I always thrived under the pressure, but motherhood fried my ADHD brain. Too many mundane, equally important tasks and then being in charge of the well being of a littles. I didn't have the bandwidth for good, emotionalally challenging books, and started reading garbage romance or YA, but most was so cringe and badly written I feel off the book bandwagon altogether.
To be honest, no not really. English and history were always my favourite classes and I never had bad experiences with the readings. I went on to double major in English lit and Medieval Studies and loved every class. Not sure if just a nerd for these, but I had nothing but positive experiences.
Basically most of middle school through high school - if I'm not interested in a book I read really slowly, but we had required reading, so I'd be stuck reading some book I hated forever with no time to read something I liked, so I just stopped reading altogether. 11th grade English especially killed my enjoyment of reading altogether. I HATED everything we got assigned and I HATED the teacher, and part of why I decided to quit the IB program was because I didn't want him as my English teacher again in 12th grade.
And luckily it didn't kill my love for reading again, but my creative writing professor in college sure made me hate books for a while. She was like the embodiment of everyone's stereotypical awful English teacher who thinks every single thing in every piece of writing is symbolic no matter how little sense it makes - like we had to read an anthology of short stories by the same author, and she said that a character buying a gun in one story was symbolic of that character "revolving" in the second story they're in. Even though nobody has ever said "wow this character revolved" ever.
She kind of killed my desire to write for a while, too.
*Edit* do some of you guys who are like "Um no and anyone who says it killed their love never liked reading in the first place" have *other* hobbies? It's pretty common for people to not enjoy something anymore if they're expected to do it on someone else's terms rigorously and not engage with it at a pace they enjoy. That's why a lot of people who hate monetizing their hobbies, because then it's not a hobby anymore. It's work. That doesn't mean they never actually loved art or knitting or whatever, just that having to engage with it on someone else's terms isn't fun.
I was an English major in undergrad and one semester thought it would be a smart idea to take 4 reading intensive classes in a semester. I had a book due per class every week.
I didn’t read a serious work of fiction for about 3 years after that semester. But it comes back, I promise. Now I read a couple books every week or two just for fun.
Being forced to write book reports in high-school lit classes almost killed my love of reading, but being able to read books in my father's book collection WITHOUT doing book reports kept it alive. As a parent, it's important to have lots of books in the home, and show by example that reading is enjoyable.
No, I was one of those weirdos that liked writing about books and was often the first one in the class to finish compulsory reading days before everyone else. The process of thinking about books I would do mostly while writing the paper. To help with this I would take notes while reading. It speeds everything up instead of reading, processing, read a bit more, process, repeat, repeat and then get to the paper and have to go back through the book and rely on the memory bank.
I think teachers catch a lot of flack for stuff out of their control like whatever curriculum and schedule they’re bound to. They have to prepare students for the real world, and in the real world for English majors or for people who go into tertiary study and work where reading is essential you can’t just piss around with compulsory reading at your own desired pace. Theyre not teaching you how to read for your own personal enjoyment.
It’s the skills of reading that’s important here not your pleasure of reading. Just ask anyone who went into law or med school having to read giant textbooks. If they didn’t get the foundational reading skills earlier they struggle to keep up.
I’ll speak from a teacher perspective. I teach Middle School Language arts and lately, kids don’t like reading drawn out exposition. They want action, they want quick reads. Even a copy of The Outsiders turns them off. I introduced a graphic novel unit and my students love it. Choice is a big thing in school now.
Oh, absolutely. When I went to college, I expected to follow one of two tracks: English (and books) or physics. Taking both my first year, I found that dissecting and analyzing books felt like it was ruining my love of reading. So I stuck with physics. Today, I'm more interested in literary analysis, but I didn't have the capacity for it then.
Happened to my oldest son, he was reading kids chapter books before his student group, the teachers would give him longer and harder books to read, he hates reading now, it makes me up set, I used to be able to give him a book and he wouldn’t put it down until it was finished and would write his own stories, but because the teachers held him to a higher standard and he saw the difference of what he was doing and the other kids and the teachers pressuring him, he ended up hating it
I remember being in high school and the teacher made us read "The importance of being earnest". I thought it was hilarious. The other students hated it. So after a while (maybe 2 chapters) the teacher switched to a different book.
It wasn't my teacher wrecking things, it was my fellow students.
I’m a lifelong and avid recreational reader. It’s my most positive and favorite habit. Anytime I had prescribed reading through high school and college, it would absolutely murder any motivation I had to read. I think the mental energy I would have spent doing it recreationally was just used up, and I’d turn to less mentally taxing free time activities. I am glad for some of them, but it made reading a Type 2 fun as opposed to Type 1. I remember being excited for the end of those classes so that I could focus on reading what I wanted and taking my time to digest and form my own opinions.
I had to take an English course in college. I picked poetry because I enjoyed reading and analyzing it. I realized how spoiled I was with a great English teacher in high school.
This professor was of the mind that there was one correct interpretation of poems; if you wrote a paper with a different interpretation or focused on an aspect of the poem he didn't think was important, you got a "B" at best. And, I know it could have been worse. But, my highschool teacher loved it when students looked at works from "non-standard" angles. As long as we could support our argument, it was okay. It kept us engaged and made discussions much more interesting. I thought college would be more of that. I went from thrilled for class and having a reason to build fun reading into my schedule. That professor killed the fun. I skipped class for the first time in my anxious little academic people pleaser life just to avoid lectures a few times.
I did really struggle to stay motivated and read the assigned stuff for my Irish literature and poetry modules (that's Irish-*language* stuff, not just English literature from Ireland), mainly because I read so much slower in my second language and the stuff we were studying was quite dense. I did begin to feel the dread knowing I had weekly readings to do, but I suppose it was more due to my own deficiencies in the language than the actual content or lecturer being bad.
I didn't like most of my High School reading list. But I still read stuff I liked in the meantime.
Like pretty much all of my school life, school was school and outside of school was my real life.
I suppose I must have somehow learned things in school, but I don't remember the vast majority of my time in it. I just longed to be anywhere else.
The entirety of law school. There was just so much reading, it felt like violence to my eyes to try to read for pleasure. It literally took like a five year break from reading anything before I could get back into regularly reading again
I worked for a bookstore run by a horrible narcissist. I couldn't read any books for a couple of years after I left that awful place, and I still have some book ADD years later.
My first literature professor in college accused me of plagiarism because I “improved too much.” The first book we had to read was Pale Fire and I was too young to get it, the second was White Noise and I read it three times, devoured it and wrote what I still believe to be a brilliant essay. The school ended up putting me through an entire hearing! Showed me what you get for improving and enjoying a book! Jokes on them, I’m a professional screenwriter now.
When I struggled with uni.
I wanted time off from studying/working on assignments. But during that time I also did not allow myself to read for fun cos I could be doing uni work instead.
Back when I was in high school, we started reading Jane Eyre in my senior year. Nothing against the book, it just wasn't for me at all. And this teacher would have us basically cram a chapter a night, on top of all our other schoolwork. Getting through 30 boring pages of that book each night really murdered my enjoyment of reading for a while. I don't think I read for enjoyment after that for a long, long time and when I did they were really short contemporary novels. Nothing robust, and definitely not any classical lit.
The frustrating thing is, before all that, I enjoyed reading pretty much anything. But high school English classes in general would consistently pick materials that did not mesh with me at all (I really only devoured *Night* and *The Catcher in the Rye;* everything else was like pulling teeth) and then hammered me over the head with it for *weeks.* And it wasn't uncommon for them to even slow the material down a ton because half our class couldn't read. So we'd take a fairly short read like The Great Gatsby and pad it out for like six weeks not even going into depth, just covering the basic plot. Six weeks of being a broke high school student with a broke family reading about rich bootleggers being awful to each other. Six weeks of reading about a governess living with a guy who keeps his crazy relative in an attic. Six weeks of individual Shakespeare plays where we just read the raw text and they acted like we were crazy if we didn't get what they were saying, zero attempts to bridge the gap between reading a script versus watching a play. I could go on\*.\* It was exhausting. I didn't even like most of these books to begin with. Meanwhile, every teacher I had was so passionate about all of them; I started to feel like there was something wrong with me for not liking any of it. To this day, I envy their passion. Part of me wonders if they were faking it to cope with having to talk about it every day, six times a day.
When I went into university and picked English as a major (because back then, we were all told to just get a four year degree in anything, and writing was the only thing I felt confident about at the time), I was so fucking disappointed to learn that all of my classes amounted to expensive book clubs. I wanted to *write.* I wanted to study writing as a craft. In hindsight, the journalism route would have been better for me, but nobody offered me that advice. The most satisfying lit class I ended up having, was one where we examined the literature from a writer's perspective to see what the writer did to make the reader feel a certain way. I only had two professors take this approach. I loved them both to death. Also honorary shoutout to the woman who led the Milton classes, because I enjoyed those lectures as well. The rest, it was just an expensive book club. Read the book, show up to class, listen to other clueless 19 year olds drone about how they thought it was so *interesting* how some event happened. I learned to hate that word. *Interesting.* In their mouths it signified nothing at all. What about it was of interest to you? Why did you find it interesting? They couldn't say. So many vapid drones in every class. God help me if the class involved a lab. A lab for an English lit course. We'd show up and even the professor couldn't be bothered; his TA was there instead, and we'd have these blind-leading-blind discussions that amounted to nothing. Such an insane waste of time. And of course at the end of it all, finding employment outside of education was a nightmare. I had to learn a completely different skillset. My only consolation is I didn't go into debt. Thank God.
It took several years after all of that for me to pick up a book for pleasure again. My campus was even surrounded by brick and mortar used bookstores and I'd buy any that seemed enjoyable and just put them on my shelf, hoping to god that one day I'd enjoy my old hobby again. Back then, whenever I picked them up and tried to read them, I'd feel a bizarre mental block and just stop after a couple of pages. There was a time when I never experienced anything like that. I've slowly started working through that backlog now, nearly a decade after exiting the university system. I'm still not jaded enough to say it's an intentional process, but the fact that this entire institution was able to make someone like me, who once loved reading, *hate* it? Speaks volumes imo. Happy for everyone else commenting in this thread who had the opposite effect though, genuinely.
My 8th grade english class. The teacher they hired for that year had just come from teaching college, and she didn't adjust her expectations at all. I will never forget her saying half way though the class, "None of you can appreciate the classics, and if I were allowed, each and every one of you would fail this class."
YES. My 6th grade reading teacher (why we had one when we were 12-13? No idea!), would make us read chapters outloud but interrupt us every few sentences to analyze EVERY DETAIL of EVERY BOOK. I'm sorry, but this question brought back *memories*.
I was a massive reader in high school and the only time my teachers made me feel like I was losing my love of reading was when I'd read in class and ignore the lesson so they'd confiscate the book until lesson ended. They encouraged me, talked to me about books to read, discussed in depth their own impressions of the likes of ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and Ronald Dahl. One even asked to borrow some of my Stephen king books based on a critique I wrote on Delores Claiborne.
I finished my degree in my forties. Life got in the way. I took a short story class as an elective; 70% of the stories the class covered were the same ones I studied in high school ~25 years before.
I was an avid reader from kindergarten onward. Until we started getting more “classic” required readings in middle school and high school. Completely ruined reading for me, and I only rekindled (KINDLE-d 🤣) my love of reading in undergrad.
Well not a necessary read or anything but I couldn't change it so I guess this counts.
For my senior year I had to choose a book for class. I had just finished watching the Harry Potter movies for the first time without reading the books. I then blindly decided that a cursed child would be an easy pick.
I don't think I need to explain further.
I’m currently in college taking literature courses for an English degree. I haven’t had a problem with any of my classes except one: Literary Theory. It was a LOT of reading, mostly dry, analytical essays examining how one should read and understand literature. It was probably the most reading I’ve had to do for a course and it was even stories
No. Never.
I've always mentally separated the books that I read for fun, and the books that they wanted me to read. Sure, I've had to read books in school that I disliked, but I finished them (or skipped them) and went back to the books that I loved.
I know a lot of people say that the books they were made to read in school killed their love of reading, but frankly this statement always baffled me. Nobody's forcing you to read Rushdie or Orwell in your spare time and if you've always loved reading, I don't know, John Grisham or Roald Dahl, then surely you'd understand these books aren't inherently different because your English teacher made you read Charles Dickens?
I understood that the books I had to read were meant to challenge me, to push me into having a deeper understanding of language or society, so I appreciated them for that even when I didn't enjoy them. We don't expect maths teachers or chemistry teachers to make everything fun either...
Aside from that, it's extremely common for prolific readers to read less or stop reading altogether from their mid to late teens, especially 10+ years ago when the YA/NA didn't really properly exist as a genre and the gap between children's lit and adult lit was wide. Most but not all readers get back into the habit at some point during their adult years.
This is the reason I'm never taking English as an elective. I love to read, and it would destroy me if it became a chore and drained the enjoyment out of my life. I'd rather take a heavy book on math or science, suffer, and then feel the weight lift off my shoulders as I flip open a page or begin reading a literary analysis of a book. It's just something I can't bear to taint by the slow-crushing grind of monetization and capitalism.
If people are never challenged they will be almost 30 and unable to digest anything beyond Colleen Hoover which is sad. 1984 is shorter than one single Hunger Games book, the language is simple, teens are more than capable of handling it.
I have only had teachers and professors that increased my love of reading, but it has happened a couple of times that we had to read books I absolutely did not vibe with.
I had to read Ben Learner's *10.04* for a class about time in literature, and I just could not finish it. I know he's celebrated, but the times it didn't make me fall asleep, it annoyed me to no end. So, I didn't read it, despite risking failing my exam if it turned out to be the subject of the exam question. Luckily, the question was on Wuthering Heights!
Yeah, in school being forced to read books I wasn't old or smart enough to understand yet and then have to write an essay on them really made me start seeing reading as a boring chore, and I loved reading YA books on my own, but after HS I sorta lost the passion for it. I'm trying to get back into reading again.
I took a Modern Canadian Literature class back in university, and although I did enjoy it, it was A LOT of reading and A LOT of information in a short timespan. It didn't make me hate reading but it did make me not want to read in an analytical way at all! I wanted to turn my brain completely off!
As soon as the semester was done, I went to a used bookstore and bought 2 of the trashiest romance novels I could find. I devoured them and it was amazing. Best book experience ever hahahaha!
I love reading, but also despised being given a strict deadline. In school, I absolutely hated having to disect every little thing. I preferred to read for enjoyment than over analyzing the details. Sometimes things can be taken a face value. Sometimes a raven is just a bird stuck in a house.
High school reading, point blank. I graduated early 2000s, and I think the most recently published book we read was maybe Lord of the Flies (which happened to be the single book in all of high school I never read). But high school made me think I hated reading so much that I never picked another book up for TEN years.
I remember when I picked a book up and it had a cell phone in it. It was this bizarre reality check for me that not all books had been written in 1500-1950, and had to be read for analyzing to death. That... Maybe I was allowed to *enjoy a book*????
For sure! It didn’t kill my love of reading, but I just got burnt out and it went dormant. I loved reading ever since I was two years old and wanted to be a language teacher ever since I was six. In my junior year of high school that really ramped up as I was taking the courses that I would need to become one. And then when I got into college that got even more intense, especially with the double teaching major in involving English and Spanish.
And even though there were some awesome books that material was also really heavy. As a result, I pretty much stopped reading for fun in junior year of high school and didn’t start doing it again until shortly after I graduated college. Even then I went slowly. I’m not sure I could read the amount I read in college ever again, but my love of reading has never wavered.
I did my undergrad in English because it was what I was good at, not what I wanted. I found myself always analyzing books. I hated reading for a good while after I finished and it wasn’t until I started my second degree that I started enjoying reading for pleasure again.
Remember as a kid i would read voraciously. My
Mum took me to the library every Thursday, went to high school and in year 7 we were made to Artemis Fowl. I hated it that much I don’t think I read again until I left school.
Luckily I have rediscovered my love for it now and even read 35 books last year !
A friend of mine has recounted the story of how unflinchingly cruel Frank McCourt was at Stuyvesant High School. I think my friend still bears the scars of the overzealous shaming he received on several occasions, but I'm grateful it didn't rob him of his ability to write well or enjoy reading.
It certainly didn't INSPIRE him to do either; that much is sure.
I absolutely HATED reading while I was still in school. In our schools, we had specified lists of books that you were allowed to read for either Dutch (all Dutch authors) or English (original English books, no translations). This also meant that almost all of the books on there were literary pills or the classics- not appealing to me at all. I remember Harry Potter was explicitly forbidden to read for your reading list, even if you read it in English instead of Dutch. I had to read 5 books a year for each course and I absolutely detested it. You could never say you did not finish it, because they would fail your book report or oral exam.
It took until I was around 20/21 for me to come back to reading. Ironically, it was Harry Potter that did it. My Mom owned the first book, and I read it in 2 days. I bought the second and got the rest of the series for Christmas. I devoured them all.
School made me sickeningly anxious, and particularly mandatory English class. I am simply neither academic nor analytical enough for that kind of rote memorisation and lacked the intellect (not to mention discipline) necessary to draw connections between texts.
I read for escapism and entertainment, and reading critically to a particular theme or question goes entirely against my grain.
Those classes are absolutely fine for people who WANT to have their reading challenged. I'll sit here with my Crichton and my Anne of Green Gables and leave the rest of you to ponder the mysteries of postcolonial thought in Conrad, thanks.
The only thing I did enjoy was the poetry.
100%. Not having a choice in what I read in school definitely killed my love for reading as mode of them were books I never would have read myself and that I hated or found uninterested. Even as much as I loved the materials I had to read for my degree, they also killed my love of reading. I loved the subject; but they were dense and boring and even downright depressing at times and it made it hard to want to sink into a new world and face the issues in those. I mainly reread old favorites as they were comforting and familiar. It’s only that I’ve started to read new books again and I’ve enjoying it very much. While I love the familiar, there’s something so enticing about a new world and new characters to learn about and absorb and about not knowing what will happen
[удалено]
College killed my streak of reading way more than high school. And it wasn't really college's fault either, my teachers were great but when I had *that much work* and mentally difficult talks, the last thing I wanted to do was use my brain *more* in my off time. I know education is changing, but when I was in high school my AP lit classes were full to the brim of useful skills and discussions that I still use to this day with media comprehension. But it would have been useless if I had simply disregarded all of it and decided it was stupid.
College killed how much I read mostly because I wanted to take advantage of it. Once I was done with classes, school reading, assignments, and studying there was usually *something* social going on at any given time, always *someone* to hang out with. And I knew I was never gonna get another time like college again so I wanted it all. Didn't wanna hole up in my room reading when I could be playing beer bocce! No regrets, got the rest of my life to read books and tons of great memories for the road
Exactly this. Thought I had honestly replied already after I read your comment. Lol. One of my profs required reading was his self published book of crappy poetry he required us to buy.
Lol. That's fucked up! What a sad abuse of power.
Haha I had a professor do the same thing, but it was a novel about a clown, a person in a wheel chair, and I don't remember what else, I just ended up switching classes after hearing that.
I feel like college kills a lot of people's streaks, because it's just sooo much reading. Even if you don't take a Lit class you are reading a shit ton of not exciting textbooks. Plus studying for maths and what not. After all that, reading for enjoyment just loses its appeal.
Yep, I was only finishing a few books a year while I was in college. You just get burnt out on it and want to do other things.
Yeah I'd have to be really excited about a book for me to pick it up after I finish all my required reading for my classes. I'm sure I'll have the time and energy to read waay more once I don't have to read so much for assignments due.
My English teacher sophomore year made me loathe reading because they had a “everything has an interpretation - but only mine is the correct one, even if it conflicts with the author or everyone else.”
That's a terrible attitude from a teacher. I don't think you're the only one who’s lost the desire to read.
The "the curtains are just blue!" Crowd are seething at this response.
The curtain were goddamned blue because the author simply liked the color. The curtain rail was made of copper because of the author's yearn of personal connections though.
I loved reading as a child, and still do decades later, but while I was in HS (11/12 during the mid 80s, in the US) I had the displeasure of having an English teacher that was utterly convinced that every book - no matter what genre, no matter who wrote it, no matter when - contained detailed information about how the author hated their mother. You might scoff, and even to me this sounds like a hilarious situation to be in, but it was literal hell at the time. Our grades depended on not only finding where in the book this information was hidden, but we had to find the SAME location and give the SAME explanation as what this teacher pre-determined it to be. Our book reports, for both class assigned and personal readings, had to clearly identify this information, and we had to argue our case for books that this teacher had not read themselves in a way that the teacher could properly envision and agree with. The lessons learned from the book were secondary, and you still had to learn them accordingly, but you could fail an assignment if your mother hating argument was not valid or didn't contain enough details to satisfy. edit: bad phrasing
This sounds like hell on Earth. I grew up loving literature, reading, and writing because there was no set 'correct answer' and that a strong enough argument would hold weight. That teacher would have driven me nuts.
This 💯. I had the same HS English teacher for 11/12th. I was (and always will be) an avid reader. However, I was not a fan of her book choices (*Fifth Business* & *Hamlet* being the only exceptions). But she gave me an appreciation for poetry and brought my ability to analyze between the lines to a height that would have taken me a decade to develop on my own. I will always be grateful to her for that (even if it took her over a year to remember my name).
I dont think I know anybody who hated fifth business, even if they were forced to read it.
I enjoyed it and went on to read the entire Deptford Trilogy.
I often wonder if there's a better way to teach literature comprehension to middle and high schoolers. On one hand, a big part of me feels like the way they pick books with an emphasis on "classics" doesn't really make sense and is misguided for a group of 12-18 year olds. I definitely tended to find the more modern/recent books more interesting and relatable on average. But on the other hand, I'm skeptical that there's any selection of books you could force a group of adolescents to read without breeding some resentment. I loved reading ever since elementary school but still was often complaining along with my friends about a lot of those books (The Outsiders was probably the one I hated the most lol).
Being forced to highlight and add sticky notes ruined some good books for me
I was blessed to have very good English teachers and literature professors throughout my academic career. They were all smart people who understood the point of literature and reading. But brother, I have heard some horror stories. Many of us will have read that [letter to Flannery O'Conner](https://biblioklept.org/2012/02/22/my-tone-is-not-meant-to-be-obnoxious-i-am-in-a-state-of-shock-flannery-oconnor-responds-to-an-english-professor/), and it really is emblematic of just the worst kind of understanding of literature.
I absolutely loved English class all the way up until I was in my senior year of high school and had an awful teacher who was really unpleasant / mean and her class caused me to stop reading books for a little while just because I was so tired after reading of her assigned books that I just didn't have it in me to read for fun in my free time. Luckily I rediscovered my love for reading the next summer and I read all of the Andy Weir books that were out in one week. To this day sci-fi books always get me out of reading slumps
I began college studying English literature, and that letter really nails why I switched to another major. So much of literary studies is about reading entirely too much into literature. I went along with it but I always had a nagging feeling that the meaning behind stories couldn't be so hidden, that a writer was failing in their basic duty if they wrote something that was difficult to understand. Now, conveying the subtlety and nuance of a complex idea often requires metaphors, allusions, and other literary constructs, and a good work of literature will encourage readers to think about and discuss the themes with others; and some works of literature are meant to be beautiful in their own right, just as some paintings are simply meant to be beautiful; but no decent writer is going to write something so complicated that only a person with a master's degree or PhD can understand it (or if they do, they've failed in their basic task of communication). I'm paraphrasing Heller, but in _Catch-22_, there is a great line describing an officer who studied English at college: "He understood everything about literature except how to enjoy it."
I love that quote! It explains how I felt about reading in college perfectly.
Hmm, I think there *are* worthwhile works that an English degree definitely helps to understand, and I don’t know that it’s an absolute failing. They’re just writing for a niche audience. But many writers do. At the same time, the whole lit professor industry of people writing extremely specific papers interpreting fiction seems a bit… useless, to me. I’m open to being convinced, but it’s hard to look at all that and see a valuable contribution to human knowledge. Especially when most of it is written in such a way, and arguing such abstruse points, that it’s only of interest to or really readable by other professors.
Huh. I don’t love her shooting down someone’s interpretation especially with her religious message—if the teacher thinks the story becomes surreal, more power to them? Plus I’m a proponent of Death of the Author when it comes to interpretation (though someone asking the author to validate theirs clearly is not)—but I definitely appreciate this part: > If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it. That last clause especially is why so much of the English-class approach never did much for me. It’s hard to care about trying to interpret something that you didn’t like enough to want to keep thinking about it.
Her message isn’t religious per se. It’s pointing out the often surprising difference between someone who supposedly engages with the given material in the accepted way, and someone who *actually* does. It applies to a lot more than religion.
I read that in her voice.
Yes! My women's literature professor. I'm a woman btw. This lady almost exclusively selected novels that Lifetime movies could've been based on. It was all so predictable and one-dimensional. Women can write about topics other than shitty men!
I'm so glad my women's lit prof had us read Austin, George Sanders, and Virginia Woolf. And I loved Middlemarch.
George Saunders seems like a strange women's lit choice... Assuming you mean George Eliot?
More likely George Sand
George Eliot and I'm an idiot.
All of grad school made me quit reading for quite a few years. Texts were seen as something to be skimmed and mined for information, rather than something pleasurable.
Yep. Law School and litigation practice shut down my leisure reading for years.
I had a Con Law professor that made us read Roscoe Pound. His writings are so hard to read -even few pages at a time- that I still recall thinking I'd rather go blind than be forced to keep reading this. Made reading anything feel like a chore for the next several years.
Reading for a professional license made me completely ignore reading for fun for several years. Kinda like having a desk job where I sat at a computer killed my desire to play video games as well.
I could only stomach reading LitRPG for about two years after my masters. Anything else was just too much.
Agree! Too many dense texts and primary sources for my required reading… bedtime reading was replaced with episodes for Forensic Files.
I loved watching episodes of Greys Anatomy after I finished all my required reading! It was the perfect turn your brain off show
I'm still burnt out on reading after grad school. The idea of reading just fills me with a big ol' nope.
“Mined for information” is exactly how I felt about every English lit class I took. Nice wording, I had never thought to express it that way
Yes that's the perfect way to describe it! Instead of reading things carefully and letting it marinate in my mind, I felt like I had to skim and speed read through all the textbooks and papers that I had to read for certain english classes. There are definitely good teachers out there who care about creating an enjoyable reading experience though
Ironically, it started when I became a professor 😂
Oh, I hear you!
I had good teachers in high school, but what killed my love was the time frames we had. I'm not the fastest reader, and if I read too fast, I absorb nothing. It was hell having only about two weeks to be able to read and completely understand all of Great Expectations and take a big test about it before immediately moving to the next book.
Ugh yeah I hated that. I'm not a fast reader normally and I'm really slow on stuff I'm just not interested in, so it was always hell having to read stuff for class. Thank god for SparkNotes. The only books I ever actually finished reading in high school were short.
Same I would read the first half and then cliff notes the rest. There was no way I’m reading all that on their schedule even if I liked it.
Nope, only ever made me more interested
Ditto. I don't know what a teacher would have had to do to make me hate a book: read it aloud while having me tortured? I felt totally crushed by a grad seminar on Malory (secondary readings + the text meant whole days spent in the library) but I still love *Le Morte Darthur* to this day.
I think there’s this weird contingent of folks who convince themselves they’d love literature if only it wasn’t for these evil teachers who…made them read literature.
I think there is an argument that it might kill your love of a particular work, but you’re right, you never enjoyed literature if school permanently killed any desire to engage with it.
The complaints always boil down to "I didn't get to do what I want." It's insolent children. Look at OP, the crux of their complaint is that there were due dates and they didn't get to choose the pace they read at. Most other people are complaining their hs english teacher made them read Shakespeare instead of whatever YA dystopian scifi series they were into at the time. I also like all the complaints that can essentially be rephrased as "I would love reading more except my English teacher didn't let me just read with my brain off, she actually wanted me to engage with the reading, which obviously killed my love for it." Yeah man, sounds like a deep passion for reading there
Eh I can understand people like me who majored in lit in college having difficulty reading for pleasure for a while. I loved my degree program, but it was exhausting. If you extensively do something very intensely in very short periods of time it can wear you out even on something you love. If you have any anxiety around grades and/or how your professor and peers will evaluate your thoughts in the open during class discussions, that anxiety then can become tied to the act of reading. That association can take a bit to dispel after you graduate. I didn’t suffer from this exact situation but I had peers who did. It also becomes mission-oriented reading to pick out specific things that the professor would like, or would be good for a paper, or that would be a good point for a discussion post, rather than enjoying the journey of the story. Which can still definitely involve using your brain and literary analysis, but doing so on your own for fun is still different than needing to worry about how your reading experience and interpretations will be judged by others and how it lines up with what you’re learning in class. I never lost my love for reading and really enjoyed my program but getting burnt out even doing things you love is a legit thing.
> Eh I can understand people like me who majored in lit in college having difficulty reading for pleasure for a while. I loved my degree program, but it was exhausting. If you extensively do something very intensely in very short periods of time it can wear you out even on something you love. That's completely different than what people say though. They aren't saying "my capacity was taken up doing so much for school that there wasn't room for pleasure." They're not talking about burnout. They're saying the fact that there's a class with selected books, assignments, analysis and due dates killed their love for reading. The fact that their teacher/professor asked more of them than simply reading the book cover to cover to get a good grade is what they're complaining about. You see their posts all the time "i just started reading again at 30 because my english teacher in hs chose the books and it made me fall out of love for reading" and it's just absurd. Burnout is an understandable complaint. Their complaints boil down to the insolence of children who don't like there being an authority figure
Super rude to be calling others "insolent children" on here where people are trying to have an open discussion. I think the only childish person here is you for name-calling and looking down on people who had unfortunate experiences with reading at some points in life. Can you really admit that you've loved every required reading during high school and college?
> Can you really admit that you've loved every required reading during high school and college? If this is your takeaway you should have paid more attention in class
Like u/ToasterCrumbtray said, you really do sound reductive and pretentious. I definitely have a deep passion for reading but I also struggled with the reading material that my professors provided for one reason for another. Those two things are not exclusive. It kind of sounds like you're scolding people for not enjoying all the assigned reading material they had in school.
> you're scolding people for not enjoying all the assigned reading material they had in school Yes, and?
Gosh, your comments are reductive and pretentious. It's like you're scolding home cooks losing their love of cooking as they have to adjust to more and more dietary restrictions. Maybe your tolerance for the amount of things making reading a chore is higher than mine, but at the end of the day, shouldn't we want more people reading? Like maybe we can look at the responses in this thread and learn ways to not discourage people from reading?
Yall really love busting out that pretentious buzzword for anyone who holds an opinion you disagree with lol you'd think a sub dedicated to reading could come up with more than just that one single word >It's like you're scolding home cooks losing their love of cooking as they have to adjust to more and more dietary restrictions. No, it's more like I'm making fun of people who claim they love cooking, but show up to a cooking class and start bitching that having to follow instructions made them lose their love for cooking. If we listened to people on reddit the solution would be "stop teaching" so nah, maybe we shouldn't do that. Just because people whine doesn't mean they have a valid complaint
Or... maybe you are pretentious and people are noticing it?
Or... it's just a buzzword for people who can't articulate themselves without using buzzwords
I agree totally in terms of hating a specific book, but in terms of the original question “killing your love for reading” I can definitely understand it. If you enjoy reading as a pleasurable escape, but then a course makes reading all about break-neck pace, picking out specific details and pieces of information you need for assignments, and tying to self-worth in an anxiety inducing way (with grades and assessed discussions in class), it can become a tiresome chore for a while. Some people have difficulty being able to relax and love reading again as simple enjoyment.
That’s a pity, I feel bad for those people. Studying lit never had that sort of affect on me, good teachers or bad.
I think a lot of people, such as you OP, just have a really hard time wrestling with the concept that just because you enjoy something as a hobby doesn't mean you're going to enjoy it in a more rigorous setting. For instance, you say this course killed your love of reading because it had deadlines to meet, but, I'm sorry, what did you expect from an organized course? To be able to finish the book whenever you want? That sounds like an issue with your expectations Like it really feels like you guys have some idealized view of literature classes where everyone reads what they want, shows up and tells other people about it, and gets an A for discussion. People in this sub will legit harbor a grudge against their hs english teacher because they had to discuss symbolism in a literature course. Makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. At a certain point it just comes across as naive, if not a little anti intellectual, to not expect a class to have coursework and throw a fit about how it killed your joy when it does. A literature class is never going to be the same as leisure reading, they're not meant to be, they serve different purposes.
I still meet people who are in their late 20s who complain about having to read To Kill A Mockingbird in high school or something. People in university level Creative Writing/English courses who proudly and openly claim to hate classical literature because it's "boring" and they don't like being "forced" to read books. Like, I hate to say it, but you are in courses where you are paying to study literature. You'll have to read something other than royal court fantasy every now and then, and it will likely be on a schedule.
You're absolutely right and it baffles me that people a) can't see the distinction between books they HAD to read to get a deeper understanding of language/text/society/whatever, and books they read for fun and b) expect English teachers to make everything fun and engaging, but every other subject gets a pass? I teach high school English (ESL, European mainland). For the first couple of years, we let students pick their own books and I don't care if they choose Charles Dickens or Colleen Hoover, as long as they *read*. But when they get to their exam year, especially the higher levels, we expect a certain degree of literary analysis to be done and you can't do that with books like *Fifty Shades of Grey.* And yes, subsequently they tell me I'm killing their love of reading. I'm sorry, but it's a school assignment. You literally *cannot* do it with some books.
I don't think it's naive or anti-intellectual to admit that you were turned off from reading because of a few bad experiences during school. Not everyone has good professors after all.
There is a point. I love the old myths. My college “fun” class on fantasy made me almost hate the Odyssey for a year because of how badly the class managed the story. Gilgamesh also got mawed. Too much time was wasted on simple comprehension without going into themes or commentary.
Bad classes can definitely ruin books for you! I was forced to read a ton of Shakespeare in one class with a teacher that wasn't very nice and I had a miserable time but I started reading one of his plays in my free time one day and I enjoyed it way more that time around. It's easier to enjoy books without super strict deadlines and writing assignments due the next day
[удалено]
I read voraciously until I finished my lit degree, 9 years later and I'm still struggling to get back to it. I read about 8 books last year, which was the most I've read since 😂
Working in publishing made it hard to enjoy reading. I would be reading and editing all day long, so it was the last thing I wanted to do in my spare time. Then, that job would end, and I would be reading – – until I got the next publishing job
Didn't necessarily "kill" my love for reading, but I definitely hit burnout with the density of reading (classical history, philosophy, law, etc...). Had to step back for a bit and explore other hobbies before returning with something "lighter". That mental sensation equivalent to "muscle strain" is real.
It's a weird mix. High school english never dampened my love of reading, but ny teachers rarely strengthened it either. College gave me my favorite professor and completely changed my outlook on literature. Even the professors with too much reading usually had great outlooks. I only had one, an online course, that really ruined things for me.
My AP US History teacher in high school almost killed my love for history, but that's as close as it gets. He would talk with his eyes closed a lot and the students used to joke that the man would put *himself* to sleep. He somehow was even able to make major battles boring.
Law.school. I quit reading books for many years after that. Finally recovered though! :)
I didn’t experience this in school, but about two years into being an attorney, I gave up reading for pleasure. In my particular specialty, all I do is read and write all day everyday. Nine years later, I stumbled upon a book I’d never heard of in a “Little Lending Library” at the park. I started reading it and, for whatever reason, a joy of reading for pleasure came back to me. I’m embarrassed to reveal what that book was, but I did write to the author thanking him.
Honestly, not really, but as a lit major I didn't read just for pleasure for a period of probably five years. Obviously reading for class demanded most of my attention, but even after I graduated I couldn't pick up a book without my brain going into analysis mode, so I didn't really read. I don't think I questioned my love of reading, I just had to figure out my way back to it as a hobby and for enjoyment.
For me, analysis simply became part of the enjoyment. The only issue it causes is that I can’t really enjoy pulpy or fluffy novels anymore.
I feel this. I dropped literature after the first year, but have never found my way back to physically reading for pleasure. I just never figured out how to turn off the analysis mode.
Never. Even if I had terrible teachers, reading was always something that I loved. Its not like a kid would stop playing Fortnite if he had to make a paper about it. People don't hate reading because of teachers. People hate reading in schools because the reading is much more complex than in regular books. Literature in school is used to enhance your critical reading skills, not to enjoy reading. If you read manga or Colleen Hoover you would not develop critical reading skills that are fundamental for college.
You could read 1984 in a day
I'll never understand why people cite that book as the worst thing literature class had to offer. I read it voluntarily when I was sixteen or seventeen and I didn't particularly like it, but it wasn't hard to get through at all. I've struggled more with other books.
No, I’ve certainly had to read books I didn’t enjoy, or write essays that I didn’t want to write, but it never had an impact on my love of reading overall. Maybe at most, I took a break from reading certain types of content.
Oh boy, another thread on /r/books to make the users feel better about not reading books.
All of high school. The Scarlet Letter remains my most hated piece of literature decades after I read it. Once I hit university and could take courses based on certain themes, I could choose things which were interesting and I enjoyed it a lot more.
Yep. In grad school I had to read several to many books and articles a week. That would have been fine (as an earlier comment said, it’s meant to stretch you), except I also worked more than full time, plus did fetish work on the side and was involved in trials and other gig economy things - my schooling was fully funded, but I had financial responsibilities with my parents and siblings. It fucking blew. It took me years to read more than a book a month after that.
Luckily, no. Never. It only motivated me to read more.
I have a bachelors in English, I didn't read a single book for fun until the last semester of my senior year. All my time was spent doing the required reading and writing plus other classes and a job. I played video games for fun. When I graduated I knew I had to either pick the hobby back up or I'll never make it a priority.
Interestingly it was elementary school that was the worst for me. I was at a higher reading level than most of my classmates and we were often reading books in class that I had finished on my own 1-2 years previous. I remember loving "Paddle to the Sea," "My Side of the Mountain" and other youth books on my own and then found it absolutely soul-crushing to plod laboriously through them in class, with a teacher that insisted on spending 10 minutes on the title page and the table of contents with classmates who could barely sound out words.
High school AP English was ROUGH. It went fast and I had to read things I had absolute zero interest in. But looking back, those classes did more for my critical thinking skills and gave me so many lessons in nuance and context. Two concepts that have apparently been lost today. I was a little tuckered out of the heavy hitting literature during this period, but I definitely read lighter things outside of class. College was….not as bad? I got to skip most of the introductory ones because of AP credit and my degree was biology/CJ so I didn’t have to take too many. But the ones I did take were just for the credits/requirements and I could pick ones that were more tailored to my interests. Didn’t lose my lifelong love of reading in either educational setting though.
My English teacher in college (UK) soley reading 'Death of a salesman' in a monotone voice for weeks and not letting anyone do any of the other characters, was hell on earth. It didn't even make sense!
Yes, it was called College. In all honestly, nothing killed my love for reading like being forced to read things i didn't want to every day. Once I graduated and started working, i started enjoying it again!
For me, my job kills my want to read for fun. Im a lawyer and after 8 hours of reading basically all day long, I will have read 100+ pages. The last thing I want to do is pick up a book. Before law school, I would read fiction for hours at a time on weekends.
Any class where I was forced to read Catcher in the Rye.
It depends highly on the reading material and the quality of the professor. I took 2 literature courses one year and I remember loving one of them because the material and discussions were deep. The books were sometimes dry, or challenging. But the professor really addressed some of those issues with thought provoking exercises. The other one, I remember only attending because she gave quizzes at the start of each class. The books were awful and tedious, and her discussions were shallow and vague.
High school English teacher made fun of me for reading a Stephen king novel 3 times because I liked it (Salem’s Lot). Just made me not read the books she assigned.
High school English killed reading for me for yearsss. I love reading in elementary and middle school and didn’t start regularly reading again after highschool till a year ago when I was 25
My college literature professor must have thought we were all naïve kids who needed to be exposed to the cruel world, because he assigned the most vile and disgusting books possible. Nihilistic main characters degrading and killing people for no reason whatsoever. It was the only class where I skipped all the lectures - read the books and showed up for the tests. I didn't want to dwell on those books any more than I had to. I think I got a B in that class.
It never killed my love but I’ve had teachers super into just reading romance classics from centuries ago which just are not my thing at all. I feel like school kills a lot of passion for reading especially for younger people being forced to read and write about books they don’t care about.
I hated Tom Sawyer and, consequently, Mark Twain because of a group book report. My group mates chose this book, but didn't read it. I had to do most of the work on a book I didn't prefer to read. I still dislike Mark Twain lol
Yes! Ethan Frome for 5 months. FIVE MONTHS. That book is only 195 pages. I still can’t read anything by Edith Wharton.
For some reason that book struck me as profound. I even gave it to a cousin who likes to read as a bday gift qhen she was a teen!...now that I am older I can't imagine why I gave her that as a gift! Or what I saw in that sad, maudlin story...tastes change as you grow
Such a shame that book is taught. Wharton has much, much better books.
I felt my love of literature slowly die with every professor who assigned Great Expectations🤮
Yes, because of the amount of things I HAD to read for school. It’s like you get burnt out and don’t read for fun. After reading textbooks all day long, I’m not gonna pull out another book to read for fun 💀 now that I’m out of school, my love for reading has returned.
Yes. Ages 13-22. Middle school - college killed my love for reading because they started mandating what I need to read, when I need to read it, and how to properly analyze it. Reading became a job, not a hobby. Now that I’ve graduated, I’m back to enjoying reading whatever and whenever I want.
I took a best sellers class that was supposed to best sellers of every generation and how they became best sellers/what makes a best seller type of class, that was heavily discussion based. What it actually was, was just the professors favorite books which were all fine (one of them I even really really liked) but the class aways ended up with him basically saying that there’s no criticism for the novel but when we would bring up any modern best seller in any comparison writing or really in any discussion we would be told anything published after 1980 isn’t good. It made me dislike reading the books because I felt I could not earnestly engage with the pros and cons of the books or really engage at all other than “this book is good and here’s why” when I was expecting to engage in more of a “this book was a best seller and here’s why” which are not the same conversation at all since there are both well written and badly written best sellers so it was just frustrating and made me lack enthusiasm for the books we read. Also I felt it was weird that we read a book from the 1800s and the 4 from the 1900s but did not even touch a book written past 1980 considering it would have been so fun to analyze trends in best sellers since the advent of the internet and such a good conversation about how that changed peoples access to books etc but instead it was just “this book good that’s why people liked it” which was just not fun for me
In high school, 3 novels made me truly hate reading: - The Catcher in the Rye - The Great Gatsby - A Tale of Two Cities As I've gotten older, and learned a lot more about Dickens and the social/political context he was writing in, I've come to appreciate all his works a great deal. I still loathe Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby though. Jay Gatsby and Holden Caulfield can both die in a fire.
Amen.
[удалено]
I HATE Shakespeare's plays (the sonnets are fine) and considering I had an entire college course dedicated to his works, I dreaded everything about reading for a bit. Alternatively, I loved my course on Geoffrey Chaucer. So it's not hard to read English I have an issue with - it's truly Shakespeare.
For sure. The amount of reading I had to do in grad school (and the stress from deadlines) burned me out on pleasure reading for several years. I was able to get back into it, thankfully, by remembering that when I read for fun, it's just for me. I can skip the boring parts. I don't have to write papers about themes or style. If I lose interest in a book, I can put it down and not care. Nobody's going to quiz me. It's great.
Grad school. I was spending so much time reading that I was exhausted of it, and it was a much more effortful type of reading to study than to read for enjoyment. By the time I was done reading to study I was not interested in reading for fun. Took me years to get back into the habit
No, never. Reading is natural state for ne, I don't care about anything while I am reading, hland I do and always had doing it FAST. Maybe it's some neurological stuff, but a week for a book is like a lot of time for me. An evening is maybe not enough, if you must think a lot through the text and writing your thoughts down.
I had a 7th grade english teacher who hated my guts. First, we had just moved from KY (college town) to upstate NY, and I couldn't speak English properly, and went downhill from there. (my allergies were non-existant and i was just causing a scene in class, etc) Unfortunately this ruined 7th and 8th grade English where they concentrate on language structure. It has cost me learning foreign languages today. Later I had a teacher that got me into reading on my own. I still have trouble reading "leisure" books for classes, even ones I would have normally read outside of class.
7th grade. The books he assigned us were way too advanced and (from the perspective of a teenage boy at least) boring.
High school and college. High school because i had to read things i didn't choose myself College ...well ..because college. I was burned out on even wanting to read until a few years after. (Reread some as an adult. Actually really good. I dont know if have it in me for Dickens and Great Gasby tho)
In highschool I had to read Silas Marner. Then, after holiday break, I was placed in a different English class and had to read Silas Marner again.
Oh no! We had to read Frankenstein in 9th or 10th grade, and I actually went to a different school for 12th grade and we had to... read Frankenstein.
Anybody have to read "Fire in the Lake" about the Vietnam war? Remember it almost 50 years later and not positively!
Because I am a brilliant man, I took two literature courses during an 8 week summer semester. I know for a fact I was the only person to do all the reading for either course, let alone both of them. I didn't want to read so much as a cereal box for a while after that.
I didn’t really read for pleasure during college or for a few years after. Then I got back into it. I always felt like I had too much I needed to read for class to want to read more afterward.
Yes. While in college I had to read so many court documents and statutes and court case documents that the only thing I could read was romantic comedy books because they didn't require any amount of thinking.
Personally, I have not experienced such a situation, but I will advise taking time to explore books at your own pace, engage in discussions with fellow book lovers, and seek out courses or reading groups that prioritize thoughtful engagement with literature.
When I went to trade school for computer networking/administration I didn't have much time to read. After three years of studying something technical, my brain changed significantly. Reading literature, something I used to love, was really difficult. I had to start out reading light fantasy featuring wizards and elves for a long while before I could work my way back to "serious literature". I became less of a book snob as well.
Junior High and High school English, 100%. I used to devour books until around the middle of Junior High, which is when a lot of those asinine book reports started becoming a thing. I didn't start reading for pleasure again until after I was in college.
Oddly, I stopped reading a long time during college, but I studied engineering. It was just so much work that I wanted to do anything that required zero mental effort after studying.
A level english for about two years knocked the love of reading out of me until i rediscovered it in 2023. We did the most intense books that really triggered me (The colour purple, A streetcar named desire, In cold blood) I feel like the English curriculum in the UK really favours books that are gorey, violence against women in particular and abuse, and ONLY reading them was really depressing and affected me slightly. I know it’s kinda stupid but I feel like there should be a balance between those kinds of books and other works. HOWEVER! I learnt to love to read again, because reading is awesome and just because you had a bad teacher/curriculum doesn’t mean you should never read again!
You guys were able to read books as uni students? Books as in not course litterature books?!😅 During my 6 years at uni I had zero time or energy left to read anything past course litterature. I was able to read a few books during summer breaks thats all
Don't look at the flowers Lenny, Put me off of books for a few months, Then the love of history class brought me back.
Not quite. I always loved the novels, short stories, discussions, and compare/contrast analytical essays we had in English classes I took. The only thing that ever really bothered me was when teachers tried too hard to control how fast we were getting through the book. “Don’t read more than the one chapter tonight because we’ll have a class discussion and I don’t want anyone spoiling for the other students”—meanwhile each chapter is only about 10-20 mins of reading. The pace was too slow & it stretched out discussions far more than should be needed for anyone above grade 2.
Yes, 11th grade English I believe. The previous year, Great Expectations had really soured me on Dickens but A Tale of Two cities was literally the first book I read three chapters and went to the Cliff's notes.
Had to read "Fever 1793" in a capstone class for college. I fucking HATE Laurie Halsie Anderson. Was a struggle.
Nope! But I'm kind of asocial and I know that there's books that I don't like. So when we were given books which we had to read I tried them and if I didn't like them I just dropped them and went with my TBR books. But I've heard about literature classes where students were unappreciated when they wrote their honest essays about the books and that killed their interest, cause if the interpretation MUST be like what their teacher think, then what point is in reading any book if you can just copy from your classmates/internet while your own opinion and ideas don't matter in the slightest?
Yeah, right now. She has a tendency to be pedantic about small meta-commentary things in classic literature while ignoring larger issues and that gets under my skin. Of course, this makes date nights with her pretty tense.
I was taking an honors English class in high school and the teacher required us to keep “page trackers” where we could annotate our reading. Being required to write a note minimum every other page of watership down made it damn near impossible for my adhd brain to read at all
All of high school English
American political theory 300. Just the worst.
No, I always thrived under the pressure, but motherhood fried my ADHD brain. Too many mundane, equally important tasks and then being in charge of the well being of a littles. I didn't have the bandwidth for good, emotionalally challenging books, and started reading garbage romance or YA, but most was so cringe and badly written I feel off the book bandwagon altogether.
To be honest, no not really. English and history were always my favourite classes and I never had bad experiences with the readings. I went on to double major in English lit and Medieval Studies and loved every class. Not sure if just a nerd for these, but I had nothing but positive experiences.
Basically most of middle school through high school - if I'm not interested in a book I read really slowly, but we had required reading, so I'd be stuck reading some book I hated forever with no time to read something I liked, so I just stopped reading altogether. 11th grade English especially killed my enjoyment of reading altogether. I HATED everything we got assigned and I HATED the teacher, and part of why I decided to quit the IB program was because I didn't want him as my English teacher again in 12th grade. And luckily it didn't kill my love for reading again, but my creative writing professor in college sure made me hate books for a while. She was like the embodiment of everyone's stereotypical awful English teacher who thinks every single thing in every piece of writing is symbolic no matter how little sense it makes - like we had to read an anthology of short stories by the same author, and she said that a character buying a gun in one story was symbolic of that character "revolving" in the second story they're in. Even though nobody has ever said "wow this character revolved" ever. She kind of killed my desire to write for a while, too. *Edit* do some of you guys who are like "Um no and anyone who says it killed their love never liked reading in the first place" have *other* hobbies? It's pretty common for people to not enjoy something anymore if they're expected to do it on someone else's terms rigorously and not engage with it at a pace they enjoy. That's why a lot of people who hate monetizing their hobbies, because then it's not a hobby anymore. It's work. That doesn't mean they never actually loved art or knitting or whatever, just that having to engage with it on someone else's terms isn't fun.
9-10th grade, went from a book every day or two I. Middle school to struggling to read 1 in a year. 12th grade English teacher brought the love back.
I was an English major in undergrad and one semester thought it would be a smart idea to take 4 reading intensive classes in a semester. I had a book due per class every week. I didn’t read a serious work of fiction for about 3 years after that semester. But it comes back, I promise. Now I read a couple books every week or two just for fun.
Being forced to write book reports in high-school lit classes almost killed my love of reading, but being able to read books in my father's book collection WITHOUT doing book reports kept it alive. As a parent, it's important to have lots of books in the home, and show by example that reading is enjoyable.
No, I was one of those weirdos that liked writing about books and was often the first one in the class to finish compulsory reading days before everyone else. The process of thinking about books I would do mostly while writing the paper. To help with this I would take notes while reading. It speeds everything up instead of reading, processing, read a bit more, process, repeat, repeat and then get to the paper and have to go back through the book and rely on the memory bank. I think teachers catch a lot of flack for stuff out of their control like whatever curriculum and schedule they’re bound to. They have to prepare students for the real world, and in the real world for English majors or for people who go into tertiary study and work where reading is essential you can’t just piss around with compulsory reading at your own desired pace. Theyre not teaching you how to read for your own personal enjoyment. It’s the skills of reading that’s important here not your pleasure of reading. Just ask anyone who went into law or med school having to read giant textbooks. If they didn’t get the foundational reading skills earlier they struggle to keep up.
I’ll speak from a teacher perspective. I teach Middle School Language arts and lately, kids don’t like reading drawn out exposition. They want action, they want quick reads. Even a copy of The Outsiders turns them off. I introduced a graphic novel unit and my students love it. Choice is a big thing in school now.
Oh, absolutely. When I went to college, I expected to follow one of two tracks: English (and books) or physics. Taking both my first year, I found that dissecting and analyzing books felt like it was ruining my love of reading. So I stuck with physics. Today, I'm more interested in literary analysis, but I didn't have the capacity for it then.
Happened to my oldest son, he was reading kids chapter books before his student group, the teachers would give him longer and harder books to read, he hates reading now, it makes me up set, I used to be able to give him a book and he wouldn’t put it down until it was finished and would write his own stories, but because the teachers held him to a higher standard and he saw the difference of what he was doing and the other kids and the teachers pressuring him, he ended up hating it
I remember being in high school and the teacher made us read "The importance of being earnest". I thought it was hilarious. The other students hated it. So after a while (maybe 2 chapters) the teacher switched to a different book. It wasn't my teacher wrecking things, it was my fellow students.
I was always a reader. But one semester in high school we had to read 1984, Brave New World, and Lord of the Flies. It was just SO GRIM.
I’m a lifelong and avid recreational reader. It’s my most positive and favorite habit. Anytime I had prescribed reading through high school and college, it would absolutely murder any motivation I had to read. I think the mental energy I would have spent doing it recreationally was just used up, and I’d turn to less mentally taxing free time activities. I am glad for some of them, but it made reading a Type 2 fun as opposed to Type 1. I remember being excited for the end of those classes so that I could focus on reading what I wanted and taking my time to digest and form my own opinions.
I had to take an English course in college. I picked poetry because I enjoyed reading and analyzing it. I realized how spoiled I was with a great English teacher in high school. This professor was of the mind that there was one correct interpretation of poems; if you wrote a paper with a different interpretation or focused on an aspect of the poem he didn't think was important, you got a "B" at best. And, I know it could have been worse. But, my highschool teacher loved it when students looked at works from "non-standard" angles. As long as we could support our argument, it was okay. It kept us engaged and made discussions much more interesting. I thought college would be more of that. I went from thrilled for class and having a reason to build fun reading into my schedule. That professor killed the fun. I skipped class for the first time in my anxious little academic people pleaser life just to avoid lectures a few times.
I did really struggle to stay motivated and read the assigned stuff for my Irish literature and poetry modules (that's Irish-*language* stuff, not just English literature from Ireland), mainly because I read so much slower in my second language and the stuff we were studying was quite dense. I did begin to feel the dread knowing I had weekly readings to do, but I suppose it was more due to my own deficiencies in the language than the actual content or lecturer being bad.
I got almost nothing from school english classes, they held me back from having the time to read what I wanted til I started college.
Intro to Catholicism. 8 books, 2000+ pages of assigned reading.
I didn't like most of my High School reading list. But I still read stuff I liked in the meantime. Like pretty much all of my school life, school was school and outside of school was my real life. I suppose I must have somehow learned things in school, but I don't remember the vast majority of my time in it. I just longed to be anywhere else.
My literature teacher in secondary school scolded me for thinking that Animal Farm was an allegory for communism...
The entirety of law school. There was just so much reading, it felt like violence to my eyes to try to read for pleasure. It literally took like a five year break from reading anything before I could get back into regularly reading again
I honestly find the whole meme of "reading things that challenged me made me not want to read" to be pretty obnoxious.
I worked for a bookstore run by a horrible narcissist. I couldn't read any books for a couple of years after I left that awful place, and I still have some book ADD years later.
Never. I had some English teachers I hated but I refuse to let them rob me of the joy of books.
My first literature professor in college accused me of plagiarism because I “improved too much.” The first book we had to read was Pale Fire and I was too young to get it, the second was White Noise and I read it three times, devoured it and wrote what I still believe to be a brilliant essay. The school ended up putting me through an entire hearing! Showed me what you get for improving and enjoying a book! Jokes on them, I’m a professional screenwriter now.
When I struggled with uni. I wanted time off from studying/working on assignments. But during that time I also did not allow myself to read for fun cos I could be doing uni work instead.
Back when I was in high school, we started reading Jane Eyre in my senior year. Nothing against the book, it just wasn't for me at all. And this teacher would have us basically cram a chapter a night, on top of all our other schoolwork. Getting through 30 boring pages of that book each night really murdered my enjoyment of reading for a while. I don't think I read for enjoyment after that for a long, long time and when I did they were really short contemporary novels. Nothing robust, and definitely not any classical lit. The frustrating thing is, before all that, I enjoyed reading pretty much anything. But high school English classes in general would consistently pick materials that did not mesh with me at all (I really only devoured *Night* and *The Catcher in the Rye;* everything else was like pulling teeth) and then hammered me over the head with it for *weeks.* And it wasn't uncommon for them to even slow the material down a ton because half our class couldn't read. So we'd take a fairly short read like The Great Gatsby and pad it out for like six weeks not even going into depth, just covering the basic plot. Six weeks of being a broke high school student with a broke family reading about rich bootleggers being awful to each other. Six weeks of reading about a governess living with a guy who keeps his crazy relative in an attic. Six weeks of individual Shakespeare plays where we just read the raw text and they acted like we were crazy if we didn't get what they were saying, zero attempts to bridge the gap between reading a script versus watching a play. I could go on\*.\* It was exhausting. I didn't even like most of these books to begin with. Meanwhile, every teacher I had was so passionate about all of them; I started to feel like there was something wrong with me for not liking any of it. To this day, I envy their passion. Part of me wonders if they were faking it to cope with having to talk about it every day, six times a day. When I went into university and picked English as a major (because back then, we were all told to just get a four year degree in anything, and writing was the only thing I felt confident about at the time), I was so fucking disappointed to learn that all of my classes amounted to expensive book clubs. I wanted to *write.* I wanted to study writing as a craft. In hindsight, the journalism route would have been better for me, but nobody offered me that advice. The most satisfying lit class I ended up having, was one where we examined the literature from a writer's perspective to see what the writer did to make the reader feel a certain way. I only had two professors take this approach. I loved them both to death. Also honorary shoutout to the woman who led the Milton classes, because I enjoyed those lectures as well. The rest, it was just an expensive book club. Read the book, show up to class, listen to other clueless 19 year olds drone about how they thought it was so *interesting* how some event happened. I learned to hate that word. *Interesting.* In their mouths it signified nothing at all. What about it was of interest to you? Why did you find it interesting? They couldn't say. So many vapid drones in every class. God help me if the class involved a lab. A lab for an English lit course. We'd show up and even the professor couldn't be bothered; his TA was there instead, and we'd have these blind-leading-blind discussions that amounted to nothing. Such an insane waste of time. And of course at the end of it all, finding employment outside of education was a nightmare. I had to learn a completely different skillset. My only consolation is I didn't go into debt. Thank God. It took several years after all of that for me to pick up a book for pleasure again. My campus was even surrounded by brick and mortar used bookstores and I'd buy any that seemed enjoyable and just put them on my shelf, hoping to god that one day I'd enjoy my old hobby again. Back then, whenever I picked them up and tried to read them, I'd feel a bizarre mental block and just stop after a couple of pages. There was a time when I never experienced anything like that. I've slowly started working through that backlog now, nearly a decade after exiting the university system. I'm still not jaded enough to say it's an intentional process, but the fact that this entire institution was able to make someone like me, who once loved reading, *hate* it? Speaks volumes imo. Happy for everyone else commenting in this thread who had the opposite effect though, genuinely.
My junior year English teacher made me loathe Charles dickens like I didn’t even know my little book loving 17 year old heart could hate.
My 8th grade english class. The teacher they hired for that year had just come from teaching college, and she didn't adjust her expectations at all. I will never forget her saying half way though the class, "None of you can appreciate the classics, and if I were allowed, each and every one of you would fail this class."
YES. My 6th grade reading teacher (why we had one when we were 12-13? No idea!), would make us read chapters outloud but interrupt us every few sentences to analyze EVERY DETAIL of EVERY BOOK. I'm sorry, but this question brought back *memories*.
I was a massive reader in high school and the only time my teachers made me feel like I was losing my love of reading was when I'd read in class and ignore the lesson so they'd confiscate the book until lesson ended. They encouraged me, talked to me about books to read, discussed in depth their own impressions of the likes of ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and Ronald Dahl. One even asked to borrow some of my Stephen king books based on a critique I wrote on Delores Claiborne.
I finished my degree in my forties. Life got in the way. I took a short story class as an elective; 70% of the stories the class covered were the same ones I studied in high school ~25 years before.
I was an avid reader from kindergarten onward. Until we started getting more “classic” required readings in middle school and high school. Completely ruined reading for me, and I only rekindled (KINDLE-d 🤣) my love of reading in undergrad.
Well not a necessary read or anything but I couldn't change it so I guess this counts. For my senior year I had to choose a book for class. I had just finished watching the Harry Potter movies for the first time without reading the books. I then blindly decided that a cursed child would be an easy pick. I don't think I need to explain further.
Yea, every time I was forced to read old English or old Chinese.
I’m currently in college taking literature courses for an English degree. I haven’t had a problem with any of my classes except one: Literary Theory. It was a LOT of reading, mostly dry, analytical essays examining how one should read and understand literature. It was probably the most reading I’ve had to do for a course and it was even stories
English teacher was a bully put me off picking up a book for yeara
10th grade English.
No. Never. I've always mentally separated the books that I read for fun, and the books that they wanted me to read. Sure, I've had to read books in school that I disliked, but I finished them (or skipped them) and went back to the books that I loved. I know a lot of people say that the books they were made to read in school killed their love of reading, but frankly this statement always baffled me. Nobody's forcing you to read Rushdie or Orwell in your spare time and if you've always loved reading, I don't know, John Grisham or Roald Dahl, then surely you'd understand these books aren't inherently different because your English teacher made you read Charles Dickens? I understood that the books I had to read were meant to challenge me, to push me into having a deeper understanding of language or society, so I appreciated them for that even when I didn't enjoy them. We don't expect maths teachers or chemistry teachers to make everything fun either... Aside from that, it's extremely common for prolific readers to read less or stop reading altogether from their mid to late teens, especially 10+ years ago when the YA/NA didn't really properly exist as a genre and the gap between children's lit and adult lit was wide. Most but not all readers get back into the habit at some point during their adult years.
This is the reason I'm never taking English as an elective. I love to read, and it would destroy me if it became a chore and drained the enjoyment out of my life. I'd rather take a heavy book on math or science, suffer, and then feel the weight lift off my shoulders as I flip open a page or begin reading a literary analysis of a book. It's just something I can't bear to taint by the slow-crushing grind of monetization and capitalism.
If people are never challenged they will be almost 30 and unable to digest anything beyond Colleen Hoover which is sad. 1984 is shorter than one single Hunger Games book, the language is simple, teens are more than capable of handling it.
I have only had teachers and professors that increased my love of reading, but it has happened a couple of times that we had to read books I absolutely did not vibe with. I had to read Ben Learner's *10.04* for a class about time in literature, and I just could not finish it. I know he's celebrated, but the times it didn't make me fall asleep, it annoyed me to no end. So, I didn't read it, despite risking failing my exam if it turned out to be the subject of the exam question. Luckily, the question was on Wuthering Heights!
Yeah, in school being forced to read books I wasn't old or smart enough to understand yet and then have to write an essay on them really made me start seeing reading as a boring chore, and I loved reading YA books on my own, but after HS I sorta lost the passion for it. I'm trying to get back into reading again.
I took a Modern Canadian Literature class back in university, and although I did enjoy it, it was A LOT of reading and A LOT of information in a short timespan. It didn't make me hate reading but it did make me not want to read in an analytical way at all! I wanted to turn my brain completely off! As soon as the semester was done, I went to a used bookstore and bought 2 of the trashiest romance novels I could find. I devoured them and it was amazing. Best book experience ever hahahaha!
I love reading, but also despised being given a strict deadline. In school, I absolutely hated having to disect every little thing. I preferred to read for enjoyment than over analyzing the details. Sometimes things can be taken a face value. Sometimes a raven is just a bird stuck in a house.
High school reading, point blank. I graduated early 2000s, and I think the most recently published book we read was maybe Lord of the Flies (which happened to be the single book in all of high school I never read). But high school made me think I hated reading so much that I never picked another book up for TEN years. I remember when I picked a book up and it had a cell phone in it. It was this bizarre reality check for me that not all books had been written in 1500-1950, and had to be read for analyzing to death. That... Maybe I was allowed to *enjoy a book*????
For sure! It didn’t kill my love of reading, but I just got burnt out and it went dormant. I loved reading ever since I was two years old and wanted to be a language teacher ever since I was six. In my junior year of high school that really ramped up as I was taking the courses that I would need to become one. And then when I got into college that got even more intense, especially with the double teaching major in involving English and Spanish. And even though there were some awesome books that material was also really heavy. As a result, I pretty much stopped reading for fun in junior year of high school and didn’t start doing it again until shortly after I graduated college. Even then I went slowly. I’m not sure I could read the amount I read in college ever again, but my love of reading has never wavered.
I did my undergrad in English because it was what I was good at, not what I wanted. I found myself always analyzing books. I hated reading for a good while after I finished and it wasn’t until I started my second degree that I started enjoying reading for pleasure again.
Studying English grammar classes or literature without any actual curiosity was a nightmare. But reading the books I love kept me afloat.
Remember as a kid i would read voraciously. My Mum took me to the library every Thursday, went to high school and in year 7 we were made to Artemis Fowl. I hated it that much I don’t think I read again until I left school. Luckily I have rediscovered my love for it now and even read 35 books last year !
Every literature class I took in college. A lot of them sucked the life out of writing for me too which is something I love
A friend of mine has recounted the story of how unflinchingly cruel Frank McCourt was at Stuyvesant High School. I think my friend still bears the scars of the overzealous shaming he received on several occasions, but I'm grateful it didn't rob him of his ability to write well or enjoy reading. It certainly didn't INSPIRE him to do either; that much is sure.
I absolutely HATED reading while I was still in school. In our schools, we had specified lists of books that you were allowed to read for either Dutch (all Dutch authors) or English (original English books, no translations). This also meant that almost all of the books on there were literary pills or the classics- not appealing to me at all. I remember Harry Potter was explicitly forbidden to read for your reading list, even if you read it in English instead of Dutch. I had to read 5 books a year for each course and I absolutely detested it. You could never say you did not finish it, because they would fail your book report or oral exam. It took until I was around 20/21 for me to come back to reading. Ironically, it was Harry Potter that did it. My Mom owned the first book, and I read it in 2 days. I bought the second and got the rest of the series for Christmas. I devoured them all.
School made me sickeningly anxious, and particularly mandatory English class. I am simply neither academic nor analytical enough for that kind of rote memorisation and lacked the intellect (not to mention discipline) necessary to draw connections between texts. I read for escapism and entertainment, and reading critically to a particular theme or question goes entirely against my grain. Those classes are absolutely fine for people who WANT to have their reading challenged. I'll sit here with my Crichton and my Anne of Green Gables and leave the rest of you to ponder the mysteries of postcolonial thought in Conrad, thanks. The only thing I did enjoy was the poetry.
100%. Not having a choice in what I read in school definitely killed my love for reading as mode of them were books I never would have read myself and that I hated or found uninterested. Even as much as I loved the materials I had to read for my degree, they also killed my love of reading. I loved the subject; but they were dense and boring and even downright depressing at times and it made it hard to want to sink into a new world and face the issues in those. I mainly reread old favorites as they were comforting and familiar. It’s only that I’ve started to read new books again and I’ve enjoying it very much. While I love the familiar, there’s something so enticing about a new world and new characters to learn about and absorb and about not knowing what will happen