Musing Mondays: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Today’s Musing Mondays (from just one more page…) is as follows: What books did you read while in school? Were there any that your particularly liked, or even hated? Did any become lifelong favorites?

Seeing as I am still in school, this is a tricky question to answer, but I think that what I’ll do is look at high school first and then bring up any books in my undergrad and now grad education that pop into my head.

I have always been a “book nerd” and in high school my favorite class was always English. I had some really good English professors: Mr. Poling for Freshman English, Mr. Burke for Sophomore English (who inspired me to want to become an English teacher), I can’t for the life of me remember my Junior English teacher’s name but her class was American Literature, and Mr. Brewer for Senior English. (Mr. Brewer was a piece of work, and I’ll leave it at that.)

I remember quite a few of the books that I read during these four years, some I loved … some I liked … and some I hated. As for ones that I loved and became lifelong favorites, I’d have to say that To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (about as perfect a book as there is), The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Beowulf and Hamlet by William Shakespeare are up there. These books are in and amongst my perennial favorites and would surely place high in a personal top Fifty List and even in a Top Twenty list. (To Kill a Mockingbird may very well be my most favorite book of all time, and I can thank my unnamed American Lit teacher for that.)

I also read a handful of books that at the time I did not like, but have since come to appreciate including: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and Julius Cæsar by William Shakespeare.

Then there were the stinkers. Books I hated at the time and books that I still detest including: Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford, I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier, A Separate Peace by John Knowles and Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. Bad books then and bad books now.

Looking back I am also surprised at how many books I didn’t read during my high school career. Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell are obvious omissions, as is The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. There are a couple of other “standards” that I can’t think of off the top of my head that I know others have read in high school but that for some reason my high school didn’t. Nothing by Hemingway (I still haven’t read The Old Man and the Sea) nothing by Austen or the Brontës; never read All’s Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque nor The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (I still have not read either). No Faulkner. No Jonathan Swift or Henry David Thoreau or Thornton Wilder.

In Junior High I can only remember reading two books, one I hated, one I loved. The one I hated was A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck and the one I loved was Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee.

As for college I read Jane Eyre and did not like it. However, I have been introduced to some gems: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty, Dark Blue Suit and Other Stories by Peter Bacho, Libra and White Noise by Don DeLillo, Paradise Lost by John Milton and the works of Colm Tóibín.