It’s Sunday and time for Six for Sunday! This is a weekly blog feature started by A Little But a Lot. This week’s prompt is books that I studied in school. I was a good student in school but I hated pretty much every book I was forced to read in school. Most of them I didn’t even read when I realized it didn’t change my grade. So this was a bit of a struggle to come up with books that I actually read. I couldn’t get to 6 I actually liked so here are the 3 best and 3 worst books that I actually read for school.
The Ones I Liked
- A Gebra Named Al by Wendy Isdell – I am a humongous dork. I love math and always have. Both of my parents were math teachers and I’m an engineer. In (I think) 5th grade, my teacher had a few of us read this while the other students were doing math we already knew. I still remember it and how much I loved it. This quirky little math world blew my mind.
- Harry Potter – It was the summer before I went to 6th grade that Harry Potter started becoming super popular, the first 3 books were out at the time. I held off reading them as I knew (since my soon-to-be English teacher was a friend of my dad’s) that we would be reading the first book in class. I held off and actually learned the first one in school. I think we were the only class to ever read it in school, too may kids after us already had read it. I got to build a diorama of Ollivander’s, it was the most fun I ever had on a school project.
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – We read this in 9th grade. It’s the only book I remember liking from high school. I’ll never read it again, who knows what I’d think now and it’s good to have one positive memory of English class.
The Ones I Didn’t Like (or at least the worst 3)
- The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger – In 10th grade, I had a wonderful teacher. He was tough but creative and really knew his stuff which forced me to actually read the assigned books. An entire year and I didn’t like any of them (1984, Lord of the Flies, ugh, the stuff we force teenagers to read is terrible) but the worst of the worst was The Catcher in the Rye.
- Lilith by George MacDonald – This was also a 10th grade read but for an individual project. Our teacher assigned authors for us to read multiple of their works and I got George MacDonald. How I managed to slog my way through this atrocity, I will never know.
- Nostromo by Joseph Conrad – I took one English class in college because it was required even though I was an engineering major. I don’t remember much about this class or anything that we read except for Nostromo and I only remember how much I totally hated this book. In one memorable reading session, I threw it across the room and knocked over my fish bowl and had to scramble to not let my beta fish die, the book was a wavy, water-stained mess after that.
Stay tuned these Six for Sunday prompts in the October which are in celebration of UK Black history month:
- October 3 – Favorite books by Black authors
- October 10 – Favorite Black characters
- October 17 – Books that celebrate Black voices
- October 24 – Books by Black authors I want to read
- October 31 – Recommended reads by Black authors
Susan Lyn Knits and Reads 