[Mistri]

High school ruined this book for me. It would've been easier to read if I hadn't been forced to tear apart every single sentence for analysis. Hearing "Great Gatsby" triggers my gag reflex now, along with most other books I analyzed in high school.

[tjalfi]

Literary augury[0] is my term for that kind of literature discussion.

[0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/augury

[toyg]

In Italy that happens with Dante’s Divina Commedia and Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi. Very good reads on their own, they get absolutely destroyed by being forced on kids.

[jwdunne]

Similar thing happened to me but with Of Mice and Men and Macbeth. Come to enjoy those stories but it always felt like I was meant to glean a deeper meaning than even the author intended!

[RBerenguel]

I had this with The Picture of Dorian Gray, but on a re-read later (several years on a bored weekend, that was before I wrote code or read about code most of the time) I came to really appreciate it.

[throwawayboise]

Yep same. HS English classes pretty much killed all desire to read Shakespear or any of the "important" American authors. Kurt Vonnegut's works are the only ones I remember enjoying.

[WalterBright]

I finally got around to reading Romeo+Juliet in my 40's. It was much better than I expected, aside from all the tired cliches in the prose.

[ecopoesis]

Shakespeare invented those “tired cliches.”

[whalesalad]

Same here. High school English was traumatizing.