[Bahmo]

Oh, where to start.

The Great Gatsby wasn't terribly painful for me, but it certainly didn't strike me as being at all important enough to force High Schoolers through. I still don't get what the message of that book was supposed to be. A book that I hate with every fiber of my being, and one whose author must have been truly sadistic, is The Call of the Wild. What the fuck?! I have always loathed "touching dog stories" because the dog usually dies in them, but this "classic" is by far the most depressing piece of shit out of all the depressing pieces of shit.

In general, I love Mark Twain, but I found his story The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County to be stupid, and not very funny compared to what its reputation suggests. In fact, that's not a solid story; it's a written monologue that just drones from subject to subject.

Shakespeare writes incredibly well, but I dislike his style. All of his characters speak the same high-poetry sort of English, from the University Graduate in London right down to the illiterate peasant, and not only is that unrealistic, the sort of dialogue it leads to actually starts to (in my opinion) upstage the content of the actual story, and make it less immersive.

My single most hated author that I read in school, based on everything I've read from him, is Ray Bradbury. I admit he writes well, but all that talent is wasted on what he writes. He's simply a one-sided blowhard; almost all of his stories are the same bit of luddite propaganda over and over again. It also enrages me that the mass of literary critics have the nerve to call him a great science fiction writer, when many of his stories are completely contemptuous of actual science, such as facts about what the climates of Mars and Venus are like. Bradbury is just a big ego.