It’s Monday again! Here’s this week’s question:

How did you react to assigned reading when you were in school/university/college/etc.? How do you think on these books now? What book were you ‘forced’ to read when you where in school that you’ve since reread and loved?

I’ve always been an avid reader, and reading under “diress” wasn’t ever much of a problem for me! There were certainly times I had to pour through an entire book in an evening in order to get caught up, and I read my share of boring or strange books, but I never dreaded the act of forced reading itself! In fact, I always thought it was sort of fun — it gave me a chance to read books I wouldn’t normally pick up on my own. In high school, I was only reading young adult — and college, it was mostly literary and contemporary fiction. Would I have ever picked up something like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to read on my own? Very doubtful!

I don’t generally re-read books, so there aren’t any that I remember reading in school and then looking back over years later. Books I didn’t fully understand about at the time that have since come to mean much more to me include Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.