Sometimes I think high school English courses are designed to make kids hate reading.
Gatsby was one of the books we had to read and I didn't like any of the characters and couldn't care less about anything they wanted or did.
When I was around 30 I decided to read the book again to see if it landed differently and nope. Still thought it was awful.
I did enjoy a few of the assigned books. Canticle for Leibowitz, Brave New World, Lost Horizon, Frankenstein, and Day of the Triffids are a few I remember positively.
Teachers know kids will use AI to write essays and I bet more than a few teachers use them to grade, so there's probably no point in assigning a single book for everybody anymore. IMHO, the best chance to get a kid to read and write about a novel is to let them pick something of interest.
Gatsby was one of the books we had to read and I didn't like any of the characters and couldn't care less about anything they wanted or did.
When I was around 30 I decided to read the book again to see if it landed differently and nope. Still thought it was awful.
I did enjoy a few of the assigned books. Canticle for Leibowitz, Brave New World, Lost Horizon, Frankenstein, and Day of the Triffids are a few I remember positively.
Teachers know kids will use AI to write essays and I bet more than a few teachers use them to grade, so there's probably no point in assigning a single book for everybody anymore. IMHO, the best chance to get a kid to read and write about a novel is to let them pick something of interest.