• Nounka@lemmy.world
    4·
    3 days ago

    It was not in English… But we had to read the golden egg. Story about a guy who s girl is missing. He keeps looking for her. Has driems about them being close together but not seeing the other. . At the end he finds a guy who sais he can do the same to him as he did to the girlfriend. Last you know he is like burried…

  • JayDee@lemmy.sdf.org
    5·
    3 days ago

    Oh man, let’s talk about short stories that defined my taste in literature!

    • To Build A Fire: definitely built a fascination in me of the morbid and got me way more into survivalism than quick sand ever did. I live in a cold place too and that put it well into perspective how dangerous that can be.

    • The Sniper: This was my start into war literature, and what a good start. I keep coming back to this one when I hear people talk about a civil war in the US. It’s more unsettling now than ever before.

    • The Lottery. How couldn’t that be on the list?

    • Cask of Amontillado: big vibes. Poe made me goth-brained no doubt.

    Our school also had us read Robert Frost. Really great way to introduce kids to the idea that ‘some folks just kinda wanna die all the time’. That and why child labor laws are good and important.

  • ouRKaoS@lemmy.today
    481·
    5 days ago

    A Modest Proposal traumatized one girl in my class.

    We all had to write our own versions, trade them randomly, and read them aloud. She ended up with mine: Have the death row inmates build a prison on the moon, then turn off their air supply to complete their sentence. (Wrote it before I’d read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress)

    She finished reading, and exclaimed “What is WRONG with you!?” She knew it was mine because of how hard I was laughing at her panic.

    I was outdone by the quiet girl who included a recipe for “kitten kurry” in her essay though. I really should have tried to get with her, lol.

    • AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip
      14·
      4 days ago

      If we’re talking the one by Dr. Johnathan Swift, about selling poor people babies and kids for food, then I absolutely agree. I just found and read it on Gutenberg and it was a little disturbing, in an interesting but absolutely messed up way.

      • ouRKaoS@lemmy.today
        10·
        4 days ago

        That’s the one! It was an honors English class & the topic for the week was satire. The teacher had print copies of The Onion that were being passed around the class and I was cracking up the whole time.

    • Inucune@lemmy.world
      9·
      4 days ago

      Was on my way to post this. Revisited in ethics 101 in college, and again in ethics in technology(uni). ‘Harm reduction’ is the answer you are looking for, because no matter how perfect you think your ethic framework is, nature and bad actors will never respect it or take responsibility. Reality mocks philosophy’s ‘utopias.’

      • pyre@lemmy.world
        3·
        4 days ago

        I like the other interpretation, where the writer inserts the suffering so you the reader would find it more believable because you’ve been conditioned to accept that we can’t have a good society without making at least some people suffer for it.

      • ninjabard@lemmy.world
        4·
        4 days ago

        Somebody always suffers in a utopia. That’s why othering people is the first step in taking away rights. Gestures very loudly at current events

    • EvanescentWave@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      We actually had to read that for our English course. What still haunts me is how weird random German words look in an English book. Like they’re not supposed to be there

  • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
    13·
    4 days ago

    Turkish elementary-school books.

    Wanna read about a small girl getting beat up by her dad and kicked out before freezing to death as she vividly imagines her dead grandma and lighting matchsticks to prolong her suffering for 20 pages?

    I think author was either Russian or Danish. Still no clue why that was a required read at age of 7 in my school.

  • SanguinePar@lemmy.world
    29·
    5 days ago

    I only recently discovered Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, but I think that would need to be in the conversation.

  • Lupus@feddit.org
    27·
    5 days ago

    In my highschool German class we read Kafkas “Metamorphosis”, it gave me weird dreams for weeks.

    In a literary sense it’s a masterpiece, simple yet intricate. The first sentence alone is genius :

    “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt”

    “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”.

    No backstory, no explanation, the reader is left with the same confusion as the characters. Then the societal observations he weaves in are sharp yet puzzling.

    I recommend it highly, but be prepared for strangeness and being left with an uneasy feeling.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      5·
      4 days ago

      Kafka’s story is crazy… He wrote all this amazing shit, but refused to publish it. His dying wish to his best friend was to destroy all of his work. Kafka died penniless.

      His friend read the work, and was so blown away that he defied his best friend’s dying wish, and published his work.

      • Lupus@feddit.org
        4·
        4 days ago

        He was very self critical so he refused to publish most of his work, but he was still published and acknowledged during his lifetime although not with the world fame he has now, other famous German speaking authors mention and acknowledge his work during the 20s. Also he died very young, so most of his work was unfinished.

        Some argue that, after he wrote “The judgement” in just 8 hours one night, a fiery explosion of creativity and geniality, he was often disillusioned with the slow and exhausting progress most of his other work made.

        A lot of his work was unpublished and unfinished until his friend Max Brod published it posthumously against his wishes.

        That he died penniless can be described as an exaggeration, he was very successful in his daytime job, although he was not fond of it. But he never managed to earn a living as a writer, so much is true.

    • rainwall@piefed.socialEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      You should read Kafka’s “The Castle” if you haven’t. It’s a surreal book about navigating an insane bureaucracy. It hit me harder than Metamorphosis, personally.

      • Lupus@feddit.org
        3·
        4 days ago

        Will absolutely do, after writing this comment I pulled out Metamorphosis and read the first couple pages again and it’s just so good. Like I said the societal observations are so sharp, I am German native and even more than a hundred years later it is still on point, everybody trying to bring a rational attitude in a otherwise completely absurd situation.

        It reminds me a little of the German comedian Loriot, he also had a way of describing exactly that. There is a Loriot sketch where a man enters a bathroom in a hotel, to get a bath, just to find another man sitting in the bathtub. So he gets into the bathtub with him and they start to argue with each other about if they want to have water now and later about if the rubber ducky can also join in the tub, without ever really addressing that they are together in a bathtub. All the while they stay perfectly polite with each other, using each other’s full names and titles (Herr Müller-Lüdenscheid! I insist that you water the duck now! - Herr Doktor Knöbel, my duck won’t share the tub with you!). It is so absurd it brings me to tears laughing.

    • Zirconium@lemmy.world
      4·
      4 days ago

      That’s what I loved about it is that it took itself seriously. How people realistically responded to what happened to Gregor