Was just scrollong through a post on reddit, when I read a comment of about how someone's highschool kids assigned summer reading list was guaranteed to trauamtize. So you know I am in the mood for something fucked up and I am curious about what a HS kid could have read and been traumatised by. So yeah. Hit me up with the goods.
by Background-Value-955
20 Comments
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
The same teacher also assigned The Stranger and Crime and Punishment that semester. I’d bet good money that that class turned into adults who read more than usual.
>The Lord of the Flies
Great book don’t get me wrong, but damn… >!Piggy’s death got me.!<
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. In the school’s defense, it was a horror & sci fi English elective so I kinda asked to be traumatized lol
Perfume by Patrick Suskind
Didn’t “traumatize” me but is definitely disturbing and odd
Introduction to Calculus
Honestly Brave New World seriously messed me up
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
1984 I read in HS and I still think about it.
We read The Wasp Factory for A-level English here in the UK.
Only realise as an adult how ballsy that was.
Flowers for Algernon
Beloved by toni morrison
Of Mice and Men. I don’t know why but I skipped ahead and read the ending. When I went back to read the rest the whole experience was worse for the dread.
Teach us to outgrow our madness by kenzaburo Oe, especially Prize Stock.
Night by Elie Wiesel and The Kite Runner are definitely the top 2. Those books will stay with you.. as theyre meant to.
THE KITERUNNER
View from the Bridge, Walkabout, Lord of the Flies, Wilfred Owen War Poems, Romeo and Juliet. Fun Times!
*Slave*, a memoir about being put into modern day slavery. Has descriptions of the girl being kidnapped and enduring horror movie level sexual violence
While it was an important book to read, I am a bit bummed that my high school only assigned books about girls and women who experienced sexual assault and nothing more philosophically interesting about women and girls.
Lord of the Flies…
The Reader still haunts me
Not high school but in middle school I was assigned to read a Child called It. (It’s a autobiography of a man’s abuse he experienced by his mother as a child) It didn’t traumatize me and was the only book that I was assigned to that I was in genuinely interested in and everyone in my grade was obsessed with the book too.