Nobody going to mention a Cask of Amontillado? Maybe not the most mind-bending example, but the tale of leading a supposed friend to their own horrific murder was not a thing I expected to be reading in school.
“For the love of God, Montresor!”
The reply to that just being “Yes, for the love of God,” was cold as ice.
Funnily enough I did on a similar post a month ago.
i remember that post, was actually hoping to find it again as there had been some great recommendations! glad you mentioned it here.
Wasn’t even required reading for me. I was just flipping through my textbook one day and found that in one of the sections the class was never going to reach.
Was that before or after the school-shooting lockdown drills?
After the hide under your desk from nuclear bombs drills but before the active shooter drills.
Nuclear attack drills? I don’t think we ever did those, I’ve just heard about them from older people. How old are you? I thought those stopped in like the 80s or something.
I grew up in a small town in Canada. We never had any kind of lock down drills.
Dang, things must be pretty good up in Canada. People are sending their children to first grade with ballistic-shielded backpacks down here.
There is a modicum of school violence in Canada, primarily in Urban/Metro centres, but not enough to cause general panic. Tue States has a pretty unique problem.
That story still haunts me, and I’ve been trying to remember where it was from for over a decade.
Maybe try a poem.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell, 1945
I think that was the inspiration for the B-17 scene from the animated movie Heavy Metal, which fucked me up as a kid.
Holy fuck who wrote this?
I should have attributed, sorry.
Randall Jarrell, published in 1945.
Bomber ball turret gunners and tail gunners had the shortest life expectancy of any combat occupation in the war, as these were the first targets of incoming fighters. I found one site that said tail gunners’ combat life expectancy was four missions.
Ball turrets couldn’t reload in flight. The ball was too small for parachutes, and the mechanisms jammed or froze often. Typically they put small, young, single guys in them.
The Great Gatsby is a great novel about the immobility of class in America, despite the country’s claim to the opposite. I didn’t realize this in highschool when I read it, but damned if it wasn’t a warning of things to come.
For sale:
Baby shoes.
Never worn.
I can do that author one better (or three better):
For sale: baby.
For sale: baby. Never used.
Not exactly a short story, but Kipling’s The Young British Soldier still tumbles around in my head some 25 years later. Really cemented in me that I don’t want to go die in some other country for some fabricated sense of duty to my country. Not that I wanted to at that point, but for sure made it seem like an extra terrible idea.
“Today, students, we are going to learn about Carcosa.”
For me that was “The Man in the Well” which the school librarian read to us in 4th grade during library story hour.
9th Grade English, got assigned Invisible Man by Ellison. It wasn’t science fiction like I thought it’d be 😅
Incredible book
Either I have a higher tolerance than most or my English teachers were pansies.
Though we did read the play version of The Diary of Anne Frank when I was in 8th grade.
Wait…you read the play version of a book? The fuck?
I don’t know that I’ve ever read the Diary in it’s entirety, but I’ve heard that there are some rather explicit parts, especially pertaining to Anne’s puberty, so maybe they did it to avoid that.
Those parts were not released by Anne’s father, they aren’t in any official edition.
Flashbacks to when only the teacher and I understood A Modest Proposal and not being able to explain to anyone else in that class that i was appreciating that he was sassing the english NOT the actual idea of eating babies. 🙃
Y’all are taking about the girl with the green ribbon, my first year college lit teacher had us read a short story where a kid fist-fucked his mom and I’m feeling like maybe my education was problematic.
Terrible!
Tell me the title so I can shun it!
Oddly enough, Google is not turning up the story but it’s coming back with a lot of results
Grew up with animals of farthing wood before school, your stories have no power here.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge has entered the chat
Ray Bradbury “The Pedestrian”
My dad read “All summer in a day” to me when I was 5ish. I think I was being mean to another kid and he was trying to teach me a lesson. That story still sucks me up.
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