Melissa’s Comments (group member since Sep 25, 2019)

Melissa’s comments from the Barberton Public Library Hooks & Books group.

Pearl Buck and Mice and Men were least favorites. Freshman year English class. I swear my teacher went out of her way to find the most boring books to give 15 year olds outside of Romeo and Juliet. Forget what the Pearl Buck book was titled, but it was about a guy in Ancient China who asks his father to get a bride for him. The family goes from being a poor farming family to wealthy. They made at least one black and white film of it.

I know there were others, but those two were the ones that stuck in my mind. Most of my favorite books I read in school that stick in my mind are ones I read outside of assigned reading. Probably the one that I remember liking in high school was Tuesdays With Morrie for one of my religion classes I think or an English class. Either way, junior year assigned reading.

I mostly remember for high school assigned reading was driving my teachers nuts because I've never been able to stop at one chapter, even for the awful ones. Why I drove them nuts is because it was read a chapter for homework and have a quiz the next class period. My memory is good, but if it doesn't want to remember stuff, nothing I can do to help will do a doggone thing. That drove me nuts too, particularly with French. I wanted to do well in French because my dad learned it as a second language-side effect of being taught by French nuns in school. English was his third. Arabic, French, English-my dad was trilingual.