Hypothesis: mandatory reading lists are created by joyless nincompoops and/or sadists. 👀 I had the same issue in my Russian high school: it was nothing but depressing 19th-century Russian literature, most of it written by sad slaveowners. 🤮 (Rot in hell, Tolstoy.) That killed my love of reading. 🙁
Kingfisher & WombatI swear to God, part of the problem of literacy is that we make kids read SO MANY books like this. Of course they’re going to associate reading with misery! We put them in a Skinner box and shock them when they read, what did people THINK would happen?