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I've almost always found some redeeming value in everything I've read, both assigned stuff and stuff I've read for fun. At the beginning of my junior year of high school I vividly remember being handed a reading list of some 20 "classics" we had to read throughout the year. I thought this was the end of the world, but looking back now I'm glad I read every one of them. There were a lot of things on the list I would have never read otherwise (my diet at the time consisting almost exclusively of science fiction), and now I can see why they deserved to be labeled as classics. I would gladly read all of them again, but there's too much new stuff to read and too little time to read it :^)
One big exception that comes to mind was Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter." Waste of the paper it was printed on.
Gary
Full disclosure: I married an English major that now works in a library, my oldest daughter is a school librarian and her fiance is a school teacher. Not sure how a hard core nerd ended up literary...
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