We had to read ‘Der Vorleser’ in which a 15 year old boy gets into a relationship with a 36 year old woman. A strange choice to force kids about that age to read (we were a bit older than 15, I think. But still…)
They Bite by Anthony Boucher is like four pages long and had me jumping at every shadow in the corner of my eye for a week. I found it in my grandparents’ copy of Alfred Hitchcock’s 30 Best in Horror or something like that, bought a copy for the brother I like because it shook me so badly (I verified it was in there)
Turkish elementary-school books.
Wanna read about a small girl getting beat up by her dad and kicked out before freezing to death as she vividly imagines her dead grandma and lighting matchsticks to prolong her suffering for 20 pages?
I think author was either Russian or Danish. Still no clue why that was a required read at age of 7 in my school.
not hans christian Anderson’s “little matchstick girl”?
Yeah, sounds like a variation of that. Or maybe even the inspiration for it, who knows.
I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier
That name sounds lovely
Into the Wild (1996) is a popular pick for something both scarring but also uncontroversial.
Less exciting would be The Pinballs (1976).
Had to look this up, because I briefly thought you were referring to “Pinball, 1973” by Haruki Murakami.
“Computers Don’t Argue” by Gordon Dickson. Guy gets shipped the wrong book by a book club, tries to return it, gets sent to a collections agency, and things spiral completely out of control from there. It’s lived rent-free in my head since I read it years ago. (apologies for the mobile-unfriendly format, this is the only source I know for this story) https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133
“Unauthorized Bread” by Cory Doctorow is a more up-to-date discussion of the same kind of power dynamics though. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/
My freshman college English prof assigned House of Leaves.
It was awesome watching the preppy kids descend into madness
That book drove me to madness, not because of the creepy content but just because there was so much going on in the endnotes. I’m compulsive about reading all the footnotes and endnotes in anything I read, but I generally hate having to keep one finger in the page I’m on in the main text while reading through the notes in their tiny font (e-readers are a godsend to me, as long as they handle notes decently, which not all of them do). I had a hardback copy of House of Leaves so it was a bit of a physical ordeal and my hands hurt all the time.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
We read this in university computer science ethics. It gets you thinking, which is good.
Was on my way to post this. Revisited in ethics 101 in college, and again in ethics in technology(uni). ‘Harm reduction’ is the answer you are looking for, because no matter how perfect you think your ethic framework is, nature and bad actors will never respect it or take responsibility. Reality mocks philosophy’s ‘utopias.’
I like the other interpretation, where the writer inserts the suffering so you the reader would find it more believable because you’ve been conditioned to accept that we can’t have a good society without making at least some people suffer for it.
Somebody always suffers in a utopia. That’s why othering people is the first step in taking away rights. Gestures very loudly at current events
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin
https://archive.org/details/coldequationsoth0000godw
Or
The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
A textbook on integral calculus
That’a fair. We have to learn how to read textbooks and manuals at some point.
Asimov’s Breeds There a Man …?
A suicidal genius figures out the relationship between his brilliance and his mental health.
Come and See by Soviet Union
The Cask of Amontillado messed me up a good bit. Being sealed into a wall would be a horrible way to die.
death of a salesman. making depressed highschoolers read that while some of them already may be considering suicide just about did a few of us in. also the plot just sucks.
Someone else mentioned Flowers for Algernon, so mine will be ģWhere the Red Fern Grows_. Such an emotional roller coaster.
And while I won’t downplay those K-12 books, I think anyone who’s ever taken a Russian Literature class in college will agree that Russian authors are next level for depressing novels. Few things compare to the bleak, gray, petty, inescapable, hopeless lives portrayed by authors like Sologub, and while English translations would certainly be accessible to high school students, I’m really glad they don’t include them.
Unless someone’s going to say they were given The Petty Demon as a reading assignment in high school.
