For me, the most interesting piece of the course was "Everything That Rises Must Converge". I'm fairly certain it's my favorite because it's the piece that irritates me the least. As I said in my previous journal, dialects bother me and stupid children bother me, so there's all the rest of the short stories out of the way. The Secret Life of Bees suffered from both dialects and children, making it my least favorite, and while The Sunflower had neither, the end result of a man being so selfish as to not grant the dying wish of another makes it my second-favorite, but still disliked. None of the reading really evoked any questions for me, the discussions about forgiveness and racism and whatnot never swayed me from my views, their arguments were either in agreement with my own or were too weak to be bothered with. Still, I was intrigued by the factual tidbits from the Craft narrative, American History courses tend to gloss over the minutiae of the slave trade, and I had never before heard of children being stolen away and sold as slaves (at least not children originally unbound from slavery).
As for surprise, I suppose I'm surprised that so many people listed required readings as their favorite books, it goes to show how little interest this generation has in literature if they haven't found three to five books on their own time, and read of their own will, that they prefer to the "classics" assigned to them by their teachers. Yes, they're classics for a reason, they teach morals and thoughts and overall ask something of the reader that is uncommon, but they should only really appeal to a small percentage of people, and that they were on nearly everyone's list means that nearly eighty percent (by my guess) of the class has not read, or cannot remember reading, five books for fun.
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