For me the school book short story that grabbed me was The Smallest Dragonboy by Anne McCaffrey. Not super scary, just sticky.
Been looking for this book for a long time, maybe someone here can help? It was in french, no idea if it was ever translated. The whole story is a guy in room alone with his dad, the dad is in a coma and expected to die (I believe the familly decided to unplug him). The guy is bitching to his dad, telling him how much he hates him for being an abusive asshole or something. It was really crude and emotonial. At the end, instead of dying when he's unplugged, the dad wakes up. Maybe it was not a novel, but a part of a book, and maybe the title had the work Duck in it.
During online school we had to read about the "Edmund Fitzgerald" and there was a cringy song too. We were constantly being accused of skipping classes because zoom was under too much load and never loading, or would make 2 separate calls for some reason. Whole society under collapse and we had to uproot all of education just so we could learn that a fucking boat sank. THATS ALL THE UNIT WAS. Just a stupid boat sinking.
My cousin was a teacher during COVID, working in rural Australia.
There wasn't enough internet there for video, there was barely enough for email. So he was driving to a different student's house each day and teaching one kid at a time
I think he was only responsible for a handful of kids
That was the busiest time at work for me, I work in government information technology and my team was delivering a system to help businesses keep paying their locked down at home staff. We had to work in the office, in a place designed to hold a thousand people, but only twenty of us were there, until we were enabled to work from home
COVID was worse than any fiction I ever read. So many people died. So many people live-blogged their own deaths
My senior year in high school, my English teacher started the year by having us turn in a list of all of the books we had read. My list was much longer than most of my classmates. He then assigned us books to read and report on based on some criteria (hypothesis: books that would make us miserable). I got assigned two existentialist plays, "Waiting for Godot" and "No Exit." I think those plays did permanent damage to my psyche.
(Sidenote: a classmate who didn't read very much got assigned Virginia Wolff. She thought it very unfair that I only had to rea d couple of plays.)
The second one actually gave me half of a mental breakdown, but not because it was too violent for me.
One analysis that I read made the exact opposite conclusion that I made, and it showed me this: in the subject of English, two diametrically opposed points can both be equally correct! Nothing is fixed! Reality is mutable!
Also The Lottery, The Veldt, Harrison Bergeron (which others have already mentioned)
Tsunami survivor realizes a part of him died with his friend that day. Messed me up. Don't remember the name
Harrison Bergeron
Alan and Naomi by Myron Levoy
It's a novel, but not a very long one.
That one with the little girl and mr beasly her "imaginary" friend
The egg by Andy Weir
Not in english, but we read Anne Frank's Diary in grade 8, Andorra by Max Frisch in grade 9 or 10.
But the most disturbing was "Der Sandmann" in grade 11 and "Der gelbe Vogel" (originally "Alan and Naomi") in grade 9.
For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.
Here are some OCR tools to assist you in transcribing posts:
FOSS Android Recs per u/m_f@discuss.online: 1 , 2
Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
