> Nothing sterilizes a book's emotional or intellectual impact quite like being forced to read it. That depends on many factors, including the particular book,

> Nothing sterilizes a book's emotional or intellectual impact quite like being forced to read it. That depends on many factors, including the particular book, the "coolness" of the teacher, the age of the pupil, etc. Poetry finally clicked for me in my final year of high school when we were assigned one single poet I had never read before (and definitely wouldn’t have never read if he hadn’t been assigned in school). I was so fascinated by this mandatory reading that I bought the poet’s collected works, then began reading verse by his contemporaries, and so on and so forth.