Required Reading from High School/College

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BatNapalm said:
I had to read Frankenstein for like 5 different classes in high school and college.
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I had a similar experience with Moby Dick. Read it twice in high school and again in university. That sucked.

I don't know if I remember all the books I had to read in high school but I'll do my best:

9th Grade:
- Romeo and Juliet
- Animal Farm
- The Great Gatsby
- Old Man and the Sea
- The Odyssey
- A Tale of Two Cities
- Huckleberry Finn

10th Grade:
- Invisible Man
- Fellowship of the Ring
- Frankenstein
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Hamlet
- Moby Dick
- Silas Marner

11th Grade:
- Moby Dick (again)
- Death of a Salesman
- Macbeth
- Catcher in the Rye
- Slaughterhouse Five (a choice between it or a couple of other books)
- Pride and Prejudice
- Crime & Punishment

12th Grade (I remember all of these):
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- King Lear
- The Tempest
- Dante's Inferno
- Canterbury Tales
- All Quiet on the Western Front
- Metamorphosis
- Grapes of Wrath

God, I hated Silas Marner.
 
Trilby said:
I suppose I should check that out, my high school made us read Great Expectations!
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Ahahahaha oh God I remember having to read Great Expectations in school.

The entire student body of my graduating year had to read it around the same time and it was universally agreed upon that the book made no damn sense as the whole thing involving the inheritance being entirely made of stolen money and thus of no benefit to anybody in the end was a waste of time.
 
I can only remember 7 things we were required to read in high school:
-Romeo & Juliet
-Julius Caesar
-Of Mice & Men
-Metamorphosis
-Slaughterhouse Five
-Lord of the Flies
-The Great Gatsby

Out of those 7, I really liked them all except Romeo & Juliet and Metamorphosis.
Everybody I know hates The Great Gatsby, but I loved the shit out of it.
 
Optimus Prime said:
Ahahahaha oh God I remember having to read Great Expectations in school.

The entire student body of my graduating year had to read it around the same time and it was universally agreed upon that the book made no damn sense as the whole thing involving the inheritance being entirely made of stolen money and thus of no benefit to anybody in the end was a waste of time.
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I'm sure most of us simply wanted Pip to go stab Miss Havisham immediately with no remorse!
 
King Lear, loved it, a lof men still treat the women they love this way
Beowulf (way too much hero worship)
Dutchess of Malfi, loved it!
Took survey of English lit as an AP class.
 
I read a lot of books for school. Here's what I remember
Middle School:
Roll of Thunder Here My Cry (God that book is depressing)
Where the Red Fern Grows
Romeo and Juliet
Catcher in the Rye (I think I read that on my own technically. But it was for school, that I remember)

9th Grade:
Midsummer's Night Dream
Some boring South African novel in which nothing happens
Some boring Japanese novel in which you think is going to be interesting because the main character bangs his father's mistress and then she kills herself but then nothing happens after that.

10th Grade
The Kite Runner
1984
Things Fall Apart
Julius Ceasar

11th Grade (Ugh, I hated my English teacher that year)
The Things They Carried (And I had to read it again for college)
Macbeth
Oedipus
Antigone (Also reread that and Oedipus for college)

12th Grade
Native Son
I Know Why The Cage Bird Sings
Hamlet
A bunch of poetry written by primarily female authors because my teacher was a huge feminist who would overshare with us her troublesome relationship with her dad. Including but not limited to Sylvia Plath's creepy incest poetry.

Oh and since I failed 11th grade English, I had to "retake" it again at the end of my senior year with this program called "Cyber high." I "read" The Crucible and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And by "read" I mean look up the plots and themes on Sparknotes. In my defense however, I only had a few weeks to finish the course and Huck Finn is long and isn't the type of book that's easy to breeze through. At least for me.
 
I got to read:
*To kill a Mockingbird
*Romeo and Juliet
*12th Night
*Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
*Animal Farm
*1984
*Brave New World

I'm going to confess and say that I never really liked To Kill a Mockingbird or Romeo and Juliet.
 
Up until 11th grade all the stuff that was mandatory was only Shakesphere and a couple short story collections from various authors that I can't remember.

11th grade
*The Drowning of Stephan Jones
*Hamlet
*Sisterhood of the Travelling pants

12th grade
*Fahrenheit 451
*Deathwatch
*King Lear
*Short stories with one where a bunch kids break into an old person's house to steal/break shit because they're sociopaths and hate the elderly.
*Maus

I remember really liking my teacher in 12th grade because he hated having to teach shakesphere every semester and basically handed out a sheet with everything that was going to be on the final exam and would let us borrow some of his personal favourite books he kept in class. I ended up enjoying English that one year the most and wish I had him as a teacher for all 4 years.
 
Let's see. It's not a complete list, but the university had a lot more material to read.
High school:
-Robinson Crusoe
-Prisoner of Zenda
-The Pearl (Didn't like this one much since it felt like Kino had no chance despite the pearl.)

University:
-Hamlet
-Canterbury Tales
-Beowulf*
-Pygmalion (For a study on speech patterns, not literature.)
-Ulysses
-The Lion and the Jewel

*I wish I had taken a recording of my lecturer reciting old English for that. In the meantime, I doodled Grendel with his arm torn off.
The same lecturer also explained what a "rump trumpet" was in a different work.
 
I can't remember a whole lot of what was required reading in school, but I remember:

Year 8: The Wind in the Willows
Year 9: Got to choose all my own books so nothing required
Year 10: Animal Farm, Macbeth, To Kill a Mockingbird
Year 11: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, A Handmaid's Tale, Madame Bovary

It's kind of interesting how different the curriculum is here versus the US.

@Venus Did you do the International Baccalaureate? I noticed you had to do the same dystopian novels as me and that was the theme at the time I did it.
 
9th Grade
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian - really good and engaging book, even though the main character is a Mary Sioux.
Dreaming in Cuban - an interesting read, to say the least.
Things Fall Apart - I liked the world it painted a lot, again, I liked it.
10th Grade
Sold - A really good collection of vignettes, enjoyable, yet really dark.
Othello - a classic, to say the very least. I liked the idea that the character who was the cuck was in fact black. It was an interesting reversal.
The Great Gatsby - I enjoyed it a lot, very surreal and full of esoteric symbolism.
Persepolis - Also a classic, I liked the perspective on religion.
11th Grade
Hondo - Not many people in my class liked it, but I enjoyed it, a good western.
In Cold Blood - Gripping and well written, very dark.
Salem's Lot - I didn't like it too much, but I'm glad I read it.
The Lathe of Heaven - Fascinating read, didn't finish it, though.
12th Grade
The Pillowman - I really liked it, super dark and edgy, but the good kind of super dark and edgy.
M Butterfly - a humorous drama. I didn't find out about the twist until it was too late.
Doctor Faustus - I read this for a literary essay. I liked it, even though it was weird as fuck.
Siddhartha - I also read this for a literary essay. Really good and well written.
College
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down - I liked the perspective on Hmong culture, even though I didn't finish it.
Egyptian religious texts - fascinating stuff, if a bit hard to read
the Mahabharata - a classic, but really dense and weird.
Overall, I liked what I read.
 
The Great Gatsby to this day still gives me an impression. The idea of an ambitious man only to die a futile death. The same goes with the bleak,but somehwat hopeful theme in Of Mice and Men. Even if it wasn't too long ago.
 
The Great Chandler said:
The Great Gatsby to this day still gives me an impression. The idea of an ambitious man only to die a futile death. The same goes with the bleak,but somehwat hopeful theme in Of Mice and Men. Even if it wasn't too long ago.
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I really liked both. I felt that The Great Gatsby had a certain surrealism to it, very well written and bizarre, veiled in allegory and symbolism.
 
I remember all the books I had to read for Secondary School English classes. For the classes I did, we had to read a play and a novel or novella that was picked by the teacher from a list of texts that were deemed appropriate pretty much.

Standard Grade (credit level):
- Of Mice and Men
- An Inspector Calls

Higher (1st attempt - I actually failed this class because the teacher I had didn't BOTHER teaching us anything. I am ashamed of the fact that I failed the first time):

- To Kill a Mockingbird
- All My Sons

Higher (2nd attempt)

- Lord of the Flies
- The Crucible

I also managed to get copies of A View from the Bridge and A Streetcar Named Desire (which were taught at Intermediate 2 and Higher level but weren't required reading for me) because I read the blurb on the back of these plays and liked them.

I'm studying literature at uni right now and I CBA listing the books I have read for this, but 2 that will stick with me that I've had to read at uni were Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and John Clelland's Fanny Hill.
 
During high school there was a bit of this weird thing where all the grades were like assigned to multiple classes at once so I have no fucking clue remembering which grade i did what because every year pretty much flowed into each other, at least at the last one I went to did, because I went to a number of different Schools. The last one is the only noteworthy school book wise because the others played it weirdly safe, safer than usual. By that I mean barely any of the others had the normal books High schools might have, save for Watership down, that one book where rabbits with ridiculously saccharine names get fucking murdered left and right. Then again it technically wasn't a book but an animated adaptation complete with bloody death scenes. YOU KNOW, FOR KIDS!

Ones that stood out from the final school were:

Animal farm, george orwell's spooky fever dream about pigs

This one I forgot the name of about a kid in a Native American ghetto which was a sort of comedy

A court case one that I also forgot the name of that was interestingly structured like a script because of the main character's dream job being just that before he gets framed for a murder he witnessed

LORD OF THE FLIES, which was even better because the class had a movie night afterwards where they showed the old movie based on that book. and it was a fairly faithful rendition.

MAUS, the one I had already read years prior, probably earlier than I should have. Still fucking loved that comic though.
 
The Lawgiver said:
LORD OF THE FLIES, which was even better because the class had a movie night afterwards where they showed the old movie based on that book. and it was a fairly faithful rendition.
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Is this the old black and white one? I watched that on TV years ago and liked it. My English teacher HATED it and told my entire class not to watch it as it strayed too far from the book.
 
LagoonaBlue said:
Is this the old black and white one? I watched that on TV years ago and liked it. My English teacher HATED it and told my entire class not to watch it as it strayed too far from the book.
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English teachers will always say that whenever a student things they can cliffnote their way through a book with a film adaptation.
 
I remember needing to read the following:

To Kill a Mockingbird (I barely remember any of it, but it was decent)

Of Mice and Men (Definitely remember crying like a bitch at the end of this one. It's one of my favorite books that has a downer ending and one of the better forced reading assignments I had to do and actually did.)

Romeo and Juliet (I read this three out of four years in Highschool, and hate it with a passion because of that. I did kind of like it the first time, since we acted the roles out and I had fun as Mercutio.)

Julius Caesar (I had fun as Marc Antony for this one, and unlike Romeo and Juliet I only had to read this for one year. This helped a lot with me enjoying the play as a result.)

Macbeth (Again, fun play. Probably my favorite one of Shakespeare's that I read, though besides these three and a Midsummer's Night Dream, I didn't get many opportunities there.)

When Things Fall Apart (probably one of my favorite required readings. It was one of my first experiences reading about the west's effects on indigenous peoples and it got me interested in foreign peoples, history, and cultures.)

The Great Gatsby (where I cheated with the movie and took a shit grade on purpose. In my defense, it was because I was not a big fan of more shit to do when I already had a lot of shit to do at the time.)

I do know for a fact that Outsiders was a book I also needed to read. That was in middle school though I think.
 
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