Required Reading from High School/College

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I forgot about The Education of Little Tree which despite the controversy, it was still a good book. (I read it in high school.) The scene with the moonshiners was pretty funny.
 
I read a lot for school, and liked a good chunk of it, like Brave New World, 1984, and The World's Most Dangerous Game.

One of the latest things I've had to read for college was something completely different: a series of plays, culminating in Play It Again, Sam by Woody Allen. Acting bits of that out in order to get a feel for what I was reading was a fun experience, and I put on a performance of lead character Allan Felix that felt a little too natural...
 
Middle School:
Percy Jackson and the Olympians
The Hunger Games
The outsiders

High school:
The importance of being earnest
The Great Gatsby
Feed (sci fi novel)
Wintergirls
The tempest
romeo and juliet
Starship troopers (We were allowed to choose whatever novel we wanted to read)
The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy (I seriously managed to convince my teacher to let me do a report on this)

University first year english:

Cereus Blooms at night
Stay Alice
A good man is hard to find
 
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I remember that I particularly liked Fahrenheit 451.

There was also a period on Shakespeare stuff (particularly Romeo and Juliet) that the teacher tried to make enjoyable.
 
In 10th grade I think, I had an English textbook that, when we got to the section on Humor, opened with this quote:

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."
- E. B. White

The teacher, un-ironically, then had us analyze the humor of "Tom Sawyer"
 
I don't recall most of them. But by the time I got to required reading of 1984 in 12th grade I'd already read it for kicks a bunch of times so I cruised through it.
 
The Stranger in like, 10th grade.

Good God to this day I don't understand why anybody thinks its special. Dude comes off an a completely sociopathic asshole who kills a guy because racism and then the latter half of the book is about him moping around in prison before he is executed by hanging.

There was also The Things They Carried in 9th grade which at the time I had to read it, made no fucking sense to me (I would later equate its non-chronological organization of events similar to Slaughterhouse V...except devoid of everything that made Slaughterhouse V good). Oddly enough, it wasn't until the next year in English where I was talking about how silly the one chapter of that book was (the one with the girlfriend and the necklace of tongues - you know the one if you've read the book), when the teacher jumped in and actually explained how it was some kind of extreme metaphor in light of how surreal the war had been for soldiers, with everything the book did suddenly making sense to me in that moment.
 
I really hated how in our School they had us read parts of the book and had us watch the movies. it was such a stupid idea.
I remember loving The Giver and Flowers for Algernon from 8th grade. especially since for the latter I could imagine OPL as Charlie. there was also Diary of Anne Frank but it bored me because we didn't read it all and instead we watched this movie about black kids writing stories and learning about Anne Frank.

9th grade.
-Romeo and Juliet. (I was the only one who new the protaganists died in the end and I remember all the girls in class being shocked and shit.)
-Some short story about a kid and his weak brother "noodle"
-Holocaust short story #123

10th grade.
-To Kill A Mocking Bird.
-Of Mice and Men
-Shitty Holocaust fiction #234 by Eli Wiesel. (didn't read it yet passed the test because all books about the holocaust are the same and I got sick that every year English class had to shoehorn the holocaust for some reason and the only thing I remember in about the book was when they had us listen to an audio narration and the narrator described how Nazis would throw babies in the air and used the midair babies as target practice)

11th grade.
-The Crucible (never finished it, we all watched the movie instead)
-Great Gatsby. Ok this book was being overhyped at our school for some reason and we even had a Great Gatsby themed prom. (I was the only person to see the irony of this).
we somehow managed to finish it, but I found it boring because the teacher wanted us to find symbolism in everything.
-Holocaust literature #543

12th grade.
There was no forced Holocaust stories. also my teacher and I were sad because we could never finish our stories because we had to do Senior Projects, which I hated because they took valuable class time and we never got to finish the Canteburry tales or even cover Lord of the Rings as our teacher planned. hell, we couldn't even finish Beowulf but we didn't watch any movies or Audio readings.
Oh and we had Mcbeth, but we watched some movie adaptation where it took place in a WWI setting. it was pretty gay and unrealistic
 
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The best book I read in high school as part of required reading was The Kite Runner in my senior year. I had actually read it the previous year with a friend who was a grade above me, I definitely enjoyed it.
 
Of Mice and Men & To Kill a Mockingbird are the only decent books from high school that I've ever been forced to read, honestly.
 
I'm lame as shit and actually liked some of the things we were assigned to read, especially the things everyone hated. We read Julius Caesar in 10th grade and everyone but me hated it, we read the Odyssey in 9th and somehow a story with fucking giants and shit bored the whole class. (Again, except me) I liked All Quiet on the Western Front unlike the rest of the class who complained to was "too hard to read" and "not realistic". And in my greatest moment of lameness I really enjoyed The Grapes of Wrath.
Of course, my school was full of people who would sooner cut their own toes off then read. I know people who were practically illiterate and still graduated.

Edit because I remembered something: Who else had that Accelerated Reader program at their schools? You got tested entirely on your vocabulary skills in order to be placed in a reading level. There were certain books in the library with the AR sticker on them, what level they were, and how many "points" they were worth. You read the book, took a stupid test on the computer, and got points depending on how much you remembered. You had to get a certain number of points in a semester and were discouraged from picking books outside of your reading level. So basically I was stuck reading things like War and Peace. I think because of this program I wound up reading less.
 
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MerriedxReldnahc said:
I'm lame as shit and actually liked some of the things we were assigned to read, especially the things everyone hated. We read Julius Caesar in 10th grade and everyone but me hated it, we read the Odyssey in 9th and somehow a story with fucking giants and shit bored the whole class. (Again, except me) I liked All Quiet on the Western Front unlike the rest of the class who complained to was "too hard to read" and "not realistic". And in my greatest moment of lameness I really enjoyed The Grapes of Wrath.
Of course, my school was full of people who would sooner cut their own toes off then read. I know people who were practically illiterate and still graduated.

Edit because I remembered something: Who else had that Accelerated Reader program at their schools? You got tested entirely on your vocabulary skills in order to be placed in a reading level. There were certain books in the library with the AR sticker on them, what level they were, and how many "points" they were worth. You read the book, took a stupid test on the computer, and got points depending on how much you remembered. You had to get a certain number of points in a semester and were discouraged from picking books outside of your reading level. So basically I was stuck reading things like War and Peace. I think because of this program I wound up reading less.
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Reading is supposed to be fun and reflective - you know you have it pretty damn bad when you're forced to do so, especially when you have to read shit you don't like just to get out of something. You have my condolences.
 
Across high school and 2 degree(and yes somehow we had to read fiction in more then one law class) my favorite is the Great Gatsby and indeed is one of my favorite novels of all time
 
In elementary school, I was in an "advanced reader" curriculum. Basically, I got to read stuff that the sixth graders read while I was in fourth grade.

That year, I read: The Cay, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Bridge to Terabithia, and Alan and Naomi. All four of those books had endings that turned me into a sobbing little girl. I genuinely think that the teacher who designed that curriculum was a masochist who enjoyed seeing children cry.

I was an English major in college so I had a lot of "required reading". My absolute favorites were Borrowed Time (another entrant in the "I cried my eyes out" list), and The Bluest Eye, a proper mindfuck.
 
Having been over 20 years ago when I was doing any of this crap, I barely remember what I've read, but here's some I do remember.
  • Odyssey by Homer
  • A Sound of Thunder
  • Where The Red Fern Grows
  • Ender's Game
  • The Hobbit
  • To Kill a Mockingbird
That's about it. I do recall seeing copies of The Crucible and Catcher in the Rye but somehow I was not in those classes that read them. We probably did Romeo & Juliet but that's all I can think of.
 
Optimus Prime said:
The Stranger in like, 10th grade.

Good God to this day I don't understand why anybody thinks its special. Dude comes off an a completely sociopathic asshole who kills a guy because racism and then the latter half of the book is about him moping around in prison before he is executed by hanging.
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I actually liked it when I didn't interpret it as a philosophical work (like Atlas Shrugged for sociopaths or something) but as the portrayal of someone with a personality disorder and how they fit (or don't fit) into society. But I'm a huge psychology sperg, so that affects it.
 
I read a lot of the general 'American Classics' and other classic literature throughout high school. Great Gatsby, Pretty much all of Shakespeare's biggest works, Death of a Salesman, Canterbury Tales, Brave New World, Oedipus Rex, Lord of the Flies etc etc.

All of which generally, I liked. But by far the book that I loved the most when I read it in high school was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. That book has literally stuck with me since I read it and has continued to be one of my favorites.

Fuck the movie though. We had to watch that too and it was a disappointment.
 
Optimus Prime said:
The Stranger in like, 10th grade.
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Why would they make anyone read this in tenth grade? I liked it, but The Plague is a lot better.

That was never required reading for me anywhere, though.

One of my major gripes with high school English is making kids read Dickens. It ruins him for them, because Dickens is for adults. A bookstore manager friend of mine told me when I was a kid and bitching about Dickens to give him a try again sometime after 30, and eventually, I did. Bleak House is now one of my favorite novels of all time, but I would never have read Dickens again from the misery of being forced to read him in high school.
 
AnOminous said:
Why would they make anyone read this in tenth grade? I liked it, but The Plague is a lot better.

That was never required reading for me anywhere, though.

One of my major gripes with high school English is making kids read Dickens. It ruins him for them, because Dickens is for adults. A bookstore manager friend of mine told me when I was a kid and bitching about Dickens to give him a try again sometime after 30, and eventually, I did. Bleak House is now one of my favorite novels of all time, but I would never have read Dickens again from the misery of being forced to read him in high school.
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I suppose I should check that out, my high school made us read Great Expectations!
 
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