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Books you were forced to read at school!

here are a few that stick out in my mind, for reasons good and bad ...

- the prime of miss jean brodie by muriel spark (my english teacher had a profoundly personal relationship with this one, to the extent she'd invite a select few of us around to her flat for tea ...)
- the great gatsby (torturous)
- the duchess of malfi, john webster
- emma, pride and prejudice, northanger abbey
- King Lear
- the mill on the floss, elliot

there must be more in the dark recesses ...
 
well considering i am still in high school and in the midst of honors lit where we are required to read something around ten books a year here goes:
9th grade
-cold, sassy tree(i liked it actually, it was only written in the 80's though)
-great expectations(it was okay)
-a tale of two cities(i liked great expectations better)
-wuthering heights(omg i hated it, loved heathcliff though)
-frankenstein(alright)
-of mice and men(okay)
-fahrenheit 451(i would have read it anyway, and got me to readSomething Wicked This Way Comes)
-animal farm(pretty good)
-romeo and juliet
-and i could have read jane eyre for extra credit but didn't
10th
-the king must die(novel version of the theseus)
-medea
-paradise lost
-cantebury tales(read some, talked about all of them)
-crime and punishment
-anna karenina
-mythology by edith hamilton
-brave new world(will read this before the end)
-the turn of the screw
-dr. faustus
-a doll's house
-macbeth
and that's all that i can remember that we've read, though we've read parts of many other things. needless to say it has been very hard to find any leisure time for reading. we also had to write a research paper and my lit teacher gave us a list of books to choose from and we picked five and then he picked the final book for us. Mine was the Pickwick Papers so i guess that's included as required reading as well.
 
  • The Red Badge of Courage
  • Lord of the Flies
  • Raisin in the Sun
  • Death Be Not Proud
  • Beowulf
  • Of Mice and Men
  • Call of the Wild
  • The Lottery (short story)
  • Tale of Two Cities
 
Required reading list for 10th year of highschool is as follows:
Huck Finn - Twain
The Giver - Lowery
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane


We're required to choose three from the list and create 10 cards about each of the three we choose.
Overall I'm rather dissapointed by the list. I would much rather get to choose which books I want to read and still create the cards. But, alas, I have no opinion whatsoever in highschool.


I had to read To Kill a Mockingbird and Rocket Boys last semester and wasn't excited by either of them.
 
Poppy1 said:
I always felt a bit weird at school, because while everyone else was moaning about the books we had to read, I thought it was wonderful - I mean being able to read a book and it was considered school-work! Bliss.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I felt that way too!!!

So, here's the books I had to read in secondary school (15-17 years old):

English class:
All My Sons, by Arthur Miller - liked it
Lamb to the Slaughter, by Roald Dahl - loved it, it's such a great story...
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson - I knew the story already, but reading it was a completely different experience...

Portuguese class:
A Sibila by Agustina Bessa-Luís (The Sibyl?) - loved it
Amor de Perdição, by Camilo Castelo Branco (Love of Perdition) - loved it
Os Lusíadas, by Luís de Camões (The Lusiads) - only read excerpts of it, but it's a great work, I loved it
Viagens na Minha Terra, by Almeida Garrett (Travels in my Homeland) - I didn't like it, it was boring and really hard to read, and although it wasn't a big book, it sure felt like it
Frei Luís de Sousa, by Almeida Garrett (The Brother Luis de Sousa) - it's a play, and this one I liked
Os Maias, by Eça de Queirós (The Maias) - very boring, it was the only one I wasn't able to finnish and had to resort to summary books
O Judeu, by Bernardo Santareno (The Jewish) - another play, had to read it in two days so I couldn't really decide if I liked it or not
Plus a lot of poems by Fernando Pessoa (and his heteronyms), Luís de Camões, Mário de Sá Carneiro and many, many others I can't recall now.

Unfortunately I didn't have to read any complete work for my french classes, but I remember reading, and loving, excerpts of Petit Nicholas.
 
I'll just go with high school right now. I can't remember much, and the poetry not at all.

-Romeo and Juliet
-A Seperate Peace
-Lord of the Flies
-Catch-22 (hated it-need to reread)
-To Kill a Mocking Bird
-Catcher in the Rye
-Huck Finn
-Grapes of Wrath (need to reread--remember hardly any of it)

ETA: I also took a modern lit. class my senior year of HS that was more along the line of reading for pleasure. We were in groups and we chose one book from each genre. All I remember is reading a Nora Roberts book for romance. I have never touched a romance book since!
College will take a lot of thinking and time to remember everything.
 
A couple I can think of off the top of my head:

- Great Expectations (My friends and I had way too much fun with this book. We "illustrated" it and wrote an alternate ending. This was in 8th grade.)
- The Red Badge of Courage
- The Diary of Anne Frank
- A Christmas Carol
- Things Fall Apart
- Romeo and Juliet
- Macbeth
- To Kill A Mockingbird
- Night
- Jane Eyre
- Wuthering Heights
- Villette
- Agnes Grey
- Crime and Punishment
- Heart Of Darkness
- Nectar in a Sieve

My least favorite of these being Crime and Punishment and Heart of Darkness. I couldn't bring myself to finish them. Maybe some day I will, but not anytime soon!
 
I was not a great reader in high school, mostly because I had this "attitude" against the whole thing (translate: youth). College changed everything.

Nonetheless, I do remember some high school reading:

Camus, The Stranger
Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Dickens, Great Expectations

Strange, I remember nearly always being shown the film version of books we read, as if somehow this would help us with the books.

Maybe they were trying to catch those who didn't read?
 
Gosh, it's hard to remember that far back...

To Kill a Mockingbird (9th Grade)
Lord of the Flies (10th Grade)
A Separate Peace (10th Grade)
Fahrenheit 451 (10th Grade)
Excerpt from Lonesome Dove (11th Grade)
Frankenstein (12th Grade)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (12th Grade)
Heart of Darkness (12th Grade)
Canterbury Tales (12th Grade)
The Albatross (12th Grade)
The Anthem (12th Grade)
 
7th grade:
The Diary of Anne Frank
The Giver

8th grade:
The Pearl
Whirligig
Touching Spirit Bear

9th grade (so far):
The Odyssey
The Taming of the Shrew
 
Animal Farm
Very interesting really, the only book I remember enjoy reading at school..pig that call Napolean ...can't believe I still can recall that name!
 
Alas! I am coming to the end of my highschool carrier and some of the books I really liked, some of them I really hated, and others I thought I might have liked if they weren't forced on us...

9th: The Princess Bride (liked it)
Anthem (liked it)
All Over but the Shoutin' (ugh... did not like it)
Romeo & Juliet (liked it)

10th: A Lesson Before Dying (ehh... it was ok)
The Joy-Luck Club (bleck!)
Julius Ceasar (not so much)

11th: Into the Wild (liked it)
The Color of Water (didn't like it)
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers (liked it)
Fast-Food Nation (booooooring!)
The Scarlet Letter (liked it)
The Great Gatsby (ehhh... not so much)
Bothers and Keepers (bleck! no likey!)
Slaughterhouse-5 (I'd already read and loved it)

12th: The Things They Carried (liked it)
Wise Blood (confussing!)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (very good book)
The Sound and the Fury (couldn't make it through)
Hamlet (amazing!)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (the heaven's opened upon this bleak and miserable earth and this book fell down from the gods!)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (well, technically we haven't read it yet, but I have and really like it)
Heart of Darkness (not yet...)

I'm sure I've forgotten a few... ^_^
 
Just as far as I can remember:

German class

Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) by Günter Grass
Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (From The Diary Of A Snail) by Günter Grass
Minna von Barnhelm (Minna of Barnhelm) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Andorra by Max Frisch
Frau Jenny Treibel by Theodor Fontane --> Horrible!
Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui) by Bertolt Brecht
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
LTI by Victor Klemperer
Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) by Franz Kafka
Wo warst du, Adam? (And where were you, Adam?) by Heinrich Böll
Der Schimmelreiter (The Dykemaster) by Theodor Storm
Der Postmeister (The Stationmaster) by Alexander S. Puschkin
Das Parfum (Perfume: Story of a Murder) by Patrick Süskind
Woyzeck by Georg Büchner
Faust I + II by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe --> Awesome!
Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Antigone by Sokrates

English class

Dead Poets Society by N. H. Kleinbaum
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

French class

Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain - movie script ;)

---

I think I will miss reading books and discuss them together with my classmates. In three weeks I'll have my examinations and somehow it's still hard to realize that the end is coming closer...
 
Wordsworth
Roll of thunder hear my cry - that was pretty good actually.

Romeo and Juliet - but it was cool because we got to watch the film too!
 
All Quiet on the Western Front - ?
Nineteen Eighty Four - Orwell (love it)
Shakespeare's sonnets
Romeo & Juliet
The Owl Service - Alan Garner
Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
The Merchant of Venice (twice!)
A Doll's House - Ibsen
The Cherry Orchard - Chekov
Talking Heads - Alan Bennett (love - and the second lot too)
Oedipus Rex - Sophocles ( great)
Othello
DH Lawrence poetry
The Handmaid's Tale - Atwood (fab)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce
Dubliners - Joyce
Picture of Dorian Gray - Wilde
General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer (yawn)
Our Country's Good - Timberlake Wertenbaker (fab)
 
The two that really stand out in my memory as books I hated were Steinbeck's "The Pearl" and "The Red Pony." My 8th grade self wanted adventure and romance, not depressing bleakness. Ugh. Also hated The Grapes of Wrath, though I think if I read it again sans weekly quizzes and essays, I'd like it much better. I certainly think I'd appreciate all of them much more. But I sure hated them at the time, lol.
 
I had to read Around the World in 80 Days for my Pre-AP World Geography class. I actually liked it, though! My favorite character was Passepartout.
 
The following are the ones I can remember off the top of my head:

The Giver by Lois Lowry
I'm Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti
Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Gift of the Gab by Morris Gleitzman
 
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