What books were you made to read in high school?

Question

I'm hopefully going to be a teacher this September and was hoping to get a better idea of what books you could remember having to go through for English class. Any help would be greatly appreciated! (Letting me know which ones you loved and which ones you didn't like at all would be fantastic, too!)

Answer 1

These are the ones I can remember...I'm sure I'm leaving out a few...and of course these are just books and/or handouts I remember getting. Not the short stories & poems from the primary textbook.

Shakespeare--MacBeth, Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar--
Oedipus Rex, Medea, excerpts from Iliad & Odyssey, Agamemnon?? (I know I'm missing one Greek play...and this one sounds most familiar)
Beowulf
Excerpts from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Excerpts from Paradise Lost
Gifted Hands
A Separate Peace
Old Man & The Sea
Great Expectations
Death Be Not Proud
The Sun Also Rises
The Great Gatsby
Huckleberry Finn
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Red Badge of Courage
My Brother Sam is Dead
The Glass Menagerie
Silas Marner
Frankenstein
Scarlet Letter
Robinson Crusoe
Pilgrim's Progress
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea
Treasure Island
Wuthering Heights

I didn't like many of the things we were assigned...I think teachers made things too difficult & almost impossible to read a book for the story's sake...you couldn't enjoy a story if you had to have memorized every name, identify dozens of quotes from each book, and know minute and seemingly unimportant details for passing quizzes and tests. Such as "on day 107 what did Robinson Crusoe make...."

Anyway, I think including a mix of classics--standards--and newer classics (1960s+) particularly drawing titles from YA literature would help make English class more enjoyable.

Although I hated it at the time, Frankenstein, was a great novel...one that I have since come to "understand" and appreciate. I think it's important and a book everyone should read at least once.

The Count of Monte Cristo was never required for any course in high school or in college (I got a BA and MA in English Lit)...but it is one of my most favorite novels. I loved it! It also seems to frequently appear on Yahoo Answer's "what is your favorite book" lists...so maybe working that into the program too.

Edit: I've just read your previous answerers posts...and I've got to agree with the person who pleaded that you don't inflict Thomas Hardy on your students. While I suffered through Mayor of Casterbridge without too much damage...I almost didn't make it through my summer school course where we read five or six Hardy novels. One of the worst experiences ever. Tess was fine, but the rest were awful if you wanted to maintain your sanity and live a happy life.

Answer 2

Would you believe... none? I don't' know what happened, but 3 years of high school and no assigned books. AFTER I graduated I read all the stuff I was supposed to read in h.s., such as:

The 3 Musketeers - Best adventure book EVER.
The Grapes of Wrath - that'll open the kids' eyes
The Ox Bow Incident - the Western for people who hate westerns, and you learn about what happens when you follow the crowd.
To Kill a Mockingbird
David Copperfield
Catcher in the Rye
Bleak House
The Scarlet Letter - those Puritans were a hoot!
The Day of the Locust
Emma
The Mayor of Casterbridge - I've read all of Hardy's Wessex novels, but this one will stun the kids at the end of chapter one. It's a real page turner!
East of Eden- Great, but may be too long
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Screw the book bans!
Dracula
1984
Animal Farm
The Three Theban Plays (Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus)

Sucky books:
Great Expectations - Pip was an @sshole
Treasure Island - BORING

Hope that helps!

Answer 3

I teach high school English. This is how we break it up.

Freshmen--Catcher in the Rye, Speak, The Old Man and the Sea, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Medea, Romeo and Juliet. Their fav. is always Catcher. They also really enjoy Medea.

Sophomores--Of Mice and Men, All the Pretty Horses, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, collection of Poe short stories, Gatsby, The Bluest Eye, and an optional American lit book. Their favorites are always Gatsby and the Poe stories. They HATE The Scarlet Letter.

Juniors--1984, Jane Eyre, Atonement, Never Let Me Go, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Macbeth, Frankenstein. They really like 1984 and Frankenstein.

Hope that helps! I don't teach seniors but they focus on personal memoris.

Answer 4

Between my First Year and Sixth Year of high school, these are the various books we had to read (the ones I can remember anyway!):

- The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler
- A Game of Soldiers (this was a play)
- The Thirteenth Member
- Oliver Twist
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- Romeo and Juliet
- Sunset Song
- Bold Girls (this was a play)
- All Quiet on the Western Front
- various poems written about WWI
- Of Mice and Men
- Othello
- Poems by Robert Burns
- Poems by Seamus Heaney
- Journey's End

There are a couple of other books we read but I can't recall the titles now.

Answer 5

Great Expectations
David Copperfield
Catcher in the Rye
Of Mice & Men
Flowers for Algernon
Animal Farm
1984
Great Gatsby
Edgar Allan Poe Poems
Romeo & Juliet
Hamlet
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
In Cold Blood
The Color Purple
A Raisin in the Sun
Black Like Me

These were the ones I did like; I really can't recall the ones I didn't like, except I do recall we had to read some Jane Austen & Bronte sisters books, all of which I hated; the prose was stilted, and I hated all of the characters.

Answer 6

Lots of Edgar Allen Poe short stories-all excellent
Scarlet Letter -boring
Sounder-excellent
Red Badge of Courage-boring
1984-excellent
Brave New world-excellent
The Bluest Eye-excellent
Autobiography of Malcom X-excellent
the House on Mango Street-excellent
Catcher in the Rye-very good
the Shining-excellent
Pride and Prejudice-boring
Roots-very good
Death of a slesman-very good
To kill a mockingbird-excellent
Ivanhoe-couldn't follow
canterbury tales-good
the crucibe-excellent( we also went to Salem Village, now know as Danvers and Salem )
Leaves of Grass-good (which the Nuns banned after we read it)
Diary of Anne Frank-excellent
Around the World in 80 days-very good
Gullivers travel -very good
kim-boring
David copperfield-very good
Assorted books by shakespere -very good to Excellent
the illiad and the Odyessy -excellent
Rabbit Run-boring

Answer 7

What grade? There was a huge difference between freshman and senior year.

Freshman- read "Great Expectations" following the installments that it orginally came out in. It took all year, but I loved it. Also read some Shakespeare- "A Midsummer's Night Dream," "Othello"

Sophomore- That year was American Literature for my school. I had to do a paper on a single American author after reading all of their works. I chose Tennessee Williams. I liked that project. We also read a lot of the famous American works (ie- Huck Finn,etc.). Personally, I didn't like reading American authors. They never were my thing.

Sophomore year I also took some short term classes on mystery literature and Thomas Hardy. I read "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." That is my favorite book of all time, but it was a bit of a reach sophomore year (also, if you're in public school, you'll never be allowed to teach that...).

Junior Year- took AP Literature. We read a zillion books that year. We read and did analysis on the basis of Carl Jung. That was really hard. We read Beowulf and the current parody (I think that it is called something starting with a "G"...sorry, it's been a decade).

Senior Year- read some 18th century works. LOVED Jane Eyre.

Answer 8

well, i'm going into my junior year of high school, so i'm not really sure what the upperclassmen read. but here's what i read as a freshman and sophomore:

freshman: Montana 1948 by Larry Watson, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Raisin in the Sun, and Farenheit 451. Of those, my favorite was probably Montana 1948, but i didn't dislike any of them.

sophomore: Homer's The Odyssey, The Color of Water, and Rite of Passage. I HATED the odyssey..most drawn out book i've ever read, other than that i enjoyed this year's literature.

Hope this helps!

Answer 9

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (one of the best I've ever had to read)
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Brave New World by Alduous Huxley (another great one)
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespear
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Answer 10

I'm in high school, a junior, and we're having to read The Scarlet Letter right now. It's not that bad, I kind of like it. Last year we had to read Julius Ceasar. I'm sorry, but that book sucked! None of us liked it at all!!!! Romeo and Juliet was good, Midsummer Night's Dream was good, but Ceasar sucked. We also read A Raisin in the Sun, which I liked mostly because we read it as a play and everybody got a part and we got to act it out. It was really fun. Then at the end of the year we read Whirligig, and that book was absolutely the best I've ever read during school. It speaks to high school age people and is just so so so so good!! If you get a chance, please let them read that one!