Students: most required summer reading you have done?

[ucdawg12]

Well, up until this year I have never had to read much during the summer, I usually left it til the last few days and banged it out than, but this summer I will have to take a different approach. For my AP English 4 class next year I need to read: Snow falling on Cedars, Crime and Punishment and Poisonwood Bible, total page number of the 3 is 1520 lol, keep in mind it took me just about 5 months to read Moby-Dick(500pages) which I actually enjoyed. Anyone else ever have a large amount of reading that they got done\will need to get done?

[emily655321]

WHOA! Those are some books. How can they expect to teach a love of reading if you're forced into so much of it? Everyone in my school had to read two books each summer, and could choose between a test or writing a journal while they read them. The test counted for 4 credits out of 140 to graduate, but most kids had way over 140 at graduation anyway, so it wasn't strictly necessary. Anyway, each grade had a list of about 12 books to choose from, so they didn't both have to be biggies. I disapprove of mandatory summer reading though. Even I detested whatever they made me read, just because it was an assignment -- and I adore reading.

P.S. -- Moby Dick is a slow read. I don't think other books would take as long per page.

[scorpio36]

I don't have that and thank god...

[unknown]

i hve animal farm,of mice and men and a tale of two cities

[CBW]

I never had required summer reading but one semester I took a modern fiction class. We were required to read 12 novels and write 4-5 page papers on each. They were:
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Steppenwolf
The Stranger
The Little Prince
Women in Love
The Sibyl
The Sound and the Fury
Confederacy of Dunces (The only one I was able to pick)
The Natural
Look Homeward, Angel
The Big Sleep
The House on Coliseum Street

We were also required to read any contemporary book and write a 15 page paper on it or we could read a contemporary novel and an older novel that he chose and write a 10 page comparison paper. I chose the first one and read Sophie's World and wrote the 15 pages.

By the end of that semester I did not want to read anything anymore. That was the first time that I actually went through the break between semesters without reading a single book.

[simon]

I thought the Confederacy of Dunces wasn't all it was cracked up to be, I didn't find it that hilarious.

[Capnplank]

Confederacy of Dunces was great, though I don't know if I'd venture to call it hilarious. Parts of it are pretty funny, but on the whole it was pretty sad. Or so I thought, anyways. I got especially irritated with the meddlesome rich wife. I don't think I've ever had a character in a book grate on my nerves like she did.
At any rate, I doubt there'd be a Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons without an Ignatius J. Reilly, so it's a double winner in my book.

[CBW]

My husband actually loves that book. It's one of three books that I reccomended to him that he actually read (he prefers magazines, especially car magazines).
He surprised me and actually read it twice.
He related to the characters, especially since it is based in New Orleans, where he is from, so he understood things a little better. But I still can't walk passed a Lucky Dog stand without thinking about Ignatius.

[softball336]

Last summer i read Invisible Man (about racism, not a man who turns invisible. Yes, I was very disappointed) and A Prayer for Owen Meany, which i LOVED. It was an awesome book about friends and about life. If you've ever seen the movie Simon Birch, it's based (loosely) on this novel. I couldn't pick between them because i like the book and movie for very different reasons.

[mir]

just Pride and Prejudice and Utopia for us - they're making up for this year during school, when we had to read the Odyssey, Iliad, and the Bible (among a lot of others). the bible may be a great religious text, but reading it as literature is like slogging through mud!

[daddysfiddler]

Well I guess I don't have anything to complain about. This year we only had to read The Scarlet Letter and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber by Hemingway. Last year we had Of Mice and Men, A Seperate Peace, and Oedipus Rex. I feel spoiled now. Good luck to all of you with huge reading lists. <><

[higley]

In the summer before my senior year of high school I think I was required to read (for about three classes?):

The Turn of the Screw
Oliver Twist
The Prince
Hardball
The Canterbury Tales
a French Revolution non-fiction book, don't remember the name
one other, don't remember

Each had to have a couple-page report on it, and for government class I think the report had to be ten pages. :P

[Zarathustra]

I'm only a sixth form student (for those of you who live in America, here in the UK 11-16 is high school where we get 10 GCSEs, 16-18 is collage/sixth-form where we get 3-4 A-Levels & beyond that is university) studying English Lit., Mathematics, Psychology & Biology so I don't have to do a lot of reading. I had to read Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Chaucer & finally Raymond Carver's Short Cuts (which I'd read already); & that isn't a great deal. I also have to 'read as much post 1914 prose as I can' because for the A2 course we need to decide on something to write 3000 words on. I'm going to do Ishmael, probably. I would do Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but I can't remember when Nietzsche was around and I suspect it was before 1914. Also, we might not be able to do translated texts (haven't checked).

[mir]

hey, for you people who had to read the Canturbury tales - are they good? we just started them, and i'm having a hard time because i don't really understand Middle English. : )

[Behemoth]

I can't remember when Nietzsche was around and I suspect it was before 1914. Also, we might not be able to do translated texts (haven't checked).

I'm fairly sure that Nietzsche died in 1900, his last writings were in the late 1880s.

[Danika_Valin]

Every summer between 8th and 12th grade I've had summer reading, but it was never a lot. The worst was when I had to read Cry the Beloved Country. It was only 300 some pages, but it could have been 1500 for how slow it moved. I hated that book.

[mono]

I usually had some books I had never heard of until then; no doubt, my instructors in high school likely avoided the classics to read during the summer, so it seemed promised we had never read the books recommended. I remember reading a few books (including The Brothers K and The River Why) by David James Duncan, and enjoying them immensely. :nod:

[Bysshe]

As I'm planning on studying English Lit. through Sixth Form, and possibly university, reading this thead makes it look all rather scary...

I'm only a little Year 10 student (14-15 years old), so the only book on our reading list for the summer is Lord of the Flies.

Unbelievably, everyone's complaining about it already. It's relatively short, entertaining, well-written, and yet they've all just dismissed it as a boring "boy's book". Some of the girls in my class are so lazy. We were set Pride and Prejudice to read over the space of a few months, and half of them didn't even bother finishing it, despite the fact that we had to write endless essays on it. I think they cheated and watched the film and/or TV series instead.

[alicialiv]

I'd have to say that the hardest summer reading I ever had to do happened in my senior year of highschool (thus far!). I read The Invisible Man by Ellison and Siddhartha by Hesse. Now, the reading bit was easy but her instructions where crazy! And of course I procrastinated. In the end I had a packet of about 30-40 pages of stuff I had written. We had to define terms and, identify them within the text and then compare the terms to the other book (there were certain terms for each book and then there was a list of other terms that was made completely for one or the other). A lot of defining had to deal with Freud. Mind you this was the smallest and 'easiest' section of the packet. There were essay topics that we had to pick and then apply to the books. There were people we had to define and apply their philosphies to the books. God! There was so much to do. In the end it was all worth it. I never knew a thing about existentialism, Freud's pyschoanalysis and many more things..... I truly loved my English class, I approached it with a mixture of fear and excitement everyday.

[Janine]

As I'm planning on studying English Lit. through Sixth Form, and possibly university, reading this thead makes it look all rather scary...

I'm only a little Year 10 student (14-15 years old), so the only book on our reading list for the summer is Lord of the Flies.

Unbelievably, everyone's complaining about it already. It's relatively short, entertaining, well-written, and yet they've all just dismissed it as a boring "boy's book". Some of the girls in my class are so lazy. We were set Pride and Prejudice to read over the space of a few months, and half of them didn't even bother finishing it, despite the fact that we had to write endless essays on it. I think they cheated and watched the film and/or TV series instead.

Hi everyone, first, I wanted to comment on everyone's postings. I am a grown-up, so I don't really have to read anything - you know required. I hated it when I was in highschool and they made me read certain books or gave us a list to choose from. I read very slowly, so it was quite difficult to keep up; thus I never liked reading. It took me a good 10 yrs out of highschool to grow to love to read. I attribute this to the fact that I had a full range of books I could choose from and no restraints! Oddly enough I preferred classics. I am just trying to point out that I don't believe in required reading lists. The first poster here sounds overwhelmed. If you overwhelm a young person they will hold that stigma their entire life. It is a darn shame educators can't see this fact. We all read at a different pace. I firmly believe it is as it should be. One person may zip through a book and totally love and understand it and another may take 6 months to read a book and love it, just the same.

Hi Bysshe, I love "Lord of the Flies". Now that is a book I thought I had read in highschool; then a few years back I saw the British made B/W film and I loved it. I again read the book and adored the story. It is great! Also, it is not a long book. I was just thinking recently that I wanted to see the film again. If you get a chance see the film, after first reading the book.

[PeterL]

I don't remember the titles, but I had to read six or eight books in the Summer when I was in high school. I usually read one or two books a week during that period, so the quantity wasn't objectionable. Unfortunately, some of the books were "juvenile literature", and that was a problem.

[Hyacinth42]

Wow, you guys actually read the "required" reading ;) As much as I love reading, the books we always are assigned are awful :sick:. Last summer, I "read" Mythology, Grendel, and 100 Years of Solitude.... I read all of Mythology, read Grendel (didn't really understand/retain most of it), and read the first 1/4 of 100 Years of Solitude before I couldn't take it anymore and just sparknoted the rest of the book... I felt kinda bad, but it was a long book... This year however, I believe that this summer I have to read: A Doll's House, Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, and I believe a Physics book... However, I may be wrong.


The year before last I had to read A Catcher in the Rye (among other things), and that was more than enough reading :sick: God I hated that book.

[Annamariah]

Last summer I had to read 10 Finnish classics for school. The assignment was given in the beginning of high school, so we had almost 2 whole years to read them, but somehow most of us read all of them during the last couple of months before the time run out :lol: (We had a list where we had to pick 10 out of maybe 40 or 50 books.) So finally I walked to library, picked up an armful of books and spent one week at our summer cottage reading.