So what books did you read at school?

Firstly, I would like to introduce myself to the forums as this is my first post, by saying hello to all.

Anywho... so in speaking with my gf not too long ago, I discovered that although she had attended the same highschool as I, she was assigned very different texts than myself betwixt grades 9&12, such as Frankenstein, Great Expectations, and The Grapes of Wrath.

With envy I recalled reading nothing to be considered classic in public school, the closest being Farenheit 451, but even that was in Junior High!

So what do fellow board members remember being assigned to read in highschool, or have read so far in highschool?

Also, what state did you attend?

Thanks! :thumbs_up

I went to high school in North Carolina and I read

Freshman Year
To Kill a Mockingbird
Great Expectations
Romea and Juliet

Sophomore Year
Things Fall Apart
A Doll's House
Cyrano de Bergerac
All Quiet on the Western Front
Siddhartha
Antigone
Epic of Gilgamesh
Night

Junior Year
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Huck Finn
Fredrick Douglas
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Great Gatsby
The Awakening
The Scarlet Letter

Senior Year
Heart of Darkness
1984
Brave New World
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Hamlet
Macbeth
Heart of Darkness
Lord of the Flies
Light in August
Turn of the Screw
The Stranger

I'm probably forgetting a bunch but that's what I can remember. The books were kind of hit or miss until senior year when I loved just about everything.

Edit: remembered a couple more

Freshman Year
Iliad
Antigone
Medea
Epic of Gilgamesh

Sophmore Year
The Divine Comedy(just the Inferno)
The Decameron
Don Quixote
Hamlet
Romeo and Juliet
The Miser(Moliere)
The Sorrows of Young Werther

Junior Year
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Father Goriot
Great Expectations
U registraturi(Ante Kovačić,a Croatian author)
Madame Bovary

Senior Year
The Trial
Demian
Steppenwolf
The Stranger
The Death and the Dervish(Selimović)
The Damned Yard(Andrić)
Ugursuz(also a novel by a Bosnian author,Nedžad Ibrišimović)
One Hundred Years of Solitude

Grade 9
Intrigue and Love
Romeo and Juliet
A Village Romeo and Juliet
...

Grade 10
Faust 1
Some poetry by Pushkin
...

Grade 11
The Robbers
Germany, a fairy tale
The Sorrows of Young Werther
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Several short stories by Chekhov

Grade 12
The Reader
Nathan the Wise
Emilia Galotti
Faust 2
1984
A Hero of our Time (excerpts)

I know Ï've forgotten some books... I had no literature class, just a German, English and Russian class, so all works I listed were read in original.

FRESHMAN YEAR:
Tickets,please.
Indian camp.
The edge.
aroud the world in eighty days.
SOMPHORE YEAR:
shahrazad
Antigone.
Le rouge et le noire.
knock.
Candide.
La civilisation de ma mére.
don't look now.
Tom sawyer.
JUNIOR YEAR:
A begining and an end.(by Najib Mahfoud).
Head of the devil.(Njib Alkilani).
Senior year:
I remember not very well.

Light in August
Turn of the Screw
The Stranger

Who were these written by? Are they good?

Light in August is by Faulkner. It is kind of slow with a lot of focus on character's internal happenings but I liked it. A lot of my classmates found it boring but there are a lot of Faulkner fans on this board that can probably explain the good aspects of it better than I can.

Turn of the Screw is by Henry James. I loved it, it's a great mystery about a nanny who sees ghosts haunting the children she is taking care of and the reader must decide if she is insane or if the ghosts are real.

The Stranger is by Albert Camus and is one of the best books I have ever read. I can't recommend it highly enough, but that may be because I agree with the existentialist philosophy it espouses (though Camus did not agreee with the existentialist label).

I went to high school in Texas. Here are some of those I remember (and I forgotten lots — forgive me; it was ages ago!):


Freshman
Romeo and Juliet
The Odyssey
Rebecca
To Kill a Mockingbird


Sophomore
Julius Caesar
Animal Farm
The Scarlet Letter
The Glass Menagerie
Poetry of Robert Frost
A Separate Peace


Junior
Antony and Cleopatra
The Crucible
Some stories Fitzgerald's stories


Senior
Beowulf
Macbeth
John Donne's poetry and essays
A Modest Propsal
poetry by Byron, Keats and Wordsworth
Parts of Walden
Lord of the Flies

Due to developmental delays, I can't really remember most of what I read. I know Lord of the Flies was sophomore year as well as lots of poetry in that chapter. Don't remember most, but my fave poet is Robert Frost. I share my birthday with E. E. Cummings. I graduated in Ohio in 1998.

some of these lists make me green with envy!

Shoot that was a long time ago. The ones I remember are:

The Catcher in the Rye
The Great Gatsby
All the Kings Men
The Scarlet Letter
Huck Finn
The Bible
Hemlet
Macbeth
Romeo and Juliet
Much Ado About Nothing
As you like it

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SirRaustusBear

The Stranger is by Albert Camus and is one of the best books I have ever read.

---

I have to agree on this. I love that book.

I've also seen the title translated as "The Outsider."

Yes, I was about to ask that :)

We did To Kill A Mockingbird, Educating Rita, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It...

I can't remember absolutely everything I've read, especially considering that I read a lot on my own and will probably mix it all up. I haven't finished High School yet either...so...

Freshman Year
The Giver
House on Mango Street
The Lovely Bones
Romeo and Juliet
The Odyssey
A Raisin in the Sun
The Glass Menagerie
The Catcher in the Rye

Sophomore Year
The Art of War
Mythology
Whale Talk
Julius Caesar
Animal Farm
Candide
Cat's Cradle
Antigone
Lord of the Flies
Of Mice and Men

Junior Year (current year)
The Grapes of Wrath
A Handmaid's Tale
The Color of Water
The Great Gatsby
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Crucible
The Bluest Eye
Fahrenheit 451
The Life of Pi

Excluding poems, essays and short stories:

The Chrysalids
Twelfth Night

To Kill a Mocking Bird
The Glass Managerie
Romeo And Juliet

Cat's Cradle
Macbeth

The Great Gatsby
King Lear
Death of a Salesman

As you can see, as of now I am almost purely an autodidact.

This is Canada for you, no emphasis on English.

What I read out of interest in high school was:
Crime and Punishment
A Tale Of Two Cities
The Idiot
The Trial
Vanity Fair
The Great Gatsby
This Side Of Paradise
The Last Tycoon
The Beautiful and Damned
Of Mice and Men
Lolita
Fahrenheit 451
A book called The Dark Room (can't remember author)
Brave New World
1984
Animal Farm
Brideshead Revisited
The Loved One
The Ballad of The Sad Cafe
Bleak House
Les Enfants Terribles
Giovanni's Room
Wuthering Heights
To Kill A Mockingbird (assigned)
The Immoralist
Catcher in The Rye
Where Angels Fear to Tread
The Metamorphosis


From busy reader :D

Highschool-I really don't remember highschool. But some of the books I remember reading were, Illustrated Man, 1984, Brave New World and Farewell to Arms. Otherwise-read some poetry and plays-typical highschool required reading.

ooh, what fun. let's see what I can remember. I can't split it up by grade, then I'll get extra-confused.

I was in Philadelphia, but it was a private school, so I'm not sure how much the state matters.

- Romeo and Juliet
- The Hobbit (did I really read this in a course?! I think so, although it seems odd now)
- The Adventures of Huck Finn
- The Great Gatsby
- The Scarlet Letter
- The Awakening
- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
- Fences
- Light in August (I think? or something by Faulkner)
- A Farewell to Arms
- The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
- Candide
- Lord of the Flies
- Love in the Time of Cholera

Ninth grade included:
Great Expectations
Lord of the Flies
Huckleberry Finn
The Scarlet Pimpernel
The Importance of Being Earnest
A Tale of Two Cities

These will generally be in order from 9th-12th grade, but I have mixed them up a little bit on the years.

9th

Romeo and Juliet
Julius Caesar
The Pearl
Wasteland
Death of a Salesman

10th

Tale of Two Cities
Lord of the Flies
To Kill a Mockingbird
Blackboy (10th or 11th)

11th

The Great Gatsby
The Chosen (10th or 11th)
Grapes of Wrath
Moby Dick (parts)
The Crucible
Walden (parts)

12th

Hamlet
Autobiography of Lee Iacocca

What am I reading currently in high school? Words, words, words.

Well I'm in year 11 right now in Australia and...

Year 8 I only remember doing Lockie Leonard

Year 9 we did Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz

Year 10 we did Anna's Story by Bronwyn Donaghy and Looking For Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta... Also we did Romeo and Juliet, but it was more of a focus on film interpretations of it.

This year (Year 11) we are doing King Oedipus by Sophocles, Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Chosen by Chaim Potok, The Crucible by Arthur Miller and then like poetry etc.

I can't remember high school much either. It was soooo long ago. But I do remember reading Frost and studying poetry as lyrics by Paul Simon. It was a wonderful class.

Wow, this is prompting sudden nostalgic flashbacks to high school...and making me realize I'm now old enough to be nostalgic about high school. :lol:

Freshman Year

To Kill a Mockingbird
Animal Farm
Romeo and Juliet
Great Expectations
Assorted Poetry

Sophomore Year

1984
All Quiet On the Western Front
Greek and Roman Mythologies
Twelfth Night
The Count of Monte Cristo
(Independent report on Howard's End)

Junior Year (what a year!)

Sermons by Jonathan Edwards and other early Americana
Essays by Ben Franklin
The Scarlet Letter
Walden
Poems by Whitman, Dickinson and others
Huck Finn
The Great Gatsby
The Grapes of Wrath
The Old Man and the Sea and Hemingway short stories
The Catcher in the Rye
(Independent project on Willa Cather's My Antonia)

Senior Year

Beowulf
Grendel
Canterbury Tales (unfortunately in translation :( )
Sonnets by Wyatt and Surrey
King Lear
Pride and Prejudice
(missed last half of the year, so don't know what the reading was)

(Exluded pieces of national literature whose names would probably not mean much to you.)

9th Grade
Homer - The Iliad (selected parts)
Homer - The Odyssey (selected parts)
Aeschyles - Prometheus Bound
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Sophocles - Antigone
Euripides - Electra
Euripides - Medea
Plautus - Aulularia
Virgil - Aeneis (selected parts)
Ovid - Metamorphoses
Epic of Gilgamesh
Bible - excerpts and selected parts
St Augustine - Confessions
+
Salinger, J.D. - Catcher in the Rye
Golding, W. - Lord of the Flies
Orwell, G. - Animal Farm
Some national lit plays

10th grade
Alighieri, D. - Inferno + selected cantos from other parts of Commedia
Boccaccio, G. - Decameron
Petrarca, F. - Canzoniere
Shakespeare, W. - Othello
Shakespeare, W. - Hamlet
Shakespeare, W. - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Calderon de la Barca, P. - Life is a Dream
Moliere - we had a choice between his plays
Cervantes, M. de - Don Quijote
Corneille, P. - Cid
Racine, J. - we had a choice, most of us did Fedra
Goldoni, C. - La Locandiera
Goethe, J. W. - The Sorrows of Young Werther
Goethe, J. W. - Faust (only first part was mandatory)
Schiller, F. - The Robbers
Pushkin, A. S. - Eugene Onegin

11th Grade
back in my old school:
Lermontov, M. Ju. - The Hero of Our Time
Balzac, H. de - Father Goriot
Flaubert, G. - Madame Bovary
Turgenev, I. S. - Fathers and Sons
Gogol', N. V. - The Overcoat
Dostoevsky, F. M. - Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky, F. M. - Writings from the Underground

whilst we were about to do the latter, I changed school, and in new school:
Alighieri, D. - Purgatory
Ariosto, O. - Orlando Furioso
Ariosto, O. - Gerusalemme Liberata
Alfieri, V. & Goldoni, C. - a bunch of plays, though we had certain freedom in choosing what we wanted
Wilde, O. - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Hugo, V. - The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Les Miserables (I did the former)
Shakespeare, W. - Macbeth
Voltaire - Candide

They also made me make up for all the things I missed in their school, so I read a lot aside these. I didn't manage to read it all, so I left some for 12th grade, hoping they would forget about, but they didn't...

12th Grade
Alighieri, D. - Paradise
Verga, G. - I Malavoglia
Svevo, I. - Zeno's Conscience
Pirandello, L. - One, None and a Hundred Thousand
Pirandello, L. - The Late Mattia Pascal
Pirandello, L. - Six Characters in Search of an Author
Camus, A. - The Stranger
Ionesco, E. - we were given a choice between his plays
Proust, M. - Combray and/or Swann's Way
Beckett, S. - Waiting for Godot
D'Annunzio, G. - a novel of choice
Sartre, J.-P. - Nausea
Kafka, F. - The Trial


I probably missed some; other than not-so-known pieces of national literature, I excluded short stories, essays and such texts, and I included only works read for subject native language / literature, not also the things we read for foreign language / literature classes, or other classes.

I'm currently in year 12.

Stuff I read out of interest AND I read for schoolwork were as follows:

6th Grade:

Bridge to Terabithia (We had it read to us!)

7th Grade:

Crossfire
Bridge to Wisemen's Cove

8th/9th Grade (Can't remember which):

Animal Farm

10th Grade (I took an advanced English class, called Enrichment English):

Things Fall Apart
Arthurian Legends
Lord of the Flies
Hound of the Baskervilles
Beowulf
Lord of the Rings
Erik the Red & other Icelandic Tales (Just Erik the Red)
The Republic (Selected bits)

For Drama:

A Midsummer Night's Dream

11th Grade:

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Importance of Being Earnest

For Drama:

Kinuta (The Silk Board)
A Doll's House
Summer of the 17th Doll
The Removalists
Medea

12th Grade:

Snow Falling on Cedars
Macbeth
The Crucible

For Drama:

The Caucasian Chalk-Circle

Stuff I read not related to school:

Heart of Darkness
War of the Worlds
The Time Machine
To Kill A Mockingbird
1984
A Clockwork Orange
Dubliners
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The Sign of Four
A Study in Scarlet
The Hobbit
Life of Pi

That's all the stuff I've read that I can remember! Also, that's all the high literature I read, not the popular fiction type novels like Nick Hornby, Stephen King and Anthony Horowitz, or Lemony Snicket.

I read The Metamorphosis! Weird but good
I read some of Catch-22 and liked it but it's v. long

9th Grade:

• To Kill A Mockingbird (Lee)--loved it
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Smith?)--loved it
• Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)--I love anything Shakespeare
• Animal Farm (Orwell)--didn't like it then, would probably like it now...
• The Miracle Worker (Gibson)--a play about Helen Keller's tutor; was decent

10th Grade:

• Picture Bride (Uchida)--about a Japanese woman who is sent to the Americas to meet her new husband and her struggle to adapt to society, very very good
• Black Like Me (Griffin)--about a white reporter who colors himself black and travels through the South to find out how it feels to be hated because of race; a true story and incredibly riveting
• Night (Wiesel)--probably one of the best accounts of the Holocaust, and there are a bunch
• The Crucible (Miller)--meh, not a huge Miller fan
• Julius Caesar (Shakespeare)--<3
• The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne)--yuck

11th:

• A Light in August (Faulkner)--a favorite
• The Awakening (Chopin)--not a huge fan, but not terrible
• Great Expectations (Dickens)--a least favorite, though I love A Tale of Two Cities
• Death of A Salesmen (Miller)
• Wise Blood (O'Connor)--excellent
• Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)--the best story about class differences involving a man who loves a woman who is above him in status
• The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)--another least favorite
• A Raisin in the Sun--a play about a black family that stumbles upon some money and how the dreams over what they are going to do with it tears them apart

12th:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare)
• Cymbeline (Shakespeare)--though I think I spelled that wrong, this is my favorite Shakespeare play
• Henry V (Shakespeare)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare)--also read in 6th grade
• As You Like It (Shakespeare)--also read in 7th grade
• Brave New World (Huxley)--loved it, but not as good as 1984
• 1984 (Orwell)--incredible
• The Giver (Lowry)--while this is a children's book of sorts, we read it alongside Brave New World and 1984 for contrast, and I really enjoyed it
• Pride and Prejudice--a least favorite
• The Chosen--an excellent book about a Jewish boy who struggles against the expectations of those around him, very very moving
• Wuthering Heights--YET ANOTHER least favorite
• Macbeth (Shakespeare)--not my favorite Shakespeare
• Parts of Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales--both enjoyable, though I wasn't crazy about them

Freshman/College:

• The Joy Luck Club (Tan)--I really hated this book and didn't understand how it fit into our course at all, really awful
• Generation X (Coupland)--Incredible anti-culture book, loved it
• The Bluest Eye (Morrison)--Also loved it
• The Bell Jar (Plath)--My all-time favorite work in this class, absolutely amazing, very real to me
• Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)--I loved, loved, loved this book.
• The Aeneid (Virgil)
• The Iliad (Homer)--better than the Aeneid, IMO, very good
• The Wisdom of the Prophet (Muhammad)--phrases from the Hadith, the Islamic text, actually interesting
• The Mahabharata (condensed)--the ancient Indian script condensed to about 200 pages, again, actually really fascinating
• Confessions (St. Augustine)--yuck
• Purgatorio (Dante)--really disappointed because I never got a chance to read the Inferno first, but overall really enjoyed it
• Praise of Folly (Erasmus)--meh, the first half was hilarious, the second half was a drag
• Basically the entire Old Testament--incredibly painstaking
• Hamlet (Shakespeare)--I'd read it a few times before

I'm from Alabama (Southern US).
This was just my required reading list since freshman year, high school. I left out all the poems and short stories we read, even the ones I really liked (Ambrose Bierce, Achebe), because this post is long as it is.
I also loved Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck) but I read that on my own time.

In no particular order, as I cannot remeber exazactly when in highschool I read the following, and these are the best I can recall off the top of my head:

Oh and I went to Highschool in CA.

There may have been a few short stories we read as well that I simply cannot recall.

Of Mice and Men
To Kill a Mocking Bird
Catcher in the Rye
The Great Gatsby
The Little Prince
The Wizzard of Earthsea
Siddhartha
The Crucible
Othello
I also remember there was a book on mytholgy we read that I cannot remeber the name of

Did you like them? Were you unsatisfied with them?

I read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare, and Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. And a little while before those three, I read Romeo and Juliet.

Personally, I liked Mockingbird, and disliked Shakespeare and Thomas. However, I feel that I can appreciate them both a lot more today.

For AS I studied Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and selected poems of Robert Frost. This year (A2), for the drama module, I've read Shakespeare's The Tempest and a play called Translations by Brian Friel.

When I was younger, we read Frankenstein for GCSE and selected poems from an anthology that included Seamus Heaney, Simon Armintage and others.

To be honest, I've not really enjoyed anything I've studied at school...

My school must have been a VERY poor one (I mean that both financially as well as the quality of education given). I cannot remember reading more than a handful of books in class or out of class in high school. Although I've ready nearly everything that has been listed, it wasn't until after graduation that I did so. That's really irritating. All of those hours locked away and we didn't even do anything worth while.

I went to school at Saint Francis HS in MN.

To Kill a Mockingbird
A Raisin In The Sun
A Dip In The Poole
Journey's End

How pathetic.

at school. well it was a long tima ago, now i am at university so...
we had to read a lot at school but mainly Russian literature. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Bulgakov, Bunin, Blok, Gorky, and poetry. oh, Shakespeare! we read Romeo and Juliet too and Hamlet !!!!1
Certainly I read other books apart from what they said I had to read.
I loved Jack London.
only when I began learning English and was able to read in original did i start reading foreign literature.
First book I read in original was The Grapes of Wrath, I loved it.
then came:
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Sun also rises (Fiesta)
short stories by O.Henry
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Catcher in the rye
1984
The Return of the native (Tomas Hardy)
Sense and sensibility
Pride and Prejudice
Old curiosity shop (Dickens) but in translation
Hundred years of solitude (also in traslation)
and some other books
this summer I am gonna spend reading a lot =)
wish me good luck

ohh, I forgot to mention Virginia Wolf =) Missis Dalloway

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Dharmabeat

For AS I studied Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and selected poems of Robert Frost. This year (A2), for the drama module, I've read Shakespeare's The Tempest and a play called Translations by Brian Friel.

When I was younger, we read Frankenstein for GCSE and selected poems from an anthology that included Seamus Heaney, Simon Armintage and others.

To be honest, I've not really enjoyed anything I've studied at school...

---

It seems like they have a far better education system in the US! I also went to school in the UK and frankly, compared to the lists here, it is a <<insert rude word here>> embarrassment.
From what I can remember we studied An Inspector Calls, Romeo & Juliet, the Merchant of Venice, Animal Farm and To Kill A Mockingbird

They are the only texts that stick in my mind, and I can safely say we studied nothing else of note. I did go to a very poor school though. Although it is probably more of a reflection of how utterly inept our education system is - many of the books US students are reading in high school, we are being taught at University