Books you were forced to read at school!

I've alwas liked Shakespeare, though.

Cheers, Martin

I could give you an awfully long list, but, due to the fact that our school systems concentrates mainly on familiarizing students with Polish books/poems (and I'm too lazy to look for their English titles in the Net, sorry ), here are some examples of foreign works, which we had to read.

Master and Margarita
Crime and Punishment
Antigone
Tristan and Isolda
Macbeth
Hamlet
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Giaour
Lord Jim
Animal Farm
1984
Papa Goriot
Little Prince
Earth of People- A. de Saint Exupery
Old man and the Sea
The Plaque
Perfume - the Story of a Murderer
The Trial
Tartuffe

It's not very similar to any of your lists, I'm afraid. I wonder why.

Of that last list, in the U.S. we read:
Antigone
macbeth
Hamlet
Animal Farm
Old Man and the Sea
The Trial.

Plus, for our senior year's paper, people read:
Tartuffe
Little Prince
1984
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Crime and Punishment

In addition, we read in our senior year alone:
madame bovary
a doll's house
Mrs. warren's profession
the trial
dante's inferno
hamlet
medea

and others that I just can not remember

Originally posted by Nemo
Of that last list, in the U.S. we read:
Antigone
macbeth
Hamlet
Animal Farm
Old Man and the Sea
The Trial.

Plus, for our senior year's paper, people read:
Tartuffe
Little Prince
1984
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Crime and Punishment

Click to expand...

Here some similarity really can be noticed. Thank you for having shown it, Nemo.

Of Mice and Men
Romeo and Juliet
The Crucible
The Odyssey
Beowulf
Macbeth
Brave New World
A Midsummer Night Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Othello

we're reading King Lear next...

This is from 6th to 12th grade.

The Odyssey
The Crucible
Antigone
Cyrano de Bergerac
Frankenstein
Beowulf
The Great Gatsby
The Giver
Hamlet
Where the Red Fern Grows
Anthem
Macbeth
Brave New World
A Lesson Before Dying
Catcher in the Rye
To Kill a Mockingbird
Romeo and Juliet
The Joy Luck Club
Great Expectations

I believe I've got them all.

Originally posted by Haethurn
The basic difference between these two teachers is that one is good, and one is bad. The former is bad. The latter is good. Sadly, we do not have much of the latter.

Click to expand...

Haethurn,

I hope you wont take this the wrong way, but this seems a very simplistic conclusion. It seems as blinkered as the sort of teacher you criticise. Just as there are more gradations of morality than just good and bad, or black and white, there are surely more than just two types of teacher. Its a shame that one teacher, or perhaps several similar teachers, have clearly made you so angry.

For my own part, I enjoyed both Mockingbird and LotF at school. I was lucky to have teachers who inspired me and a selection of books that I happeneded to take to. Had I been force fed D. H. Lawrence or Catch 22 I might have been put off literature for life!

I'm not a great fan of swear words believing they are all to often an excuse for lazy language. However, for direct speech to be realistic they sadly need to be there.

I'm in the 8th grade and I remember we had to read "The Yearling" and "Huckleberry Finn" last year. FUUUUN...

-Maria

I remember these books from school.

Shane
Of Mice and Men
Billy Liar
The Pearl (I think that's what it was called, all I remember is it was about a Meixican - again not too sure - who found a pearl and ended up blowing his babys' head off!!!!)
Diary of Anne Frank - this moved the whole class to tears

I really hated being "forced" to read at school. Would rather have read one of my own books. I probably would have enjoyed my English class better had this been the case.

We had also fragments of "Lolita" by Nabokow- I read the whole. And we knew the first sentence in English to savour his language.

so far
-romeo and juliet
- lockie lenard
-tommorow when the war began
- the red king
- deadly unna

out of them i only like tommorow when the war began and the red king

This incomplete list is from 1966-72 in Ireland (national curriculum):

Hamlet
Macbeth
Julius Caesar
Romeo and Juliet
Murder in the Cathedral
Arms and the Man
Oedipus Rex
Short stories of Frank O'Connor
Gulliver's Travels
Lord of the Flies
Lord Jim
The Shrimp and the Anemone
The Pearl
Hard Times
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Huckleberry Finn
The Great Gatsby
1984
Animal Farm
The Odyssey

Various books in other languages too, plus a raft of poetry.

Haethurn, "Hate"? Do you really 'Hate'? Is there an empty seat available for me? Can you register for both classes and benefit from the good portions of both approaches to teaching? More and more we come into contact with people of diverse qualities. That is a result of our freedom to be ourselves. How far along are you in the class?---Robinson Crusoe---

Books/plays studied for GCSE included:
Macbeth
Romeo and Juliet
Lord of the Flies
To Kill A Mockingbird
My Family and Other Animals

No Dickens, but I've since read all his major novels. The only one I've never been able to finish is Pickwick - a favourite for some other Dickens fans.

A level syllabus included:
Keats' Odes
Henry IV Part I
King Lear
Jane Eyre
Pride and Prejudice
Far from the Madding Crowd

The A level book I most loathed was "The Great Gatsby". Perhaps in part because I was a bit of a moral fundamentalist as a sixth former. I believed all great literature promoted good behaviour. The amoral characters of Gatsby's world didn't fit.

I notice Hardy got a few mentions earlier in this topic, so I've started a thread on him in the author discussion section:
http://forums.thebookforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1337

Books I had to read and hated:

Animal Farm
Of Mice and Men
Shane
Lord of the Flies

Books I had to read and loved:

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury

So Ray Bradbury saved me from hating every book I read in High School. Thanks Ray!

Oh, and George Orwell, I don't care how many teachers think you're a brilliant writer, I still think you SUCK!

This thread raises the question of whether books are ruined by being studied academically? Is it possible to over-analyse books? The answer to both questions is probably, "sometimes, yes".

I asked one of my A level English teachers whether part of what we were aiming to do was to discover exactly what the author intended. As far as I can recall, she said it was legitimate to read in things that may never have consciously occurred to the author, not least because subconsciously this may have been something they were implying. This answer may be explained in part by the fact that the teacher in question was actually a university lecturer who was only working in the school part time. An academic would give this sort of answer, because there is a whole academic industry based on uncovering the true meaning of classic literature. Many academics are convinced - or convince themselves - that the likes of Jane Austen wrote novels crammed with subtely disguised representations of sex and liberation. Or perhaps it is their publishers who convince them?

For my own part, I actually find studying Shakespeare more fun than just watching it, even though it was intended for the stage more than the page. Once I've studied it I have a better idea what it is about.

I absolutely think you can ruin a good book by over-analysis. I remember sitting in A-level English Lit. listening to the teacher going on about what the author REALLY meant and thinking "How do you know what the author really meant?". I sure all we ended up doing was critiquing not the books but others' interpretations of the books.

It doesn't help you enjoy the books either if you know you've got some really scary exam about it afterwards. And the fact that you have to reread the books over and over again just so it sticks in your mind. You just end up hating everything about the books you were studying.

Let's just say that I have never read another book by the same authors that I studied at A-level. Think that says it all really.

1)The Great Gatsby
Thats all...

The whole over-analysis issue is why I avoided grad school. I feel that my undergrad degree in English is really a degree in b.s., because in class all we would do was pick some positiion on our interpretation of a work, and the rest of the class would argue it. To keep the discussion going, you often end up playing devil's advocate even if you've been convinced that you're wrong. Actually developed skills that were useful in real life, but still . . . not signing up for another helping.