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Books you were forced to read at school!

In German:

- Morton Rhue: The wave
- Klaus Kordon: Einbahnstraße (On-Way Street)
- Max von der Grün: Vorstadtkrokodile (Crocodiles of the Suburbs)
- Patrick Süskind: Perfume
- Heinrich Mann: Loyal Subject
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust (Part One)


In English:
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: The great Gatsby

Unfortunately, we didn't read much in English :(.
 
Long time ago now, but the two i remember having to study for my English Literature exam were.....

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet

There was also a book of poems but the title escapes me.
 
In my senior years at high school I had to read:

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen - Emma
Shakespeare - Macbeth
Shakespeare - Hamlet
John Le'Care - The Spy Who Came iin From the Cold
Lady in the Lake (Can't remember the author)
D.H.Lawrence - Sons and Lovers
Beckett - Waiting For Godot
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (can't remember the playwrite)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe (can't remember the playwrite)
 
the teachers in my school are i suppose in some middle? probably leaning towards the second. the 9th grade english teacher wouldn't say "god" but would scream out the word "bitch" if the character in the book was screaming it. odd way to be politically correct. my 10th grade english teacher was rather christian but her personality didn't reflect it. i think the books in my school are predeterminded by a higher authority though
 
Animal Farm
1984
Romeo and Juliet
Macbeth
After the first death
Maestro
Importance of Being ernest
Cosi
Girl with a Pearl Earring

(these have been for my english and literature classes)

Lani
 
I had to endure The Color Purple and Far From The Madding Crowd-not a fan.
When you are forced to write about books you don't llike afterwards it just makes it worse doesn't it?
 
I didn't care much for the books we had to read for high school until one of my teachers told us we had to read In Cold Blood over Christmas vacation. I tell you every spare moment was spend absorbing that book!

College readings haven't really provided us with much required reading that I find interesting. A few exceptions though with things like Beowulf, Frankenstein, Mississippi Trial, 1955, and Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case.
 
the dumb ox and brief history of time. didn't like it.

in the lit classes, at least we had the choice of what books to read except for the two
 
The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne was one that I had to read. The sophomores in my building are currently reading it and they are impressed that others have read it and remember the story and themes well-that's what usually happens when you read.:rolleyes: I don't know how, but a few coast by without reading at all, what a shame because they are truly missing out.:cool:
 
Great Expectorations wasn't too bad, at least it had a story and interesting characters, but did nobody else have to read Diary of a Fox-Hunting Man? It remains a mystery how a book about the Great War could contain so little excitement. All Quiet on the Western Front was miles better; I even read it voluntarily.
 
* means i enjoyed it

*animal farm
*macbeth
*midsummer night's dream
catcher in the rye
raisin in the sun
*princess bride
the hobbit(* but i had already read it)
2 old women
MC Higgings (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
 
I'm taking AP American Lit. and this is my reading list:
Non-fiction:
**How to Read Literature like a Profesor
Novels:
*Angela's Ashes
*The Sovereignty and Goodness of God
*The Great Gatsby
*Death of a Salesman
*The Narrative of Fredrick Douglas
The Scarlet Letter
Ethan Frome
The Crucible
Beloved
Things Fall Apart
Benito Cereno
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Short Stories and Poems: (that i remember)
**Rip Van Winkle
**Thanatopsis
*Nature
*The Fall of the House of Usher (i read half of it...)
[(there are more than these, but i don't remember them and i don't have my lit. book with me...)]

*has already been assigned
**actually read it

as you can see, i don't really like reading things that have been assigned, but suprisingly, i'm still passing :p
 
I'm currently in grade 12, but I've read all the stuff for english this semester. Amongst various short stories, these are the novels I've had to read:

Grade 9
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Grade 10
The Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare

Grade 11
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

Grade 12
The Wars - Timothy Findley
Macbeth - Shakespeare
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
 
Doug Johnson said:
I hated everything I had to read in school, but I love books now. There must be an explanation, but I'm not sure what it is.
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Isn't that they way it works though? It's one thing to enjoy a book on your own, quite another to open it on your own will. Then again, some works would go unread if we left it to kids to pick what they wanted to read.
 
Sometimes I think I became a reader despite my education. Not to trash my teachers, most of them were great. The books they assigned were not so bad for the most part. The problem was their method of teaching us to look at literature as something to be dissected and analyzed under a microscope. Many of them forgot to point out the relevancy of literature to our lives as individuals struggling to keep from looking like idiots in front of everyone else.
As I looked at some of the reading lists posted by current high school students here in this thread, I realized that I can't think of but one book I was assigned in English class that was written by a living author. That was To Kill a Mockingbird. Perhaps it would have been a good thing for the me and my classmates if our teachers had assigned a few more contemporary works too. I don't remember any of them ever talking about the current books of the day, except for this one history teacher I had..but he was different-he did allow us to use contemporary works for extra credit reports- and he was the only history teacher I had who talked about "real" books and encouraged us to pursue them. Needless to say, his class was one of my favorites!
 
SFG75 said:
Isn't that they way it works though? It's one thing to enjoy a book on your own, quite another to open it on your own will. Then again, some works would go unread if we left it to kids to pick what they wanted to read.
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You're probably right. I probably just hate being told what to do, but it could be the eassy writing that I hated.

I loved Catcher in the Rye, (which for some reason my school never assigned) but if I'd needed to write 2,000 words on the symbolism, that might've changed my opinion.
 
The problem was their method of teaching us to look at literature as something to be dissected and analyzed under a microscope. Many of them forgot to point out the relevancy of literature to our lives as individuals struggling to keep from looking like idiots in front of everyone else.
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I agree totally!. Our reading curriculum was really fantastic, now that I think back to it, the teaching was exactly as you found it to be. Analyzing certain passages, looking at how it reflected the writer's own experiences and that kind of thing. Not that you should completely ignore it, but when you are reading anything by Orwell, Steinbeck, or Willa Cather, you could go into so many directions relevant to the lives of students.
 
The ones I can remember:

Harp In the South
Lord of the Flies
The Delinquents
Slake's Limbo
Various Shakespeare
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Crucible
The Red Pony
A Streetcar Named Desire
Silas Marner
 
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