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Books you were forced to read at school!

Books:
To Kill A Mockingbird
Tuck Everlasting
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
Medicine Walk
The Hobbit
The Cay
Poems:
The Raven

These are all that I can remember at the moment.
 
I was forced to read Black Beauty and The Secret Garden, which I hated.

I was forced to read, and loved:
The Hobbit
Lord of the Flies
To Kill a Mockingbird

And other groups were reading Kes, and Of Mice and Men, which I was very jealous about, so read anyway.

And Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Macbeth, and maybe one or two more, not sure which were school and which were college...

College, for A level, we did:
Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson - fantastic, and I am so grateful.
Dubliners by James Joyce - ditto
Something by Angela Carter - ugh ugh, hated it
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - which was ok
A couple of Shakespeare
Murmuring Judges by David Hare - a play I found fantastic.
 
Most of the books we read in HS I enjoyed. Some of my favorites were:

Of Mice and Men
Tale of Two Cities
1984
Animal Farm
To Kill a Mockingbird
Catcher in the Rye

I can only think of one book I hated, which was Far from the Madding (sp?)Crowd. I'm not even sure why I hated it since it was so long ago! Was Bless the Beasts and the Children a book? I remember watching the movie, which I hated as well. I never got the idea of the buffalo going off the cliff...

For awhile now I've been trying to remember the books we read in school. Do you think there is a way to access a school district's reading lists for a certain time period? Say, 1987-1990? I'm so curious.
 
Reading through this thread makes me so jealous. I don't think one science fiction or fantasy book ever made it into our literature classes - we didn't even get to read 1984. :mad: All we got was depressing literature - Far From the Madding Crowd, King Lear etc. It's no wonder I listen to The Smiths to cheer myself up.
 
I only remember a few...

1)The Scarlett Letter
2) Waiting for the Rain
3) To Kill a Mocking Bird
4) The Canterbury Tales
5) Lord of the Flies
6) Rascal
7) The Outsiders
8)Hatchet
 
Books we are reading in American Lit this year:
  1. The Pearl (Steinbeck)
  2. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
  3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain, that genius)
  4. The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
  5. Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury)
  6. As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)
  7. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
  8. The Crucible (Miller)
  9. Walden (Thoreau)
  10. My Antonia (Willa Cather)

Out of the ones we've read so far (the first five), I liked all but The Pearl because I found Kino rather annoying and stupid at times, and our teacher had to keep pounding it in to our heads that Steinbeck was from Salinas, California, which had absolutely no relevance to the book, and kind of ruined the experience for me. I really don't like Steinbeck at all.
 
In high school i was "forced" to read:

Things fall apart
Like water for chocolate
Maggie girl of the streets
Return of the Native
Child of the Owl
A Thousand pieces of gold
Siddhartha
Pride and Prejudice (this was the only one I hated!!!:mad: )
Hamlet (play)
Hard Times
Heart of Darkness
Kindred

....thats all i can remember for now.
 
CattiGuen said:
In high school i was "forced" to read:

Things fall apart
Like water for chocolate
Maggie girl of the streets
Return of the Native
Child of the Owl
A Thousand pieces of gold
Siddhartha
Pride and Prejudice (this was the only one I hated!!!:mad: )
Hamlet (play)
Hard Times
Heart of Darkness
Kindred

....thats all i can remember for now.
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Siddhartha....interesting choice by the teacher/curriculum committee.
 
SFG75 said:
Siddhartha....interesting choice by the teacher/curriculum committee.
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My senior year in high school I dated a boy from a conservative catholic school. He had to read Siddhartha too. I read along with him (for fun) and was rather surprised by the choice.
 
steffee said:
I was forced to read Black Beauty and The Secret Garden, which I hated.

And Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Macbeth, and maybe one or two more, not sure which were school and which were college....
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I read Black Beauty when I was a small child.....loved it, read it over and over ad nauseum! Didn't read The Secret Garden until I was grown. We did have to read some Shakespear, which except for Julius Caesar, I didn't care for at all. Still don't. Heathen that I am! :D :rolleyes:

I made a very forceful point that if they wanted me to read it, I wasn't going to do it. :rolleyes: Didn't do me too much good I can tell ya. :p
 
pontalba said:
I read Black Beauty when I was a small child.....loved it, read it over and over ad nauseum! Didn't read The Secret Garden until I was grown. We did have to read some Shakespear, which except for Julius Caesar, I didn't care for at all. Still don't. Heathen that I am! :D :rolleyes:

I made a very forceful point that if they wanted me to read it, I wasn't going to do it. :rolleyes: Didn't do me too much good I can tell ya. :p
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LOL Pontalba. I didn't think that at the time, I used to like sitting in the class, with each of us having our own copy of the same book, hehe.

But now I think students should not have to read certain books chosen by the teacher! How ridiculous, as in a class of thirty, there will never be one book that everyone enjoys, let alone a dozen or more over the school years. Why not have a list of books that students can choose from, one from each category or whatever, and the teacher then has to read them all. After all, they're the English teacher.

I think Shakespeare's okay. I prefer the histories though, to the tragedies and comedies.
 
steffee said:
How ridiculous, as in a class of thirty, there will never be one book that everyone enjoys, let alone a dozen or more over the school years. Why not have a list of books that students can choose from, one from each category or whatever, and the teacher then has to read them all. After all, they're the English teacher.
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That's a great idea on the surface, but what a whole lot more extra work for the teacher! :eek: There's much more to it than the teachers just having to be familiar with the book - the teachers must compile the notes on the book and lead discussions also, and it seems that it would be a bit difficult if 30 children all needed different notes to take down and then discuss 30 different books.

I don't think that wiether they enjoy it or not is important. The one thing that is important is weither or not it is easy to sit an exam with. As a student, I would much rather read a book in class that I loathed, yet was easy to write an essay on then read a book that I absolutely loved, but would not even know where to begin to write my essay.
 
books:

How many miles to babylon
Of mice and men

I can't remember what else

plays:

death of a salesman
king lear
philidelphia,here i come
Merchants of venice

I love death,phili and merchants everything else was eh
 
I always felt a bit weird at school, because while everyone else was moaning about the books we had to read, I thought it was wonderful - I mean being able to read a book and it was considered school-work! Bliss.

Ones I can remember are not much different from other peoples.

Day of the Triffids
Black Like Me
Grapes of Wrath
Animal Farm
Lord of the Flies

Another one I remember, but have forgotten it's name, was set in King Arthur's time but contained lots of anachronisms - does anyone remember reading a book like that?
 
MonkeyCatcher said:
That's a great idea on the surface, but what a whole lot more extra work for the teacher! :eek: There's much more to it than the teachers just having to be familiar with the book - the teachers must compile the notes on the book and lead discussions also, and it seems that it would be a bit difficult if 30 children all needed different notes to take down and then discuss 30 different books.

I don't think that wiether they enjoy it or not is important. The one thing that is important is weither or not it is easy to sit an exam with. As a student, I would much rather read a book in class that I loathed, yet was easy to write an essay on then read a book that I absolutely loved, but would not even know where to begin to write my essay.
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Yeah, I see your points, but I really think that your experiences of reading books at school determines your enjoyment of them later on. I don't mean, give each of a 30 students a complete open choice of what to read, resulting in 30 different books for which the teacher has to study too, and many of them unsuitable exam books, but maybe have a list, of maybe five in each category, for the students to choose their own.

When I was at school, two set texts were Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird, whilst other groups read different books. Maybe instead of being placed in a class and told which books to read, the students could choose from all the GCSE texts available in a given year, so as to encourage as many students as possible to engage with the books, and subsequently enjoy reading in later years.

And then if the teachers couldn't be required to read all the books available, maybe the classes could be juggled about to accommodate the students reading each book.
 
High School
In the Heat of the Night (yes, it was a book before it was a movie and a TV series)
A Tale of Two Cities
Romeo & Juliet (twice)
Twelfth Night
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
All Quiet on the Western Front
Lord of the Flies
To Kill a Mockingbird

University/College
St. Petersberg
One Day in the Life of Ivan D.
Doctor Zhivago
The Master & Margarita
The Open Road
My Childhood
Titus Andronicus
Shakespeare's Sonnets
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Naked Lunch
Alias Grace
Heart of Darkness
Love's Labour's Lost
King Lear
Love of a Good Woman
Metamorphosis
As I Lay Dying
All Quiet on the Western Front
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Beowulf
Sir Gawin and the Green Knight
The Canterbury Tales (at least a small portion of it)
and many others...

And no I wasn't an English major ;)
 
Here are a few:
Twelve Angry Men- (liked it)
To Kill A Mockingbird- (it was okay) i think EVERYONE has had to read it!!:)
The Taming of the Shrew- (didnt like it)
Romeo and Juliet- (liked it)
Macbeth- (loved it!)
A Separate Peace- (one of my favorite books!!)
Lord of the Flies- (liked it alot)
 
Grew up in Saginaw Michigan during the trickle down Ronny R. years. We never read a single book. We read whatever they could fit into our textbook. To this very day, I hate short stories. Bartleby the Scrivner, The Lottery etc. Since poems are short we had to suffer thru a ton of poetry. I would rather swim a mile in sardine juice than read poetry.
 
You have not suffered until you have been forced to read 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' - by James Joyce!!!!
I have never read anything so boring in all my life. I remember our teacher asking us to read 'the next couple of chapters' for our lesson the next day. Sounds ok doesn't it? Only turned out to be about 120 pages of rambling, train-of thought philosophical tangents about being an irish catholic!!! I have never read so little of a book I've had to write an essay on!!!
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At first I didn't like that book either, but after several discussions in class I ended up enjoying it. It definitely wasn't as bad as Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (my least favorite required read). Despite a slim 150 pages or so, I reached page 40 before giving up. The worst part about it? We could have read Slaughter-House Five instead, but the English Department had a change of heart.
 
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