The best book your school made you read?

[Brutal Peanut]

Unfortunately, my High School English teachers seemed to have some kind of hard-on for poetry. So if we weren't dissecting sentences and covering nouns and verbs for the millionth time, we would read poetry or poetry excerpts. We also had to write and share our poetry and our feelings about poetry for a majority of the year. Problem is, I don't particularly like poetry. I actually looked over class listings and information to make sure I didn't accidentally put myself into a Poetry 101 elective.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, Night by Elie Wiesel, Catcher in The Rye by Holden Caulfield, and Lord of the Flies by William Golding, are the only four books I can actually remember being assigned to us. A lot of the books mentioned by other Escapists, I had to find and read after I was already out of High School, which is a shame.

I'd say I most enjoyed reading Night and Lord of the Flies.

 

[Jason Rayes]

The Hobbit was my fave, we read it in grade 6 and I have that to thank for showing me that reading could actually be fun, rather than just something I did for an English class.

 

[Yal]

Definitely Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, following several generations of one family in a South American town that's just a few degrees askew from reality. It's a crazy, beautiful book, and I should really go read it again.

Honorable mention to the play Equus, which was just an insane thing to slip into a public high school curriculum. Teenage sexual and religious confusion co-mingled and wrapped around stable full of horses. This is not a coming-of-age tale, it doesn't end well for anybody.

 

[Lancer873]

Well there's Huckleberry Finn, which was brilliant in the fact that it didn't really try to be pretentious or anything yet had more examination of humanity than half of the "deepest" books out there. Rather than relying on symbolism it went with satire, and I quite enjoy that. It was blunt and to the point but it still made you think.

On the opposite end, I loved Lord of the Flies. Some of the symbolism-analysis can get a bit weird but the primary message is still just illustrated so beautifully and perfectly. I still quote the "maybe it's only us" line now and then.

 

[Saladfork]

Well, there were a few:

Heart of Darkness (We also watched Apocalypse Now)
The Great Gatsby
The Wars

 

[dfphetteplace]

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. It introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut in high school, when I needed to wisdom of that author most. If you have not read any of his work, do yourself a favor and do so.

 

[Tropicaz]

I remember at about 11 we read Holes. That's a great book.
For GCSE we read to Kill a Mockingbird for English and Animal Farm for Drama, and they were both class,so theyd probably be the best 3

 

[the doom cannon]

Let's see. I always and still do say that, for the most part, any book that you are required to read will be a bad experience and thus seem "bad." But I have been proven wrong on a few occasions. George Orwell's 1984, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird are the ones from middle school. In high school I remember reading some graphic novel in an american literature class that was really interesting, but I can't for the life of me remember the title or author. Last year in college for a class I read Spiderman Blue, a Superman, a couple Batmans, a Birds of Prey, and several other comics. Best class ever

 

[Jaeke]

So far my favorite has been "Of Mice and Men".
Some Honerable Mentions: "Farenheit 451", "Anthem", and "Alas, Babylon".

We're about to read Count of Monte Cristo though, and I've been told it's quite good.


My least favorite: "A Seperate Peace".
What a boring piece of shite.

 

[omega 616]

We were only made to read one book and it was more of a read it out loud than write a report on it.

It was a book called "rhino boy", it was about a teen who grew a rhino horn out of the middle of his forehead... Not exactly a masterpiece of writing by any stretch.

Am I the winner of the worst book?

 

[Mr.Cynic88]

In one of my gen-ed English classes, I took a course that was all about dystopian fiction. During the class I had to read the book "We," which I found to be an amazingly enjoyable novel, and also was clearly quite influential to Orwell's 1984 which was written a few decades later.

 

[shrimpcel]

Probably Les Trois Mousquetaires. I should have read that book much much earlier, when I was eight, not eighteen.

 

[axil56]

I don't take English anymore but one of my more high-class associates had their coursework on 50 Shades of Grey so there's that. Made for some pretty interesting free periods though

 

[doomspore98]

Another one for "to kill a mockingbird" and "animal farm". Those books were just so perfect, they seem so timeless.

 

[AvsJoe]

Grade School: The Giver by Lois Lowry. Wasn't my favourite at the time but it has stuck with me all these years and I still find myself recalling scenes from the book even today. Just last week I remembered the conversation Jonas? Jason? Jessie? whatever-the-hell-his-name-was had with the titular Giver regarding "seeing beyond" and how he was able to see the colour red when most everyone else only had monochrome vision.
Honourable Mention: Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.

High School: Toss-up between We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and what I think was Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl. The former, like The Giver, I didn't much enjoy while reading it but it has haunted me for years since, while the latter I immensely enjoyed at the time as well as now. Problem is I'm not sure whether it was Dahl's short story or a knock-off, though I have little reason to suspect the latter.
Honourable Mention: Inherit the Wind by Robert E. Lee (not the confederate commander, the other one).
Dishonourable Mention: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Tom Hardy (not the man who played Bane, the other one).

 

[Hollock]

I really liked 1984.

 

[surg3n]

Of Mice and Men, was pretty good by my schools standards - High School English class was pretty miserable.

I did do a book report on The Hobbit though.

 

[The Goat Tsar]

In my junior year of high school, I was in AP Literature, and I had to read Doctor Zhivago, Doll's House, Antigone, and several other books and plays I can't remember. I hated it so much it turned me off casual reading altogether.

For my senior year, I dropped down to regular literature. That year I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Slaughterhouse-Five. I loved both of them, with Slaughterhouse-Five being the favorite book I've ever read. If I hadn't dropped down to regular literature I wouldn't have read those books and I probably would've given up reading as a hobby.

 

[Duskwaith]

The Outsider by Albert Camus. Book changed my whole view on life rather profoundly and was simply a masterpiece. My teacher was fairly awesome as well.

I also done King Lear with an edition of Burial at Thebes by Seamus Heaney. Burial was good but King Lear was unbelievably good, the same teacher had done her Phd in Shakespearean studies so it was some high quality and very awesome reading

 

[hoboman29]

A Cather in the Rye is mine. If you had told me before reading this that someone could make an interesting story about what someone does for two days to avoid his parents I would have laughed at you. I think the reason I really love it is because it's such a down to Earth story: no goals, no forced lessons, and it is completely serious about it's plot revolving around the relatively mundane.