Books You Had To Read At School

The books I enjoyed most were Anna Karenin (which I wuvved b/c it was high class Mills and Boon and therefore acceptable for Boy Reading) and Bleak House. Also The Castle Of Otranto with terrific opening involving man being crushed by spontaneously-appearing giant black helmet. Worst was Frankenstein.

Far From The Madding Crowd: I will no longer read any Hardy as this dull dull dull.

King Lear: We got told to read it in the xmas holidays of the L6, of course no one bothered (or at least to read it properly properly and not just flicking through), spent two weeks on it all over the place and were expected to write essays on it. Bugger me!

Women In Love: Two weeks to read what must be the densest and dullest book ever written (it has no plot. at all. it's turgid, pretentious garbage.) Then write a coursework essay on it which with my pace of reading I had approx. 2 days to do (worse because I couldn't remember much about the piece of shite I was meant to be writing about).

Enjoyed A Room With A View though...

When I arrived at Shrewsbury, english teach asked us to list all books we cd remember writing. An hour later mark s is still writing, all other pens now still (actually this = not quite true, a coupla others were major bworms also). Then begins struggle: he to convert me to grown-up reading, mt to prove to him that kidZoR lit = bettah. He loved A.Garner's Red Shift, which he had not heard of. He tried me on THE CRUEL SEA. Meh. Cept for a scene where a floating ring of skeletons in life-jackets is discovered c, all still holding hands. And the public schooly nerd who has first evere sex w.pro before goes to sea, gets instant gonorrhea, tells no one, and when ship is torpedoed, prefers to lket himself drown, as freeezing water eases the itching and death the shame. Yes yes but where are the galactic fleetz, magic portals or MOOMINS!

Wish I appreciated this at the time. Don't think I understood much of what i read although it did mean that i went back after i left school and reread them. Most notably Flann O'Brien The Third Policeman which is a wonderful and deeply strange book. Also Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig which ruffled my hair as it went over my head. So I was turned on to things rather than turned off.

Once though, tried to get a book out of the library and was told couldn't get a particular book out because it had the wrong coloured sticker on it and was therefore too advanced for me. What a great librarian she was.

This summer I had to read Ragtime and write a paper for it before going back to school. Since the teacher hasn't had a chance to ruin it yet and it's a good book really, I enjoyed it.

Though I'll never forget my english prof who giggled endlessly while reading passages from Shakespear. He had to stop and catch his breath he would start laughing too hard for an 70 year old. My section got his only ever treatment of a post modern novel, which was amusing in its disection.

My tenth grade teacher put me on an independent study project so I unsurprisingly wrote this big ol' thing about Tolkien. My eleventh grade teacher did something similar but assigned the reading -- _Gravity's Rainbow_. Now them's a way to get your head scrambled in the late Reagan daze. 12th grade English was an odd year, but I did end up reading _Death of a Salesman_. Lame. Willy Loman = unsympathetic twit. Beyond that, I forget what the hell we read.

One book it did turn me on to: Orwell's COMING UP FOR AIR.

BUT i firmly believe it's all to do with the type of book you read. for example, Hardy = utter turn off at GCSE level. and consequently, utter turn off at most other levels as well. but i was given the chance to discover Keats for myself at the age of 16, which has proved to be a major influence on just about everything i've ever read since, from Chaucer to David Foster Wallace. and Shakespeare, whho is probably both unfashionable and english-grad-geeky to boot, but whose work i just fucking love. Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet are just brilliant, and i studied those from i guess the ages of 13- 15. maybe i just had a teacher who clearly loved literature as well. the only drawback is, i don't think i'm really good at anything apart from criticism of classic, or "modern classic" (god how i hate that term) literature. i am certainly unemployable for that very reason.

having Arts rather than Sciences as your speciality suXor.

And Hardy is God.

Similar experience with The Old Man and the Sea. Also, getting into groups to discuss the symbolism in the title Lord of the Flies. My 9th grade English teacher was also the cheerleading 'coach'. Old Man and the Sea was with a different teacher though; secondary(?) role - administrator/counselor.

Worst: Dune, 1984, The Catcher in the Rye

Woolf done zero justice by closet-dyke AP English teacher. And have HATED Hemingway to this very day.

Any particular reason you're not a Steinbeck fan, Anthony? He's actually not a total favorite of mine either, but I don't loathe him.

These are just my opinons , i may be incorrect.

Grade 7
Where the Red Fern Grows
Locked in Time

Grade 8
Shadow in Hawthorn Bay
Anne of Green Gables
Anne Frank Remembered

Grade 9
The Wild Children
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Grade 10
A Doll's House
The Chrysalids
Romeo and Juliet

Grade 11
The Glass Menagerie
Brave New World
Macbeth

Grade 12
Death of a Salesman
Wuthering Heights
Hamlet

"novel boarding school boy dies" tells me that in sophomore English we read A Separate Peace

Grade 7
Where the Red Fern Grows
Locked in Time

We did Red Fern in grade 5 in my school (Alberta), I think

Locked in Time, though - I've been trying to remember the name of this stupid book for ages, also read in grade 7 - kept trying to look up 'lost' instead of locked and getting no relevant results. Thanks for this!

Definitely Johnny Tremain in 8th grade

I can't remember if we read Where The Red Fern Grows for school or if I traumatized myself.

We read a lot of short stories in junior high and high school, most of which I don't remember now

Grade 5
Marty Hollitt and the Amazing Game Machine
Where the Red Fern Grows

Grade 6
The Giver

Grade 7
Locked in Time

Grade 8
The Diary of Anne Frank

Grade 9
The Outsiders
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Grade 10
Macbeth
Lord of the Flies
Flowers for Algernon (short story)
The Cask of Amontillado

Grade 11
Hamlet
Pride and Prejudice (which I did not actually read, because we also watched the film in class and I was not enjoying the book)
Canterbury Tales
The Pigman

Grade 12
King Lear
The Odyssey
Beowulf

memories getting triggered -

7th grade - The Diary of Anne Frank, memorable because an evangelical named Travis threw an absolute fit about having to read it because there's like one sentence about same-sex attraction?

8th grade - Flowers For Algernon + '60s movie adaptation

Senior year - parts of Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost + a week on 17th century poetry

At my school, every year we read a Shakespeare, a compulsory novel, and then a novel one could pick (from a list of approved choices).

I don't remember which Shakespeares were assigned (def Night's Dream, R&J and Macbeth). Iirc the five novels were Catcher, LotF, Gatsby and Mockingbird-- and "A Druid's Tune", because head of our English department was a big fantasy nut. One of the possible elective novels was "Eye Of The World" (lol), but I'm grateful to her for introducing me to "Canticle For Leibowitz", which remains a formative novel for me

I did a book report for Watership Down in 8th grade and called it the best novel ever written lol

speaking of which, I kinda remember Animal Farm being assigned but I can't remember what year, maybe in high school

Incredible memory skills here. I remember reading Wuthering Heights and our cute assistant teacher brought in the Kate Bush song on a cassette one day and played it on a boom box, writing the lyrics out on the board, to much stifled amusement. However I, and perhaps, as I liked to think, I alone appreciated what she had done for the class, and I hoped that she would take notice of this fact, and bestow a glance on me, because any token of her gratitude, no matter how trivial, seemed to be quite important to me then

year 7
Fire In The Stone
Bridge to Terabithia?
Romeo & Juliet?

year 8
Sun on the Stubble
Macbeth

Year 9
Displaced Person*
Julius Caesar
The Outsiders

Year 10
The Chosen

Year 11
The Great Gatsby

Year 12
Jane Eyre

*Displaced Person was a terrible novel by a local author from our town, about a teenage boy who is ignored & “disappears” into a limbo state. SO BAD
That year they decided to do away w To Kill A Mockingbird in favor of local authors. We all hated it, our teacher hated it, so our classes on it were spent discussing at length why it was so stupid

i know we read way more but those were the ones i remember

6th grade was my one year in Jesus school - I remember one book involving a Jewish boy rebelling against the Romans, it was either simultaneous to the Jesus story or a Maccabees story? and also one about a boy whose plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness and he has to survive alone for a year until he's rescued.

3rd grade - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Price

God I fuckin love Homer Price

the Franz Kafka of Winesburg, Ohio

Aged 12-15

Animal Farm
Merchant Of Venice
Lord Of The Flies
To Kill A Mockingbird

15-18

The Chocolate War
Hamlet
Catcher In The Rye
An Evil Cradling (?!?)
Juno And The Paycock

Poetry 12-18 (can't remember all of this but certain of these)

Seamus Heaney
Philip Larkin
Eavan Boland
Emily Dickinson
Elizabeth Bishop
Patrick Kavanagh
Yeats
Wilfred Owen
Siegfried Sassoon
Virgil/Catullus/Ovid, lol Latin

Othello, Romeo & Juliet, Far From The Madding Crowd, Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, The Crucible, Lysistrata

Secondary:

Jamaica Inn
I Am David
(then NOTHING as was not entered into English Lit GCSE, fucking shit school)

Taking English Lit GCSE at 6th Form:

Of Mice & Men
Collected Maupassant short stories
Also there was an anthology with a load of different things, think it was set by the exam board.

A-level English Lit (looking back these were some odd choices)

Thomas Hardy Poems
William Golding - The Spire
Joseph Conrad - The N*gger of the "Narcissus"
Peter Shaffer - Equus
Shakespeare - The Tempest
Shakespeare - The Taming of The Shrew

I can't remember with nearly the precision of many of you, but lots here is familiar - Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, The Outsiders, Macbeth (the only Shakespeare we read?), To Kill a Mockingbird, The Machine Gunners. I also remember The Crucible, and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. An odd one was Willy Russell's Our Day Out. An even odder one was Frankenstein but as a play rather than a novel.

Our Day Out was unmemorable apart from reading it aloud giving us the unprecedented thrill of one classmate getting to say 'dickhead'.

some of the choices are mystifying. why tf would you make a load of 13-year-olds do merchant of venice instead of something like macbeth?

we did of mice and men also, aged about 13, i'd forgotten about that.

for some reason i now remember when we did lord of the flies, our usual english teacher was off sick for a while, and this substitute teacher came in, a very stern very british man in his seventies, grey hair, black-rimmed spectacles, ww2 accent, just felt unbelievably on the nose for him reading lord of the flies aloud in class. we christened him 'cecil'.

i can still hear him saying 'i've got the conch' in a sort of 10% effort at acting the role of a petulant 1940s british child

Oh wow, yes: Roll of Thunder, Hear Mr Cry. Had totally forgotten about that. Did that around 12/13. Only book we did by someone who wasn't white I think

i think my brother did that, the name definitely brought me back to seeing it around the house.

p cool that maupassant short stories were on the syllabus for 6th form in the uk. i still find it infuriating/weird that for my final irish school exams we did an autobiographical novel by brian keenan rather than a piece of fiction. feels heinous, in ireland, or anywhere.

Me not Mr lol

My not Me, Jesus I'm tired

I can try for placement in school grades.

5th grade
Animal Farm

6th grade:
A Door in the Wall

7th
Johnny Tremaine

8th
Courtship of Miles Standish

9th
Julius Caesar
The Prince
Gilgamesh

10th
Billy Budd
Dickinson
Poe, I think
Emerson
Transcendentalism, Imagism

11th
The Sun Also Rises
The Awakening
The Turn of the Screw
Whitman?
Plath

12th was Existentialism-heavy
A Portrait of the Artist
Anna Karenina
The Stranger
Waiting for Godot
Gertrude Stein?

After that I was in college majoring in English, so read everything I had missed the first time.

Hence my confusion at my children's school where you get to 17 and the first book is Frankenstein.

For my A Level they made me read Joseph Andrews and A Portrait of the Artist and I'm so glad they did

I don't really remember having to read that many compared to other people.

secondary school -
1st year - ??? maybe nothing ???
2nd year - Cider With Rosie
3rd year - Z For Zachariah, The Chrysalids
4th year - An Inspector Calls
5th year - Of Mice And Men, Hamlet

have no memory of anything else. although I had the "good" English teacher in the 3rd year which might explain the 2 books in a year, and the shit English teacher that quit/got fired after 2 years for 4th/5th year, she couldn't control the class at all so it was pretty much chaos

O Level I remember There Is a Happy Land that was formative too I guess

I fell out with an English teacher for dissing Cider, she was right and I was a dick

the Maupassant short stories were specially picked by my GCSE English Lit teacher, an old lady with some of the most wildly progressive ideas about education I've ever seen. Everything she picked for us was about sex, drugs & death, especially the Maupassant, she made sure to focus especially on the later syphilitic fever dream stories, not on The Necklace or w/e. Such a contrast to my experience at secondary school.

I think I did all of these in high school English.

Shakespeares: Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet
Novels, etc.: The Catcher in the Rye, Animal Farm, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Stone Angel, Lord of the Flies, 1984, Death of a Salesman, The Great Gatsby, Fifth Business
OAC (5th year) independent study: Sartre's Nausea, Camus's The Outsider

I don't remember a single thing I read (or didn't read) in French class.

It's only hit me in recent years how dumb it is that my Portuguese lit curriculum in high school included zero Brazilian authors and zero authors from the former colonies. Even the culturally chauvinistic UK includes other anglo authors. I hope they've changed that back home.

We did Look Back In Anger in English class and a Christiane Rochefort book I've never heard mentioned anywhere else ever for French.

For my A Level they made me read Joseph Andrews and A Portrait of the Artist and I'm so glad they did

my school is the school in portrait of an artist but we still didn't find a place for it in the six years i spent there.

LG did you ever break your glasses y/n

never had any!

@ jmm thank you for reminded me that I also read Fifth Business in hs. Garp, too!

I wrote an essay on tragicomedy in Garp for my A-level English independent project and I don't think I could face reading it now.

I answered the TS Eliot question on my A Level which we hadn't done in class but I was deep into him at the time and had no love for Pope back then which we had studied but again, I was too much of a moody teen to get it

favorite book I had to read in school was Frank Norris’ McTeague

4th grade - Wrinkle in Time (other option was Where the Red Fern Grows)
5th grade - don’t remember
6th grade - don’t remember maybe Grapes of Wrath?
7th grade - i think we had drugs are bad class instead of english?
8th grade - To Kill a Mockingbird, A Day No Pigs Would Die (not googling), Flowers for Algernon
9th grade - Romeo & Juliet, Great Expectations (abridged), other abridged things in a big textbook including Billy Budd
10th grade - Julius Caesar, T.S. Eliot poems, Candide, Don Quixote, a Garcia Marquez I forget the title of, Heart of Darkness
11th grade - Scarlet Letter, The Assistant (?), Great Gatsby, a Hemingway one that our teacher disliked because she thought Hemingway was an overrated misogynist, East of Eden, The Color Purple, another Hawthorne one set in a utopian community that was actually really good but I forgot the title
12th grade - Frankenstein, Silas Marner, a Thomas Hardy that I forget, more Shakespeare, Tale of Two Cities (i think)

Oops I forgot to learn that drugs are bad

We had no choice … thanks to Reagan.

i transferred to a different school in the seventh grade so had to read To Kill a Mockingbird twice 😫

OH MY GOD the zaniest one was this book we read in my 6th grade reading class ... about a teenage girl living in the middle ages who uses goofy medieval 'profanity' like "corpus bones" and "god's thumbs" and pranks all her marital suitors.

Googled "corpus bones book" and found it instantly, it is 'Catherine, Called Birdy'

we had separate reading and English classes that year for some reason, we read Mockingbird in English that year

i don't remember many but the o'level set texts my year were

1984 (this was in 1984)
Far from the Madding Crowd
Macbeth

and we had read The Return of the Native previously. and local lad's Cider with Rosie.

the CSE group did Kes and had a falconer visit one day

I remember

a garbage novel called My Name is Davy and I'm an Alcoholic, which I'm pretty sure was written for school classes only
Macbeth
The Outsiders
Flowers for Algernon
Guns of Navarone
To Kill a Mockingbird
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The Crucible

usually there was one novel that everyone had to read and then I had to do book reports on a few books from a big list.