I don't really remember my grade school ones. They were probably stupid anyways with endings like "And it was the best pie her grandmother ever made..." In senior year we had to read alot of Oprah's recommended reading list books
Night by Elie Wiesel......not bad.
and some other Oprah nominated Holocaust book that I didn't read.

Uh..oh yeah grade 11 we had a senile old man, who I'm sure got high every lunch hour he was 20 min late coming back from....shades on of course. So we really didn't do anything. Wait...read one book The Republic of Nothing...er lame.

And that's all I remember, except from when I was little, Boris Bad Enough. Sickest. Book. EVER!

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My teacher in 6th grade strongly recommended we chose Night as our free-choice book, so I did. Depressing, but amazing in the fact it's non-fiction. If you ever go to Auschwitz yourself it feels totally weird, as it's in color and empty. I felt like I expected to feel the ghosts of thousands or something, you know?

Yeah because of that book I pretty much have a mental image of Auschwitz as being some sort of crazy evil building, full of black nothingness that devours souls. Cool that you got to see something so historic and solemn.


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You put the feeling much better into words than I did.

I will now grace you with a list of everything I was required to read in high school. =)
It's not very much and half the list I read during my senior year. I feel a bit sad for my education.
Great Expectations
Journey Home by Yoshiko Uchida
The Iliad and the Odyssey
To Kill a Mockingbird
All Quiet on the Western Front
Death of a Salesman- I never liked this mostly because I had to read and analyze it many times for different classes. I also had to watch a terrible reenactment done by some other students.
The Scarlet Letter- In general I'm not fond of Hawthorne, but I could never take this book seriously. Let's just say I was in a class of all guys and they gave me a completely different perspective of it.
Tortilla Flat
The Grapes of Wrath
Cannery Row-my favorite of the Steinbeck novels I've read.
Growing Up-an autobiography by Russel Baker
Canterbury Tales
The Dubliners
Tess of the D'ubervilles
A Separate Peace
A Lesson Before Dying
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Awakening
Antigone and Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
...and of course several works of Shakespeare


Last edited by waftingwish at 10:09 pm, Aug 11 2010

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Looking for... shoujo with a canned peach confession. Don’t English me I’m panic.

HS and AP english feels like so long ago. I'm surprised no one mentioned reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or Les Miserables unless I missed it.

From what I remember I also liked Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Letter, The Picture of Dorian Gray, How Green Was My Valley

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"ありがとう...だ いすき...DAISY" ♥

Well, here are some of the ones that I had to read in my school. The titles are not in any particular order or anything and these are only a few examples of what I have read for school.

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (it was because the movie was coming out so we read that one and took a field trip to the movie theatre afterwards lol.)
The Giver by Lois Lowry (I actually liked this one)
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read
Animal Farm by George Orwell ( I absolutely loved this one)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (well part of it anyways)

You just reminded me that we did the same! We had our field trip coincidentally land on pajama day, but unfortunately they moved pajama day because of this. Way to kill the fun...

Back in high school I always took a lit-heavy schedule... I had a number of books every year (read; upwards of 20),

I can't say I remember which titles I read for school and which I read for personal enjoyment either- for instance, I'm fairly certain that All the King's Men was in the school curriculum, but I could be totally wrong about that.

My personal favorite that I read for a class was probably One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I would've read that one eventually anyway (I have a bit of a thing for magical realism).

The only book choice that ever irritated me, my personal tastes aside, was when the teacher tried to pass off Herman Hesse's Siddhartha as Indian lit in a world lit class. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love Steppenwolf, but Hesse is German. You can't do a unit on Indian lit without including any Indian lit. That's just pathetic.

I'm effectively a Japanese lit minor, so I have a pretty big list from college as well, but they're mostly obscure to the Western reader.

All that said, there are so many decent books in the world that it's rare that the school system will choose one incorrectly. As Calvino puts it (well, he manages about 15 separate definitions in one of his essays), a classic is the sort of book which has never quite finished saying what it has to say. The stories survive the test of time precisely because there is something urgent and compelling within them, precisely because there is something deeper at the source. Discussions about the real world practicality of reading deeply into statements aside, that's what literary analysis is all about.

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Reviews of my Work:
You are kind of boring - Blackorion
Congratulations! Ur an asshole! - tokyo_homi
Your awesome!!! - Cherelle_Ashley
NightSwan also said that she wanted to peg me, once, but I'm not sure whether to take that as a compliment or a threat...

Do people not have read The Catcher in the Rye anymore? It was one of my personal favorites that I had to read for class. I am currently reading/annotating Wuthering Heights. Heard it was good but unfortunately its due in two hours so I'm just skim reading it. I'll probably go back and read it tomorrow.

Now that someone mentioned it, I had to read Antigone, too, only that it was the Spanish version called Antigona Perez. It is quite different...

Also, to add to my previous list, in sixth grade I had to read Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. I remmember thinking how long it was back then, and now looking at how short it really is, it's funny.

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"I am a colorful fantasy born on dark nights; a delusion of black and bottomless minds; a thought that dies in the morning reborn by moonlight. What am I?"
- A Night of a Thousand Dreams

I have to agree, I actually enjoyed the 6 chapters so much that I went online to read the whole book, and it sooo worth it! You have to love Darcy!!

No, no, Salinger's still big. One of the four most important, generally, and I'd agree that it's well deserved, especially since Catcher in the Rye is one of those books where you really need to be in a particular moment of your life to properly "get" it, and for most people that moment comes during high school.

But, it also does create a lot of polarizing reactions... so... I'm not surprised that it hasn't turned up that much.

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Reviews of my Work:
You are kind of boring - Blackorion
Congratulations! Ur an asshole! - tokyo_homi
Your awesome!!! - Cherelle_Ashley
NightSwan also said that she wanted to peg me, once, but I'm not sure whether to take that as a compliment or a threat...

I read The Lord of Flies a year ago or so (and yet it was seriously scary by the end; definitely better than any of the films) and am happy I did it now. I'm definite we'd be all stuffed with war relation at school. Though we had relatively good literature teachers (one of them actually told us about ...ahem Rimbaud and Verlaine). But in general the class was weak and liking what you have to read was a no. Looking back at it now there was a lot of somewhat useless thick books. I was so proud to finish Anna Karenina and now I don't remember a thing exept it was all about a confused chic.


I highly recommend you to read Hiromi Goto - The Chorus of Mushrooms (in case you don't know it).

Well in my senior year we read Beowulf, Grendel, Brave New World, Jane Eyre, and Frankenstein
Out of them I disliked Brave New World, and Frankenstein(Thematically it was good. I like the plot too, but Mary Shelly just dragged on and on). I read Grendel in whole in one sitting and remember disliking it, but I mean I read it in one sitting. I liked Beowulf. And I liked Jane Eyre and stayed up until 4AM finishing it the night it was handed out to us but don't tell anyone they'd think I was gay.

I remember I missed the day when we broke up into groups in elementary school and I ended up in a group with a bunch of girls reading Ella Enchanted... I finished that in one night too... Hmm... Anyways quite.

I remember when we read Animal Farm in middle school. It was boring since I'd of course already seen the film version.

And I remember my number one favorite thing I read for school was classic western Flint. That wasn't really required though. Everyone had to do a report on a book of their choice.

I live in the city so as far as reading full novels went it was mostly non-required. I personally read a lot.