I don't have any required reading anymore, but these were my prescribed texts in high school (chronologically from year 7. Also, I skipped a year):
- The Taming Of The Shrew
- Mister Monday by Garth Nix
- The Princess Bride by William Goldman
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Billy Elliot
- The Crucible by Arthur Miller
- Macbeth
- The Stolen Children (anthology)
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. And we watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer for...some reason.
- Frontline
- Julius Caesar
- My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
- "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night".
- Othello
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- Swimming Upstream
- V for Vendetta (film)
- 1984 by George Orwell
- A Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Selected poems by Emily Dickenson
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Blade Runner
- The Justice Game by Geoffrey Robertson
- Hamlet
- The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carre
- Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett
- Ariel poems by Sylvia Plath
That's what I can remember. Even when the course was awful, the texts themselves were good to wonderful - with the exception of My Brilliant Career which was horrid. We also got to choose some texts ourselces to supplement the prescribed texts.
"Doctor Who means never having to say you're kidding." - BocajI think the only things we read in 3 years of HS English were a few scattered things:
- English 1 had The Iliad (or the Odyssey, I forget which), Romeo & Juliet and a few short stories from a book.
- I tried to comp out of English 2 by taking a summer class where I had to read Gone with the Wind and Grapes of Wrath, both of which I OUTRIGHT HATED. Ended up half-assing the comp.
- English 2 had some newspaper serial story about a Weimaraner called Field of the Dogs. Otherwise, I think we did a couple poems and that was it.
- English 3 had Scarlet Letter and I don't remember anything else. By this point, I'd also started reading Harry Potter of my own volition.
I don't know why my 3 years of English were so devoid of reading.
edited 19th Apr '12 9:52:02 PM by Twentington
Currently reading Death Of A Salesman. During the past school year I've read Lost Horizon, Brave New World, Lord Of The Flies, Fahrenheit 451 and Oedipus The King.
edited 21st Apr '12 10:55:21 PM by Mort08
Looking for some stories?Reading for college —
(17th century literature)
- La Princesse de Clèves (Mme de Lafayette)
- Phèdre (Racine)
- Le Cid (Corneille)
- Lettres portugaises (Guilleragues)
- Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Molière)
(19th-20th century lit)
- Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe (3 chapters, not the entire thing) (Chateaubriand)
- Spirite (Th. Gautier)
- Une Histoire sans nom (Barbey d'Aurevilly)
- La reine morte (Montherlant)
You know what the strangest thing is? All those 17th century books are much less dated than the more recent ones (with the exception of Chateaubriand.) They seem much more contemporary, with less Values Dissonance. Then again, the 17th century was the Golden Age of French culture...
edited 24th Apr '12 3:55:23 PM by Fresison
The most interesting book we read as a whole (and the only one I remember the title and author of) was Der Schimmelreiter
by Theodor Storm
. And even that one was boring as hell.
However, we also read Morton Rhue's The Wave, but I don't remember whether we finished it or not (we also saw a movie about it, not the German one, which didn't even existed back then, so we did finish the story itself, at least). If we, then that was the most (and the only actually) interesting one.
People aren't as awful as the internet makes them out to be.For Western Humanities II I was assigned these. Can't say I read them all.
- Don Quixote- Miguel de Cervantes (Edith Grossman translation)
- Second Treatise of Government- John Locke
- Candide
- American History Documents- Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Iroquois Constitution, Various speeches
- Faust: A Tragedy- Goethe (both parts)
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Marx Selections
- Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed- Philip Hallie
- In the Time of the Butterflies- Julia Alvarez
For Western Humanities I it was these-
- The Holy Bible- Selections
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- The Oresteia- Aeschylus
- Five Dialogues- Plato
- Poetics, The Nichomachean Ethics- Aristotle
- On Justice Power and Human Nature: Selections from the History of the Peloponnesian War- Thucydides
- The Satires of Juvenal
- The Consolation of Philosophy- Boethius
- Utopia- Thomas More
- The Tempest- Shakespeare
- A Tempest- Aime Cesaire
edited 25th Apr '12 7:23:31 AM by Rhea
9th grade:
- A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest Gaines
- Romeo And Juliet
- A bunch of short stories
10th grade:
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Lord of the Flies
- Life of Pi
- A Tale of Two Cities
- ''The Kite Runner
11th grade:
- The Scarlet Letter
- The Awakening
- As I Lay Dying
- Native Son
- 1984
Fresison and Rhea both have amazing reading lists. Seriously.
I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.Let's see:
9th:
10th:
- Hamlet
- Gulliver's Travels
- Frankenstein
- Animal Farm
edited 29th Apr '12 8:00:39 PM by UmLovely
RISEGrade 9:
- Romeo And Juliet (William Shakespeare)
- To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
- Deadline (Chris Crutcher)
- Nessy Names et la malédiction du temps (Michèle Gavazzi)
- Zone (Marcel Dubé)
- Short stories and poems; I don't remember all of them
Grade 10:
- Twelfth Night (William Shakespeare)
- Lord Of The Flies (William Golding)
- A Study In Emerald/A Study In Scarlet (Neil Gaiman/Arthur Conan Doyle)
- Oscar et la dame rose (Eric Emmanuel-Schmidt)
- Salut et liberté (Fred Vargas)
- The Lottery and other short stories; parts of The Illiad and other poems
Grade 11:
- Macbeth (William Shakespeare)
- The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
- Happiness (Will Ferguson)
- Le voyageur sans bagage (Jean Anouilh)
- Là où la mer commence (Dominique Demers)
- A few other short stories and poems
edited 29th Apr '12 2:01:44 PM by czhang
I have read, sorted by language, spread over two years,
for english class:
- the secret agent (don't remember the writer) BORING!
- a clockwork orange (anthony burgess) Kind of cool, but not an easy or pleasant read.)
- the lord of the rings (Tolkien) awesome that that is even allowed.
for dutch class:
- mariken van nieuwmeghen (medieval, unknown author)okay.
- lucifer (rennaissance, Vondel)okay, better than expected)
- de schaapherder (romantic period, Oltmans)nice story, but to much Purple Prose.
- kobus en agnietje (enlightment, don't remember the writer) okay, but too simple.
- de aanslag (Mulish) okay.
- dingetje (Koch) funny!
- het woeden der gehele wereld ('t Hart) nice, but very far-fetched.
- karakter (Borderwijk) I liked it. everybody hates it, but I liked it.
for german class:
- die dreigroschenoper (brecht)deus ex machina ruined the story.
- meine freie deutsche jugend (Rush) funny!
- der schimmelreiter (Storm)
- and one book of wich I don't remember the title. that must have made a BIG impression.
overall, I liked most of the books that I had to read. what helps is that only the german 'Brecht' book was the only book I couldn't choose from a long list.
edited 22nd Jun '12 1:36:02 PM by skarl
I remember books all the way back from when I was in grade 4:
4th Grade:
- How to Eat Fried Worms
5th Grade:
- Hatchet
6th Grade:
- Where the Red Fern Grows
- Hatchet (Again!)
7th Grade:
- Something For Joey
- The Outsiders
- Voyage of the Frog
8th Grade:
- The Westing Game
- The Pigman
- Flowers for Algernon**
- Invitation to the Game**
Freshman year:
- Romeo and Juliet
- The Odyssey (condensed version)
- The Cask of Amontillado
- Of Mice and Men
- The Fall of the House of Usher**
- Pit and the Pendulum
- The Necklace (short story unit)
- The Most Dangerous Game (short story unit)
- To Build a Fire (short story unit)
The ** represents the fact there was more than one book to read. The 2 in 8th grade were options for a reading competition (the others being Summer of My German Soldier and Holes, which I had already read), and the two for freshman were for an Edgar Allan Poe unit (The Cask of Amontillado was required, and we had to choose one other. I'm a fast reader, so I was able to finish 2)
I believe this year we have to read The Mask of Red Death, Red Badge of Courage, the Crucible, and Huckleberry Finn, if not more.
I don’t even know anymore.

The books read for my college english class are:
Tuesdays with Morrie Death Of a Salesman
(can't remember the rest)
"I don't give a rat's ass about going to hell. I guess it's because I feel like I'm already there." -Mugen