Books you had to read... that you actually found interesting?

The Awakening, definitely! Thought a book about a rich woman having affairs and questioning her marriage in her beautiful vacation home would be...boring, but I connected strongly with the book. In fact, I was one of maybe two people in the class who loved it.

Also really enjoyed The Scarlet Letter in the same course, for most of the same reasons.

Most books I read for an English class and enjoyed, I probably would have read anyway (As I Lay Dying, Death of a Salesman, etc.)

The Giver was my favorite, and I also felt that the movie did it justice despite some differences.

Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men for me. Quite the revelation. Address Unknown by Kressmann Taylor is another favorite I was forced to read.

I read Stephen King's The Talisman as a kid (a 12 year old kid) and it blew my mind that books could be this weird and intense. I stopped wanting to read kid lit at that point and started devouring harder things. Then The Color Purple taught me lesbians exist...and that I could potentially be one .

As far as this year, Jonathan Strange And Mr. Norrel was pretty cool. It's basically like a charlotte bronte novel or something but about magic-doing British gentlemen.

edited 9th Apr '15 10:28:22 AM by Nanoka

I've had a few teachers who ruined books I later came to like. Namely, The Hobbit. Wow the teacher made that book a dull-ass slog. Before that, I was pricklier as a kiddo, so I promptly decided I hated Maniac Magee when the teacher said "You all are so lucky to read a writer as good as this." Referencing that bit about the months April and May fighting over the weather.

But on a nicer note, I loved Dealing with Dragons. It introduced me to modern fantasy. Other nice reads were Holes, The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, and (oddly) The Scarlet Letter. For the latter, what helped was an awesome teacher who considered Dimmsdale a ridiculous drama llama and pointed out the weird bits.

edited 10th Apr '15 10:20:43 PM by Phoenixflame

Count me in for The Giver. I read in the 6th grade, and I think it may have had a strong influence on my love of science fiction. The Great Gatsby is also excellent, but it's cultural and political significance can be difficult to get across in a classroom environment. Same with Romeo And Juliet. Shakespeare's interpretation of the story is fascinating, yet its themes unfortunately are directed toward the one audience that needs to hear those themes - but won't get them most of the time (teenagers reading a play about why infatuations and rebellious streaks aren't a good idea).

edited 12th Apr '15 11:12:23 PM by Aprilla

I seem to be one of the few people on the Internet I know of less than 20 years old who had to read Catcher In The Rye and actually really liked it. Holden is a fascinating character who really drives the story: The other characters serve really to interact with Holden and bring out either the best or the worst in him.

My personal interpretation is that Holden is actually a Villain Protagonist, the villain of his own story. His inability to let go of the past at a time in his life when he needs to, a time of his life when he needs to accept the "phony" world of adults, creates a very interesting character. Even though sometimes he has a point, one of my favorite passages is Mr. Antolini's speech to him at the end. (I personally think that Antolini patting Holden's hair was just because he felt sorry for Holden.) All in all, it lead to Catcher being one of my favorite books.

EDIT: I also liked Of Mice and Men and Fahrenheit 451.

edited 16th Apr '15 5:53:37 PM by LinkToTheFuture

I loved Catcher In The Rye, but I'm almost 30, so that probably doesn't match up with your point.

The Well of Lost Plots from the Thursday Next series. It annoyed me at first mainly because the other groups got the classics and it was a bitch to find a copy of the book here, but it sucked me right in . I guess I have to thank my Lit Teacher at the time for introducing me to Jasper Fforde.

I don't know. Many of the reviews I read go something like "I read it when I was 15 and I hated it, but I just read it again at 25 and now I love it." I guess it really depends on how it's taught.

My teacher didn't assign it per se, but she recommended it to me after class, and I picked it up from a friend.

Catcher just seems to have a reputation for being an overrated "classic" with a boring story and a Wangsty protagonist. I think it becomes better the more one thinks about it.

The Giver, Catch-22, and Wuthering Heights.

edited 19th Apr '15 5:03:20 PM by Tojin

Teachers are supposed to assign literature?!?

As a German, I would have given my left pinky to be made to read things like To Kill A Mockingbird or Flowers For Algernon (Both books I have read of my own accord instead, and declared awesome) in school. Instead various iterations of my dearest friend Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth (Who wrote Hiob, which is in itself not a bad book, but has the entertainment value of a cinder block) were forced down our throats. We did, however, read Big Mouth And Ugly Girl in English class, which I first put off as your usual teen novel - but while it does have various parallels to books by authors like John Green, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It dealt with an interesting scenario, and while it was no literary masterpiece, it was still enjoyable.

The two books I can think of actually liking were The Giver and To Kill a Mockingbird.

The only one that comes to mind is Jasper Jones, which is To Kill A Mockingbird, but set in a rural West Australian town in the 60s. It was actually really witty and interesting, and the characters were very realistic.

On the other hand I disliked Dracula, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Secret River, and The Crucible. Now that I think about it, maybe I just have a problem with period pieces.

I've genuinely loved many of the books that I've had to read in school. The Giver, To Kill A Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men can be counted among the more "classic" of required reading. I'm not sure how common it was for classes to read the other books that I'm about to list, but I was also required to read Things Not Seen, The Westing Game, Chains, and Speak.

I had a great time reading all of these books. However, please take into consideration: I am such a bookworm, and there are very few books I've read that I genuinely hated. There were some that I found boring at the time of reading (looking at you Tuck Everlasting) but overall, I like most of my required reading books at school.

I remembered I despised the idea of even reading Romeo and Juliet at first, due to my burning hatred of romance (The whole genre. Sure, there are some good ones, but 99% are CRAP), but I actually liked it.

And I actually liked The Giver as well. Not as much it's sequels, since they are boring, have a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere as a villain, and those "Gifts" are just HUGE Asspulls.

Gulliver's Travels, Of Mice and Men, 1984, To Kill a Mockingjay, the Canterbury Tales, and Lord of the Flies (up until things start going seriously downhill) were all kind of memorable for me.

I also liked Huckleberry Finn. I despised Jane Eyre, Beowulf, Romeo and Juliet (if only because I already read and seen that story many many times and I hate how it was espoused as a tragic romance story rather then a deconstruction of teen romance), and a few others.

Romeo and Juliet does kind of depend on how you approach it. I've seen it approached straight as a tragic love-story, and I've seen it as a deconstruction of romance in general. I had an instructor in high school who taught the play with an emphasis on how ridiculous the two lead characters actually behaved (he liked it better as a dark, cautionary comedy). As with most Shakespeare plays, it is quite remarkable just how many ways you can effectively approach the material.

The Death of Ivan Il'yç, by Lev Tolstoy, which I had to read in junior year. It feels frustratingly boring until the very last pages, where you finally understand the real tragedy of the lead character and you actually wish for him not to die and instead Set Right What Once Went Wrong with his life and family. At that point, it becomes an immensely satisfying read, especially the "boring" stuff that came before.

Also, L'affaire Moro (The Moro Affair) by Leonardo Sciascia. It is an illuminating read on one of the darkest pages of Italy's recent history, and it's written in the most straightforward (and thus satisfying) styles I've ever witnessed reading an essay or similar. It is also a very human examinations of the last letters of a man who knows he's sent to die by his own political party, and desperately tries to convince his once colleagues and friends to save his life while never betraying their secrets to his captors.

I recommend both books if you haven't read them, though the second one unfortunately needs quite a lot of familiarization with the events (and the socio-political context of the time they happened in) it deals with if you're not Italian (and even if you are, it still does).

Crime and Punishment and The Idiot come to mind. Though, to be honest, I always had some interest in Dostoyevsky's works. Both of them are excellent novels. I myself prefer The Idiot because of its main protagonist, Myshkin.

Also, The Captain's Daughter was surprisingly a good read.

edited 31st Oct '17 8:57:33 AM by kaalban

Macbeth. My absolute favorite of Shakespeare's plays and I fell in love with it after reading it in school.

I'm only a junior in high school, so I've still got plenty more to read still, but To Kill a Mockingbird was one I genuinely really enjoyed last year.