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

I think I liked a lot of the books I was assigned in middle school, but the only ones I can remember reading are Holes, The Giver, and Bless The Beasts And Children. In high school, I hated almost everything except Shakespeare and Dickens, but I had to admit that The Canterbury Tales and The Count Of Monte Cristo had good parts. (My teacher said "The Pardoner's Tale" would have made a good Twilight Zone episode, and I agree.)

edited 3rd Dec '10 11:47:45 AM by feotakahari

The First Poems In English

Riddle 75:

I saw a lady sitting alone.

A mirror.

Riddle 44:

Swings by his thigh a thing most magical!

Below the belt, beneath the folds

of his clothes it hangs, a hole in its front end,

stiff-set and stout, but swivels about.

Levelling the head of this hanging instrument,

its wielder hoists his hem above the knee:

it is his will to fill a well-known hole

that it fits fully when at full length.

He has often filled it before. Now he fills it again.

A Key. No, really. You filthy-minded perverts!

All translations r belong michael alexander buy his book from penguin classix do it.

edited 3rd Dec '10 11:54:54 AM by mmysqueeant

Pretty much every book that my school made me read. For which I'm grateful they turned out well, at least for me. Well, there was the occasional weak poetry, but there was much more good poetry to make up for it. The whole process of analizing everything later is what made it all the more interesting (or annoying, depending on whether I liked it in the first place).

I liked Holes, Maximum Ride (that was one of our summer reading books), and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman(also summer reading). In fact, most of my summer reading books were pretty good(my guess is, they pick the kids books for summer because nobody is going to read A Christmas Carol by themselves).

Frankenstein and Dracula. The former was... you know how you like a work, but acknowledge it's terrible? Yeah. Too little progress, too much stupidity, too much lagging. The latter's pretty awesome.

Also, The Great Gatsby. Loved the writing style, which is primarily the reason I stuck to reading it.

Nthing Jane Eyre, Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird. Also, Things Fall Apart. Quite a nuanced take on colonialism.

Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451, Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Basically, most of the stuff from 7th and 8th grade, and all of the stuff I did so far in 9th grade.

You know, I wonder—do books you picked out of a reading list count?

Because that was how I discovered the Pit Dragon Trilogy.

To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Joy Luck Club, The Giver, and Artemis Fowl.

edited 8th Dec '10 6:26:09 AM by Player2isDead

• The Outsiders
• The Giver
• The Aeneid
• Enders Game
• Animal Farm
• Nineteen Eighty Four
• The Hobbit
• Small Gods
• Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
• Lord Of The Flies
• Hamlet

edited 8th Dec '10 6:57:20 AM by LizardBite

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Animal Farm, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Pride And Prejudice, The Chrysalids, The Hobbit, and a bunch of books about Classical Mythology. And a film adaptation of A Midsummer Nights Dream, because I couldn't find the book at the library.

Any of the Shakespeare plays I had to read for GCSE and A level English Literature (The Tempest, King Lear and Macbeth) and An Inspector Calls definitely qualify. I expected them to be terribly boring.

Same goes for set texts including The Lord Of The Flies, Animal Farm, To Kill A Mockingbird and Roll Of Thunder Hear My Cry. Again, they were all books I had heard of, but presumed wouldn't be very good.

On the other hand, I was never very interested in any of the poetry we were assigned (Donne, Frost and Edward Thomas) nor did I like The Burial At Thebes, Empire Of The Sun and The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn.

The Canterbury Tales was better than I expected. I would have loved it if only they could have given me a copy with modern spelling.

On Writing, by Stephen King. I was surprised when it was assigned for a composition class, but it turned out to be very interesting.

Crime and Punishement is my favorite assigned book I had to read. Lets see, Life of Pi was intresting, King Lear, Pride and Prejudice, Slaughter-House Five.

The Book Thief. MUCH much better than I thought, and better than The Stranger, which was our other choice to read (I wanted to choose The Stranger simply because I had read it ).

One Hundred Years Of Solitude. I didn't have to read it, but my English teacher got very overexcited at me one day and went "You like magical realism! You can't write magical realism unless you read One Hundred Years of Solitude! I won't let you!"

So I read it and it is my favourite book and I will love it forever and ever, the end.

Pretty much every book assigned: The Bean Trees, Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451, etc.

You're lucky! Not many people can say they actually liked the books they were assigned. Academia seems to try its best to turn reading into a chore!

Everything I have ever been assigned save The Jungle. May that book rot in Hell.

• Englar Alheimsins
• 101 Reykjavík
• Þrymskviða

For some reason my english teachers all assigned me some incredibly boring books. The year before me got The Hobbit and The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, I got boring fluff I don't remember any more.

edited 5th Jan '11 1:28:59 PM by Foringinn

In no particular order, and probably missing some: Lord Of The Flies, 1984, Animal Farm, Of Water And The Spirit, Macbeth, Into Thin Air, In The Heart Of The Sea were all books that I was specifically assigned by school to read in the last couple years that I really liked.

edited 5th Jan '11 2:18:48 PM by Metalhead467

Therese Raquin was a fairly awesome book to be told to read. I enjoyed it thoroughly, even though I was pretty much rooting for the death of all the characters bar the cat. :3

I liked Wide Sargasso Sea too, and Of Mice And Men.

Doing Hamlet at the moment, which is badass. I've always been a Shakespeare fan.

edited 7th Jan '11 4:26:47 PM by SunshineWerewolf

• Not so much a book, but John Donne's poetry.
• The Things They Carried
• A Prayer For Owen Meany
• Dune (Which I had read before having to read it for school)

There are a lot of others but I can't seem to think of them at the moment.