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

Stuff I liked in school both required reading and not.

• The Giver
• 1984
• Lord Of The Flies
• Animal Farm
• To Kill A Mockingbird
• After The Bomb (Not technically required reading, but it was in the school library and a worthy read. Basically think what happens in the aftermath of an accidental Soviet nuclear strike on Los Angeles from the perspective of one teenager in the early 1960s.)
• Where The Red Fern Grows (again not required reading in school)
• Beowulf
• Don Quixote (In Spanish no less!)
• The one from that Afghan girl who lived through the Taliban days until the late 1990s, I forget the title. (It was post-9/11 when I read this.)

Things Fall Apart was also great.

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. I like how it portrays a realistic, dystopian future.

On the more optimistic side, Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist.

edited 13th Jan '11 9:31:50 AM by NathanielTheSeeker

All Quiet On The Western Front'. At first I was disappointed that we weren't going to get to study Nineteen Eighty Four, but a month later my opinion completely changed. I love that book now. When the teacher read out the last part of the second last chapter, it was intensely sad; the narration really twisted the knife a lot.

The Once And Future King — at first I thought, "Yawn, no way this will be as good as Malloray," but it actually adds something to the arthurian mythos

Macbeth — it helps that we later watched the Roman Polanski version in class.

Conan The Barbarian — I had to read to complete my grasp of pre-Tolkien fantasy... and it turns out that pre-Tolkien fantasy is awesome.

Lots of books are VERY interesting. But i find fiction to be less so.

It would be much easier to list a selection of things that I didn't like reading:

• Eyes Of The Amaryllis
• The Good Earth
• The Awakening

The first I had to read in middle school; I can recall nothing of the plot except that I found it boring. I couldn't get into The Good Earth or The Awakening and never finished the former. There are probably others that I've erased from memory.

Things I have liked, from the top of my head:

• To Kill A Mockingbird
• Pride And Prejudice (though I thought it was way too long and tedious in some places, I liked the overall story)
• The Giver
• Brave New World
• Nineteen Eighty Four
• The Iliad (though I disliked the translation)
• The Kalevala (which was a choice read for an epic we had to read)

I'm lukewarm on Shakespeare; loved Othello, and thought Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet were alright. And overall, I like most of the books I'm assigned.

edited 19th Jan '11 8:19:10 PM by apassingthought

To Kill A Mockingbird was actually good.

On an unrelated note, I got a B+ on an essay on an assigned-reading book that I actually never read.

I'm taking contemporary British fiction this year, so expect me to post in this thread a lot.

Right now I'm reading Ian Mc Ewan's Saturday. It's a really interesting look at post- 9/11 middle class life, which may or may not be ironic, in that the author may or may not share the perspective of the main, middle class character, who is a rationalist with no time for literary art. Good stuff.

I found that Animal Farm and Of Mice and Men were so good I read too far ahead of everyone else. >_>

They must have seriously underestimated my reading ability because we only read a chapter a day or something.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin is really marvellous. Great prose.

Actually, anything my eleventh-grade English teacher assigned. Ditto Candide and The Prince (European History).

/vaguely tries to recall high school english classes

hmm... like just about everyone else here, it seems, I rather enjoyed Lord of the Flies and To Kill A Mockingbird (both of which were actually assigned in middle school, not high school). I also liked some aspects of Inferno (we never got around to reading the rest of the Divine Comedy), The Handmaid's Tale and Invisible Man (which, however, was inferior to HG Wells's book of the same title). Never had much patience for Shakespeare or a lot of other "classics" (e.g. The Odyssey), found 1984 wanting in many respects, couldn't get into Dubliners or Wise Blood (although the latter probably bears rereading).

That was years ago though. I can't remember half the books we were assigned. I know there was one by Toni Morrison, for instance, but I can't recall which one or what happened in it. Likewise, there was a play about the Incas and the Conquistadors which was actually rather good but I can't remember what it was called. Et cetera.

Odd Thomas, for school. One of my favorite book series now.

Definitely Huckleberry Finn.

Now I can tell why certain YouTube users like TVBRobotnikReturns decided to list those those types of books in his profile. I bet the way we were raised and influenced made us want to go to school!

edited 6th Mar '11 10:53:24 AM by fungal88

Everyone in school and in my family said they pitied me when I was assigned to read To Kill A Mocking Bird. I actually liked it.

I didn't really enjoy a lot of the books I had to read in School/College. I count Of Mice And Men as my least favourite book of all time and some other spectacularly bad ones were Enduring Love and The Kite Runner. I also utterly loathed A Streetcar Named Desire, not because it was bad, but because I couldn't make myself like any of the characters.

On the other hand, for college last year I had to read Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, which I adored and King Lear, which is probably my second favourite of Shakespeare's plays now.

Surprisingly, I enjoyed The Old Man And The Sea. The writing was a bit dry, but it was a fairly enjoyable novel. What I enjoyed less was my English teacher going on about how Santiago was Jesus because he was on the boat for three days, and the mast was the cross because it was vaguely cross-shaped. She also said that the tree Finny and Gene jump out of in A Separate Peace symbolizes the Tree of Knowledge from Genesis, because... well, hell if I know. They're both trees, I guess.

So, basically... my English teacher was full of crap, but those were both decent enough books.

edited 6th Mar '11 6:46:20 PM by Parakus

To Kill A Mockingbird.

edited 6th Mar '11 6:47:37 PM by TibetanFox

Hm decent books that were on the reading list? Enders Game was good, Anthem and Animal Farm were ok, but not great.

More like, what did I read in school that I did not find interesting? I liked just about everything I had to read.

• Did not quite enjoy Billy Budd. I liked the story, but reading Herman Melville's writing is like pulling teeth.
• We also had to read a morality play called Everyman in class, but we thankfully didn't do much with it. With Everyman alone I discovered that I hate morality plays and blatant religious allegories with a flaming passion.

edited 11th Mar '11 6:17:47 PM by annebeeche

I didn't like a lot of the stuff we read in 9th and 10th grade but it has mostly been erased from my memory so sorry, can't give any titles. The Shakespeare and Tolkien I enjoyed, although I was already familiar with them.

You got to read Tolkien for school? Lucky. I asked my AP Lit teacher last year and he was like "Uh, no, Tolkien doesn't have literary merit", but was unable to give me sufficient reasons why other than that the books are "too long and wordy" and that they "lacked real-world relevance". What. This was especially frustrating since I could answer most of the AP essay questions with examples from Tolkien's stories. And the essay part AP test is more about constructing an argument and supporting it rather than the actual book, anyways.

Speaking of Shakespeare, I'm enjoying Much Ado About Nothing at the moment. I think starting with the comedies would make students enjoy Shakespeare more. The tragedies are harder to get into, and freshmen here get hammered with Romeo And Juliet their first year and end up swearing off Shakespeare forever.

This is unrelated, but I heard that in my head in a gay Valley-girl gum-chewing hipster voice.

This was of course around ten years ago, when schools were cool and english teachers were groovy. Or maybe my school was more amenable to Tolkien than other places were, I don't know. That, the Shakespeare, and now that I think about it To Kill A Mockingbird (although it isn't actually one of my favourite books) were the only things I really enjoyed in 10th grade, and I realised around that time that I could make crap stupid arguments up in my essays and get much better grades on them than by trying to conform to the formula we were being taught.