Side note to all of this. I had a buddy at A&M who got to read The Dark Knight Returns graphic novel from 1986 as part of a literature class in high school. That would have been very cool!

For those that got to read The Hobbit for school:

1. I am very jealous
2. When was this? Rough year and grade level wise?

Pretty sure I cheated on that, I think we read The Hobbit in 8th grade

Chipotlemonger said:

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For those that got to read The Hobbit for school:

1. I am very jealous
2. When was this? Rough year and grade level wise?

---

Also jealous. I got to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe sometime in middle school, but The Hobbit is one of my all time favorites

Conversely, I absolutely loved Shakespeare as a kid......with the caveat that I did not read them in their original format. I read them in American.

Most notably I LOVED Macbeth.

Still have the book that got me into Shakespeare. How could you not with art like this?!

Written in 1976.

Bad:
David Copperfield
Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare

Good
Red Badge of Courage
Animal Farm
1984

I like classics now, but from the time I was 10 until 17 it was a death march, around 200 books for school. That's in addition to reading several hundred westerns/scifi/fantasy/mysteries/thrillers every year (I was forced to keep a log).

I think I would have read a lot more classics in total by now if I hadn't gotten so burned out in grade school. Nowadays Tolstoy, Lermontov, Gogol, or Chekov are my favorites, but I think I only read one classic from the age of 17 until my mid-20s.

I forgot about Beloved. That was a horrible read.

Best:
- Animal Farm
- Lord of the Flies
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- The Odyssey
- The Great Gatsby
- Brave New World
- Nineteen Eighty Four
- A Tale of Two Cities -> about the best opening of any book ever.
- Les Miserables
- The Pearl
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Worst:
- The Scarlet Letter
- The Iliad
- The Prince of Tides

Burnable:
- House of Spirits -> this was assigned spring of my senior year. It was so bad, I did the math and could graduate without doing the final paper. I took a complete goose-egg.

As someone who loves the count of monte cristo story, but has only seen the movie, will the book be ruined for me if I try to read it now?

The Sun Also Rises is my hands down favorite.

Worst? Heart of Darkness without a thought


Best? Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Interview with the Vampire

I love the book. The movie does a good job of telling the story and I like it a lot.

With the book though there's way more to the lengths and efforts he goes to to exact revenge. There are also more characters. And the ending is different. I would give it a shot if you like the story.

The "hated" one that stands out to me was Scarlet Letter. I tried and tried and couldn't get into that stupid thing.

Don't remember a ton that I enjoyed other than A Tale of Two Cities, Killer Angels, Animal Farm, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

The rest fell into the "I have to read them so I did and they didn't suck but they weren't impressive" category.

Martin Chuzzlewit sucks

Great Expectations is the most boring book I was ever forced to read.

The better ones:
Martian Chronicles
Brave New World
Animal Farm

The worst:
Billy Budd
Great Expectations

I remember reading scenes from The Crucible in 10th grade and I had the line:
God d***s all liars
although instead of "liars", it came out "lawyers".

Those of you listing Slaughter House Five, was the required reading in High School?

Seems a bit much for a public high school in Texas.

Worst: Great Expectations
Best: Angela's Ashes, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, Animal Farm

I wish I had been forced to read Slaughter House Five in high school.

Tanya 93 said:

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Worst? Heart of Darkness without a thought


Best? Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Interview with the Vampire

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I cant agree more on Heart of Darkness. The book was the reading equivalent of watching paint dry.

Slaughterhouse 5 was required for us in Sugar Land. I don't remember what year it was, but is still one of my favorite books. Need to go back and re read it. It's been years.

Liked:
The Count of Monte Christo
Hamlet
Le Morte D'Arthur
Brave New World

Hated:
My Antonia (absolute garbage)
Crime and Punishment
MacBeth

A note about "Great Expectations." It shouldn't be assigned to high school aged kids to read. Regardless of the novel's quality, it's beyond the typical high schooler's emotional capacity to understand. Most teenagers are narcissists and will not grasp what a complete ******* Pip is at the end of the novel, which is a major theme of the book.

Chipotlemonger said:

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For those that got to read The Hobbit for school:

1. I am very jealous
2. When was this? Rough year and grade level wise?

---

7th grade, 1986.
Easily the book I've read the most over the course of my life, and I read a lot.
I'll always be thankful to Mrs. Jackson for "making" us read it.

I forgot about Slaughterhouse 5. I don't remember much about it other than I really liked it, and I distinctly remember thinking, "This book is f'd up," but in a good way. Not f'd up like "Night."

I could have run into Slaughterhouse V while taking summer classes for college credit, but it was definitely during high school.

Best
- The Count of Monte Cristo
- The Pillars of the Earth

Worst
- The House on Mango Street

Wow, trying to remember what I read in HS back in the early to mid 80's. I enjoyed nearly all the required reading

Animal Farm
Brave New World
Flowers for Algernon
To Kill a Mockingbird
Bless the Beasts and the Children
Great Expectations
Huckleberry Finn
Great Gatsby
The Call of the Wild
Canterbury Tails
Various Shakespeare
Beowulf

I'm sure I'm leaving a bunch off that I can't remember. Didn't care much for Thoreau's Walden.

The only one that I recall just hating, and it seems to be a consensus, is The Scarlet Letter.

High school worst:
English III AP - The Scarlet Letter

High school best:
1984 - not required reading, I picked it up in detention one day and read it all

College worst:
World Literature I - Agamemnon (part one of the Oresteia)

College best:
Science Fiction Past and Present - Dune

Best:
Confederacy of Dunces (Still my all-time favorite)
Animal Farm
The Gulag Archipelago

Worst:
Anything Shakespeare...just couldn't get into it

Best:
Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy (for a unit on satire)
1984
Tale of Two Cities
Animal Farm
Lord of the Flies
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
One Flew Over the ****oo's Nest
Cannery Row

Tolerably okay:
Shakespeare's typically "required" plays (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice, etc)
Of Mice and Men
The Pearl

Worst, I assume because I didn't finish them:
Black Elk Speaks
My Antonia
All the King's Men
David Copperfield

The Awakening

Did anyone have books pulled from the reading list after parents complained?

We had "and then there were none" pulled because on of the vocabulary words was "ejaculate"

And "to sir, with love" pulled for profanity after a parent complained.