What books were you made to read at school?

Astro Pen

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I recall some. The asterisks are the good ones:
I have included primary school for a bit of flavour. I will add a few as I rack my memory

Sons and Lovers
Rogue Male *
The Guns of Navarone*
The Merchant of Venice
Late Night on Watling Street*
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Kidnapped (RLS)
The Water Babies
Dr Doolitle*
Jennings Little Hut*
The Midwitch Cuckoos*
The Long Walk* (Slavomir Rawicz not S.K.)
 
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The Chrysalids
Dance of the Happy Shades
Animal Farm
Great Expectations
Martian Chronicles
Hamlet and As You Like It
Oedipus Rex
A Bird in the House
 
A Kind of Loving.
A Man for all Seasons.
Lord of the Flies.
Mr Midshipman Hornblower.

None of them appealed to me then nor now.

And the obligatory Shakespeare. I would rather watch the plays than read them.

School could have easily put me off reading for life, luckily I was able to read plenty of books at home.
 
Wuthering Heights
King Lear
Animal Farm
Lord of the Flies
I, Claudius
 
The Griffin Pirate stories had me hooked, first books I ever read.

pirate.jpg
 
To Kill a Mockingbird
Of Mice and Men
A Separate Peace
No Promises in the Wind
Rolling Thunder, Hear My Cry
Sarah, Plain and Tall
Captains Courageous
Tuck Everlasting
Frankenstein
Dracula
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Jurassic Park
And Then There Were None
The Outsiders
The House on Mango Street
A Light in the Forest
The Sign of the Beaver
Stone Fox
Escape from Warsaw
Number the Stars
Tuesdays with Morrie
Into the Wild
Never Cry Wolf
 
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I didn't read a lot until high school forced me to.
First book I was 'forced' to read: Reach For the Sky. Loved it and thought hey, what have I been missing out on. I've been an avid reader ever since.
I was also introduced to Shakespeare. It took me a while to understand that he was a genius because the language threw me off. Also:
Away All Boats, Lord of the Flies and lots of others that I can't recall. It was a long time ago. You know, I had to outrun dinosaurs on my way to school. In a cave.
 
No tyrant teachers ever demanded that I read anything that I hadn't already read, years prior.
Ma was an English lit major, still at uni. The paternal line were all huge fans of anything Adventurous. The parental library was a treasure trove of amazing reads.
Ma taught me to read before I ever started school. Classroom reading lessons were an excruciating ordeal. The teacher would provide every student with a copy of the same book and require each student to read a page or two aloud, Reading aloud is too slow, anyway; but the pace of the average student stuttering and groping across each simplistic page bored me to tears. I was scolded, when it was my turn to read aloud; because I hadn't a clue what tedious page the classroom had attained. All I could say was that I had finished reading that book 30 minutes ago and was back to reading my Kipling.

When I showed up for my required Lit class in High school and read the syllabus; I went to the teacher and told him that the class was redundant to me because I'd read everything on the list, years ago, except To Kill a Mocking Bird. "If you want me to read that too, lay a copy on me and I'll knock it off over the weekend."

In those days I was much younger than I am today and still had the capacity to remember everything that I had ever read, in great detail.

Woe to the suspicious teacher who sought to trip me up for padding my resume. Quizzing me on my knowledge of these works laid them open to an excruciatingly detailed recap of plot, characters, specific scenes and opinions thereon.
 
Ones I remember as required reading were
Of Mice And Men
A Town Like Alice
Lord Of The Flies
probably a few more that I can’t remember.

We also read quite a bit of Shakespeare. The teacher would randomly chose a few pupils to read out the character parts and the rest of us would listen. Later, there would be a debate on what it all meant.

Luckily, I enjoyed all of it:)
 
Reading aloud is too slow, anyway; but the pace of the average student stuttering and groping across each simplistic page bored me to tears. I was scolded, when it was my turn to read aloud; because I hadn't a clue what tedious page the classroom had attained
Yep, some special hell should be reserved for those time serving teachers, they seemed to pick the readers who would monotone endlessly, and not comprehend a single paragraph of the story.
 
To Kill a Mockingbird
Of Mice and Men
A Separate Peace
No Promises in the Wind
Rolling Thunder, Hear My Cry
Sarah, Plain and Tall
Captains Courageous
Tuck Everlasting
Frankenstein
Dracula
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Jurassic Park
And Then There Were None
The Outsiders
The House on Mango Street
A Light in the Forest
The Sign of the Beaver
Stone Fox
Escape from Warsaw
Number the Stars
Tuesdays with Morrie
Into the Wild
Never Cry Wolf
You were made to read all these, GS? What kind of school was this?
 
I read To Kill a Mockingbird twice in high school.
Bridge to Terabithea
The River (1 & 2)

In my juniors & senior year we just watched movies.

In college-
Huckleberry Finn
Civil Disobedience
Walden
The Jungle
The Maltese Falcon
The Big Sleep
Strangers on a Train
Double Indemnity
The Devil in the Blue Dress
The Drowned World
Animal’s People
The Metamorphosis
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Brave New World
Frankenstein
Dracula
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
One Hundred Years of Solitude
John Carter of Mars
Moving Mars
Red Mars
The Martian Chronicles
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
War of the Worlds


ASU had decent taste.
 
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Is this just an age thing, a difference between the UK and the USA, or (possibly) a misreading of the OP? We were never made to read anything at school, unless you were doing English Lit at 'O' or 'A' level, and even then the required reading was only 4-5 set books.
 
Is this just an age thing, a difference between the UK and the USA, or (possibly) a misreading of the OP? We were never made to read anything at school, unless you were doing English Lit at 'O' or 'A' level, and even then the required reading was only 4-5 set books.
Mine were all assigned to me. You didn’t have assigned reading?

I was over ambitious and would often read and write extracurricular works like Aristotle’s Physics, the entire John Carter Series, the entire Red Mars Trilogy, etc. but I had to drop out last year, because the professors were giving me low marks because I wasn’t sticking to “politics” or some such topic and instead talked about various literatures that they apparently had trouble cross-referencing. I read a lot of extra curricular stuff I didn’t need to, but all of those books listed were assigned.

But I never got my bachelor’s. Too talented, apparently!

Edit;

Apparently I never made it, and never will, because I wasn’t constructing my own original ideas and instead extrapolated my thesis from the ideas from the masters, on their theories in literature, etc. it was okay to do that with the fun classes, Mars and Mystery, etc.

However, when I wrote about Beowulf or Don Quixote or Things Fall Apart (a few more I was assigned), I wasn’t drawing my own conclusions.

Frankly, I wasn’t really comfortable with it, because I’m pretty moderate compared to most students in US colleges. Ahh well, I never wanted to teach anyway. Just wanted the prestige of a BA for odd types of jobs under my belt. Now I have le $50,000 debt! Lol
 
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Mine were all assigned to me. You didn’t have assigned reading?

No. We were encouraged to go and read other books, but there was no list or required reading. This was 50+ years ago, mind you - perhaps they started assigned reading because the intervening generations didn't go and look for themselves...
 
I was in three different high schools. Read a lot of Shakespeare, some Thomas Hardy, a few American modern writers including Hemingway and Harper Lee/To kill a Mockingbird.
The oddity that I remember was a one term course where we read "Challenging" books. I remember Fletcher Pratt/The Battles That Changed History and The Communist Manifesto. The kicker on the last one was that that was at Phillips Academy Andover, probably the most prestigios Prep school in the US - attended by both Bush presidents. I didn't last.
 

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