King Lear, Futile rage against the universe and a tough essay to write.

Ethan Frome, Never reading again if it is the last book on earth.

A Separate Peace, Meh

Crime and Punishment, So much resentment for being forced to share that man's feelings.

Death of a Salesman, powerful emotional experience, learned new perspective about life.

Death of Ivan Ilyich, Wow!

I read 1984 as a junior. In 1984.

Grade 9 - To Kill a Mockingbird (overrated) and Romeo and Juliet (good)

Grade 10 - Obasan (boring but I think if I reread it as an adult, I’d appreciate more) and Taming of the Shrew (I don’t remember it much)

Grade 11 - Frankenstein (not bad) and MacBeth (liked it)

Grade 12 - Handmaid’s Tale (Loved it) and Hamlet (really liked it)

These were required readings chosen by the teacher. We also had to read one book (usually a classic) of our own choosing, each year.

Will not post the list because it would be way too long - we read approximately 6-12 books a year from the first grade till the twelfth, so there's quite a bit. I will admit straight away that although I loved reading, I really struggled with the obligatory reading (mainly due poor time management lol) and didn't read them all.

Books that helped to shape my view and/or left an impression:

• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Although it is very difficult and painful to read, it's still one of my absolute favourites.
• Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. We actually had to read only few chapters but I found it to be too enjoyable and read most of it. Planning to reread it in 2023.
• The Trial by Franz Kafka. Surreal but memorable.
• Jevgeni Onegin by Aleksander Puškin. It was great introduction into Russian literature since it's not too heavy and yet has this 'something'.
• Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. I read half or less because I found it to be way too depressing. Decade has passed and I'm still staying away from it.

Few books by Estonian authors, most of which aren't translated into English but that really affected how I see my country and it's history. I'm actually rereading them now. But one that is translated and that still gives me strange vibes is The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Kivirähk.

I read so much in middle and High School I couldn't tell you what we covered... But I can say the books I read for fun had a greater impact on me than those I read for school.

At Uni I took Non-Western World Lit and I really enjoyed the books and learned SO much about colonialism and it's affects. I am definitely a better person for that course.

I only remember Great Expectations and I hated it. Years later I was dating a guy who said it was his favourite book and it bothered me more than the cheating and the heavy drinking hahaha

Romeo and Juliet - I preferred Hamlet

Dracula - I actually really liked this

The Great Gatsby - I liked the movie later on

A Tale of Two Cities - Hard to read through at times but when I finished it, it stayed on my mind for days.

Those are the ones off the top of my head

If I’m forced to read a book, I hate it. Anything I was forced to read in HS or College, I will ever pick up again. I’m pretty sure this started with my grandmother forcing me to read “good books” instead of my beloved Babysitters Club or Sweet Valley. I still irrationally hate Sarah Plain and Tall because of that

Beowulf - Anonymous

Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare

Macbeth - William Shakespeare - prefer it to R&J but I had to read this twice in full analysis and I'm still mad about it.

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - it really affected my outlook on certain things. But I recognize its flaws.

Night - Elie Wiesel

Huge chunks of the Odyssey by Homer

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald - didn't finish it, got bored

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - I love this one to this day.

The Crucible - Arthur Miller - this one I have such mixed feelings about.

Various poems and short stories and even Psalm 23 were peppered throughout all of that. A Rose for Emily has stuck with me well past highschool

Edit: All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

I remember 3 required reading books throughout my entire schooling. I know there were more, but I don't remember titles.

The Great Gatsby, which I actually loved and still love.
The Old Man and the Sea, which I really enjoyed too. I know most people don't like it, but I thought it was great.
Animal Farm, which I was too young to even understand at that point lol

My highschool world literature list was quite extensive, had to read at least one, more often two or three books from all of these authors: Shakespeare, Hugo, Camus, Moliere, Hesse, Ibsen, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Hemingway, Remarque, Kundera, Kafka, Garcia Marquez, Huxley

I surely am forgetting many. This was about 50% of compulsory reading and the more enjoyable part, the rest was my home country authors that I mostly disliked due to rather depressing historical fiction.

Huckleberry Finn (trying time read in the different dialects made it nearly impossible for teenage me to comprehend)

To Kill a Mockingbird (it was great)

All Quiet on the Western Front (It was great)

Man, this thread points out to me how dismal my education was. My High School education (and one year of university) was in the US in the '50s and '60s. I have always been a voracious reader, but I read things I was interested in rather that classroom assignments. I can barely remember some short stories that were mandatory to read from an anthology that was the English Literature class textbook. Thankfully I read a great many of the classics of literature on my own. With a few exceptions the great pieces of literature were certainly not a part of my formal education.

I also read the Chrysalids! I remember it being weird but there were definitely worse books in other years.

Shakespeare - A Midsummer night's dream, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth (thank goodness for Sparknotes)

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee (I enjoyed)

Lord of the Flies - William Golding (Probably my favourite out of all of them)

The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams (I don't remember a whole lot but I don't think it was that bad)

Agamemnon - Aeschylus (meh)

Dune - Frank Herbert (Way too long for high school English. I don't think I read it fully)

White Noise - Don DeLillo (Horrible book. There is no plot until the 21st chapter and it is all just absurd garbage)

Had to read a lot of other ridiculous books in French for high school too...

Went to college right out of High School in early eighties.

Went back to school college to get my degree in late 90s.

I saw my friend's son's reading list for a college lirerature class last year

You would think it would have changed a bunch in 40 years, but nope. You don't become an English lit professor because you like novelty. I'll bet it's the same syllabus as the one in 1950.

English lit: something by Dickens, Twain, Shakespeare, London, Hemingway and maybe a Bronte sister. All good reads.

Gatsby, outsiders, house of the scorpion come to mind.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Richler - made a lifelong Richler booster of me.

Surfacing, Atwood. For me, 186 pages of culture shock. Didn't understand it, too new to Canada. Too sentimental/romantic to handle the realism. Still, reading that book in 11th meant I picked up The Edible Woman a few years later and became a big Atwood fan.

Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse:. Same as Surfacing. Couldn't really process it but it told me Paul St Pierre existed so that paid off later.

Romeo and Juliet? Bleh. I checked out once Mercutio died.

>Catcher in the Rye - Salinger (boooring!)

This is blasphemy.

I'm only in highschool:

Frankenstein - Great I love the early sci fi and and how it introduced bioethics to me

Lord of the flies - It was a hard read for 9th grade me, but introduced the great human nature debate to me because my teacher made us introductions in hobbes, roussau, and Locke.

Catcher in the rye - It was quite boring but had a few interesting themes about class but completely is lacking in other views on American life of that era. The tragedy is the most redeemable part in my opinion.

Long way down - a very interesting realistic fiction story set in an unknown city like Chicago or New York. It goes over race relations and the cycle of violence in the black community.

Nimona - It was a great queer allegory, and had very compelling world building, and character writing.

Night - It was a very interesting autobiography about Elie Wiesel and his life in Hungary prior and his tome in Aushwitz. Obviously worthwhile read to understand how bad the holocaust was.

Animal Farm - My first introduction to politics outside of the typical American sphere. It was compelling. I love the ending of the pigs becoming exactly like the farmers. Which I see as the marxiat leninist party becoming exactly like the capitalist class.

To Kill a Mockingbird - An interesting view on gender/race relations and its relation to innocence and justice in pre civil rights America.

Macbeth - It was an interesting but not my thing

Romeo and juliet - a classic love story and tragedy but really weird like they are really young

A Raisin in the Sun - It was amazing look at Harlem in the 1950's and shows the diversity in the black community.

Some of the odyssey - Interesting but weird. Odysseus kills the suitors, but he cheated. He is noble but tricks the cyclops. He is a hero, but he saved nine of his crew. It's just weird.

Island of the Blue Dolphin, Heart of Darkness (both in high school and in university), To Kill A Mockingbird, Flowers for Algernon, Lord of the Flies (amusingly timed with the Biography class disecting fetal pigs and them marching through our class with pig heads...), several Margaret Atwood books, 1984, Lost In The Barrens. Northern Canada in the 90s but had some phenomenal teachers.

I can only remember a few of them. I'm an old old woman wheezes in 38 👵🏻 We had to read Peer Gynt and a doll's house by Henrik Ibsen Haugtussa by Arne Garborg, Lord of the flies by William Golding, The hornets nest by Jimmy Carter. Hunger by Knut Hamsun, The prose Edda by Snorre Sturlason, A midsummer night's dream by Shakespeare, the Cider House rules by John Irving. And I know we read a bit about the black plague aswell. But I can't remember what it was

(in kindergarten we read The witches and the Twits by Roald Dahl together and we had to draw something from every chapter. And that was the best mandatory reading of all!

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. Yuck. I found it boring and anticlimactic, but I appreciate what it said and meant.

Station Eleven by Emily St. Mandel

Read it once in university and I reread it twice a year since

I remember reading A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah (his memoir on being a child soldier in Africa) and he came to speak at our university. Just mind blowing the evil that exists in the world, but also the ability some people have to overcome abuse

I went to catholic school and probably forgot some freshman and sophomore books.

Grade 9: The Odyssey To Kill a Mockingbird

Grade 10: Julius Caesar And Then there Were None Slaughterhouse 5 Cat’s Cradle

Grade 11: Scarlet Letter The Great Gatsby Black Boy The Catcher in the Rye Huck Finn

Grade 12: Different Seasons The Postman The Princess Bride Boy’s Life Siddhartha Some shitty Dean Koontz book that I can’t recall the title

The Chocolate War

The Pigman

Lord of the Flys

High School: To Kill a Mockingbird and Lord of the Flies are ones I learned a lot by reading and still enjoy

Obasan and the Timothy Findley one where he goes to war I got a lot more out of when I reread them as an adult

Stone Angel will always be one of my favorites (our English teacher had her quote "I became a writer when to introduce oneself as a Canadian woman from the prairies was to apologize for oneself three times" on the board and I ran right out and bought the rest of her books)

We did Romeo and Juliet instead of Hamlet because the Leo movie came out that year and the teachers caved to pressure, then we did MacBeth the next year

I got to pick books off the "extended reading list" (which I think was code for "get the nerd to shut up so we can teach the other kids") and that's where I discovered The Stand and Power of One and Les Mis and Phantom of the Opera and Fried Green Tomatoes

In college the ones I remember are

Beowulf (don't EVER take a course on just Beowulf)

Coming of Age in Mississippi by Annie Moody - that one really made an impression on me

I only remember a few of them, but we had (completely out of order):

• Fahrenheit 451
• Animal Farm
• Tess of the Derbervilles
• Romeo and Juliet
• The Great Gatsby
• Life of Pi
• Canterbury Tales (not all of them)
• A Separate Peace
• Pictures of Dorian Gray
• The Importance of Being Earnest
• Othello
• Frankenstein
• Night
• Scarlet Letter

And many more that I can’t remember. I did not enjoy most of them at the time, but loved Night and really enjoyed Animal Farm.

In college I only took one English class and it was contemporary American plays. Off the top of my head I remember A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Baby with the Bathwater, and that one with the Alec Baldwin movie where he says Always Be Closing.

Frankenstein (I understand the classic status as the concept was new. Found it boring though)

Twelfth night (ahhhhh)

Kallocain (like 1984 but bleak)

Born a crime (great)

The road (I like Cormac McCharty but this wasn’t a favorite of mine)

On tyranny (5/5)

Interview with a vampire (eh)

Purple hibiscus (great)

Jr. High: I remember A Separate Peace, The House on Mango Street, and Diary of Anne Frank.

High School: Great Expectations (yuck), Count of Monte Cristo (fantastic!), lots of Shakespeare, The Sea Wolf (loved), Alas, Babylon (loved), Lost Horizon (loved), To Kill a Mockingbird, Animal Farm, Cold Mountain (yuck), Grapes of Wrath (yuck), All Quiet on the Western Front, Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights, Beowulf, various Ancient Greek epics and plays, etc.

I majored in English so I can't even begin to list everything. But standouts were from my courses on Arthurian Literature (everything from History of the Kings of Britain to The Once and Future King) and Tolkien (Silmarillion, LOTR, Hobbit, a biography, The Tolkien Reader).

That's all that I can remember with great clarity, apart from poems and short stories.

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We had a lot of required books and can’t remember them all. The ones I remember the most ( some I only know the title in Spanish)

Beowulf

El canto del mio cid

Los nibelungos

Poppl vuh

100 years solitude

Don quixote

The iliad

Unbearable lightness of being ( this one messed me up for a while)

La vorágine

Maria

Rosario tijeras

Catcher in the rye

Romeo and Julieth

Tom Sawyer

Un cadaver en la biblioteca

In college, I only took the mandatory English classes ( engineering major), but I had to read

Troilus and Cressida ( Shakespeare)

The odyssey

All silent in the west front

Overall, I realized what I like ( and what I don’t like) to read, and through all the discussions it helped me see how each book is a representation of their time and to not judge a book written 100 years ago by today’s standards.

Edit: formatting attempt Disclaimer: graduated high school 20 years ago, might have mistyped titles here

I'm glad I was forced to read Black literature (Invisible Man, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Song of Solomon, etc.) in school. I don't think I would have otherwise. I'm Asian so it's not as if racism is some foreign concept to me, but at that age I wasn't particularly cognizant of Black American history (other than slavery) or art.

It's been quite a while, but here's what I remember definitely reading for high school:

• Romeo and Juliet
• Macbeth
• The Outsiders
• Jane Eyre
• A Christmas Carol
• Lord of the Flies
• Treasure Island
• Stoney Creek Woman

My high school English program had more of an emphasis on short stories though, versus full-length books.

Year of Wonders - excellent historical fiction

Things Fall Apart - pretty good

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - meh

Romeo and Juliet - Overrated

To Kill a Mockingbird - liked it a lot

The Shining - the book is better than the movie

High School was a long time ago but from what I can remember:

The Year of Living Dangerously - Christopher Koch

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

Fly Away Peter - David Malouf

Hamlet - Shakespeare

Overall, the fact that I had to read these meant that I didn't really think about whether I liked them until at least some time after college. I was a good student, which meant I did my homework. Mostly, now I judge my like/dislike by how much I remember and whether the book elicited an emotional response.

All these were 9th grade. I liked most of the stuff

To Kill a Mockingbird (I liked it) and Romeo and Juliet (I liked it) Some Greek mythology. I loved Greek mythology when I was younger, so there wasn't much new to me.

Lord of the Flies. I remember a decent amount of this.

Great Expectations-Mrs Haverham(sp?) is very memorable. The very ending, epilogue type thing, stuck with me.

These were 10th grade(the only Honors English I took):

Julius Caesar-I remember several points of this. Mostly, I remember reciting the "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech outside the cafeteria. It was either that, or recite a much longer portion just to the teacher. I'm shy, so it wasn't fun. It was good to be pushed out of my comfort zone, though. At some point in the speech, I even decided to try having fun with it by putting emotion into the speech. Basically, acting.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn-Some of the sex stuff was memorable(not in a porn kind of way), though I've kind of forgotten the details by now. I remember realizing where "on the rag" came from.

Exodus by Uris-Barely remember the basic plot. I think it was about the creation of Israel.

Gone with the Wind-I think I cried when the daughter died.

As a twelfth grader, I remember reading books that I knew were way below my reading level. I should've been in honors, but 10th grade was heavy on the essay writing. I didn't like rewriting. Since this was before so many people had computers, rewriting meant actually writing again. Also, Gone with the Wind was 1000 pages. So, 11th and 12th grade I took regular English.

A book written in the same universe as The Outsiders. The way the acid fried the kid's brain was memorable.

Don't remember the year:

The Great Gatsby-I really liked a couple of scenes from it. One was where the girlfriend talked about how she didn't need to drive carefully because other people can do that. Then hit someone.

Hamlet and Macbeth. I remember the basic plots and a few scenes, but that's it.

In college, I read Jane Eyre and a book about a someone going west in the Wild West days. I know he in the epilogue, he became a railroad tycoon. I didn't like Jane Eyre. Between that, Dracula, and maybe another Victorian Era novel, I've decided that they just seem way too concerned with etiquette for me.

A lot of poems a d short stories but this is what I got during my hoghschool years.

Grade 9 Romeo and Juliet (okay) (Mostly read short stories and poems)

Grade 10 Midsummers Nights Dream (pretty good) Animal Farm (found boring) Lord of The Flies (good but not great)

Grade 11 Macbeth ( I was expecting more I guess) Wuthering Heights ( i tried rereading this earlier this year, it's been 9 years, and I couldn't get through it...so nothings changed) The Stone Angel ( really good Canadian Lit)

Grade 12 The Kite Runner ( one of my top 10 ever) Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption ( never fully got through it but liked what read)

I can't remember too much from the early/ mid 90s but, Lord of the Flies - hated it. Still on the curriculum as my coworkers 15yr old sister did it this year Romeo and Juliet - peak Leo era. We watched both movies in class alongside, and I was alone in preferring the 60s version Great Gatsby - I'd already read it. Didn't hate it Great Expectations - didn't mind it. The Pearl - hated it King Lear - I didn't mind it. So much of the joy in Shakespeare is taken out by high school English Studies though Plus a lot of Australian poetry, all of which I thoroughly hated.

The trouble with anything you are forced to read and answer questions on, all the joy and discovery is leached out of the book long before the end. The flow is lost.

I'm wondering if anyone had The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros?

A Tale of Two Cities

1984

Romeo and Juliet

Hamlet

It’s been a while, but the ones I remember are:

9th grade: 1984, Animal Farm (there were definitely more this year, but I think I spaced out on most of the class)

10th grade: Dracula, Frankenstein, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility

11th grade: literally all I remember from this year is The Great Gatsby

12th grade: A Separate Peace, Things Fall Apart, Dante’s Inferno, Catcher in the Rye, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

To be honest, I despised almost every book I read in high school, so a few years later, I decided to give some of them another shot. Turns out, as an adult, a lot of these books have more meaning. I ended up loving A Separate Peace, I enjoyed Dracula, big fan of Gatsby. Still can’t rock with Shakespeare. I appreciate the art form and the stories, but if I’m being honest, it takes more focus to understand them than I want to put in for leisure reading.

In terms of impact, I reference A Separate Peace every once in a while and no one knows what the hell I’m talking about. That’s about it.

I'm from the Philippines so we were required to read the two novels of one of our national heroes, Jose Rizal. In grade 9, we are required to read his first novel "Noli Me Tangere" and we were even given performance tasks where we should re-enact the events in the novel through a play. In grade 10, we are required to read Noli Me Tangere's sequel, El Filibusterismo. Now that I think of it, we also need to read the epic "Florante at Laura" in grade 7.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - yeah I got me some first world problems

Eva Luna - really dug the mystic realism and tried to write like Allende for a while after reading it…

American Gods by Neil Gaiman - loved it. Suited my feelings about religion perfectly. Not impressed with where the tv adaptation went after S1.

No Sugar by Jack Davis. So dated. Kill me now.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - teenage me was disappointed it wasn’t scary in the slightest.

Highschool was pretty standard. College it was the pillow book, and conference of the bird, golden ass, and the symposium by Socrates. What Helped shape my views? That would be a modest proposal which made me laugh my ass off in class.

I honestly don't remember any of them, read what i had to then got back to the books i actually wanted to read, now those i remember ^^

1984 (George Orwell) for fourth-year high-school English and Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) in sixth-year high-school English Literature. Both are brilliant and have stayed with me ever since.

We had The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien) in third-year high-school English. Enjoyed it, but reluctant to say it had a lasting impact.

Intro to Shakespeare was Julius Caesar in third-year high-school English. What a great way to start on his work!

Was somewhat jokingly told that we couldn't finish a BA in English Literature without reading Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Fair enough too, but unfortunately less of an impact, possibly because its reputation left me expecting too much .

-

We also had The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) and The Europeans (Henry James) in sixth-year high school-English Literature which did not work for me at all, but which I expect a few other people would have loved.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller was not compulsory, but what I read for a free choice assignment in third-year English. Absolute masterpiece and such a breath of fresh air from the typical set books up to that point. A massive impact on my life.

Honor's English classes high school, 1970s. Read lots of books, essays written on each. I was doing a lot of acid though and don't remember much. I know that I refused to read Lord Jim as part of our 5 or 6 book summer break assignment. Got a "B" on the essay somehow. Teach let us choose one book of our own to read/write about. I chose A Clockwork Orange. He made me get my parents' permission 1st. It was ok. I picked up a copy of Lord Jim this summer. Will eventually read it for penance. Also since Heart of Darkness is a GOAT.