Anyway, I wanted to create this ‘other side of the coin’ thread because I had the opposite experience in high school. I’ve always been an avid reader pretty much since I was able to read, but when I was assigned to read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in AP English I dreaded it-- aw jeez, I have to read that dusty, old, almost dictionary-sized book?!?
But I absolutely loved it-- the sweeping vistas Steinbeck described, the character development, the history, the story-- I was blown away. It unlocked my fear of ‘Literature’, it leveled me up as a reader. After that I devoured everything Steinbeck ever wrote, and then went on to tackle novels I never would have otherwise attempted, like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which I also loved.
So, anybody else have a similar, positive eye-opening experience being assigned to read a novel they dreaded cracking open, but ended up loving?
It was during the year I took between high school and college when my high school history teacher suggested I read The Glory and the Dream, a U. S. history book written by William Manchester. I loved it, and still have a copy that I bought.
My absolute favorite was the novel Le grand Meaulnes, in my French class in my final year. Although set in 1890s France, the main characters are teenage boys who were going through similar things as I was at that age. The story is a quest novel with adventure and romance told from the boys’ perspective. To this day, besides Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it is my favorite novel. It would have to be the most inspiring one I read in school.
I also liked Brave New World very much, which my teacher linked thematically to Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
I read Of Mice and Men, which I borrowed from the school library, at home over the weekend, that one was quite enjoyable too. I also borrowed Animal Farm from a teacher in Grade 9, that also made for a quick but edifying read.
A Tale of Two Cities. I started it thinking I hated Dickens (we’d read Great Expectations the year before, and fourteen-year-old me just didn’t have enough life experience or historical / cultural knowledge to get it, at the time). I was so wrong. Such great storytelling, and Sydney Carton was my first literary crush.
Honestly, I liked a lot of the books we read in high school (not surprising, I grew up to be an English professor), but that’s the one that really stands out because it surprised me so much.
I honestly don’t recall what books were assigned in high school, tho I do remember a friend asking “Did you get to the part where the dog dies?” Thanks.
What I do remember is Miss Jenkins, my 10th grade English teacher, mentioning The Hobbit. Thanks, Miss J!! Such a gift you gave me!
Some I loved (mostly already mentioned in the other thread)
The Odyssey (Robert Fitzgerald translation)
A Tale of Two Cities
The Grapes of Wrath
The Old Man and the Sea
Macbeth
Purlie Victorious
Books I had to read in college that I Liked:
The Odyssey (Robert Fitzgerald translation)
The Patrocleia (Book 16 of The Iliad as translated by Christopher Logue. I highlt recommend this. It’s completely off-the-wall and unlike any other translation you’ve ever read.)
De Rerum Natura by Lucretius (Rolfe Humphries translation) – Lucretius anticpates Galileo and other later philosophers. Great suff.
Androcles and the Lion by George Bernard Shaw. The play wasn’t the interesting part – Shaw’s introduction, with its dissection of Christianity, was.
The Canterbury Tales – by Geoffrey Chaucer and translated by Nevill Coghill (Penguin edition)
Lysistrata and other plays – by Aristophanes , translated by Dudley Fitts. Definitely worth the reading. And look for the illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, which are NSFW.
Plato – various dialogues, by several translators
There are lots of others I can’t recall. I read a LOT of classics on my own in college, because they were so available. I started reading the unabridged War and Peace by Tolstoy, then saw that there was a course on it scheduled for the next semester, and signed up for it. I figured I ought to get credit for it, since I was already reading it.
I’ll also add that in grammar school we read excerpts from some books that encouraged me to read the whole thing, including A Christmas Carol and Gulliver’s Travels. I also read an excerpt from Beowulf – translated into modern English, of course. And eventually I read it(I have about half a dozen different translations at home), but not until much, much later.
I actually liked Catcher in the Rye. I believe there was a bit where Holden was talking to a girl, and allusion is made to the fact that her stepfather had been sexually abusing her (IIRC). At the time I was dating a girl who had been sexually assaulted (not by her stepfather), and so I could kind of obliquely relate.
I really liked Les Misérables (abridged version). Yes, I’ve heard the full original unabridged version is quite a slog, but when you get rid of all the unnecessary stuff and boil it down to its essence, it makes for a really good story.
I honestly don’t remember books read for school, other the aforementioned loathsome Wuthering Heights. Outside of school, I was mostly into science fiction, reading pretty much everything I could get my hands on by Bradbury, Asimov and many others.
I absolutely loved To Kill a Mockingbird, which we read in 9th grade English. It’s still one of my favorite books of all time, and when people ask hypotheticals like “what one book would you make everyone read,” Mockingbird is one of the books I think of.
The other book I read in school that I absolutely adored was The Great Gatsby, which we read in 11th grade English. I thought it was both quite interesting and had great writing, and later when I met my husband made him read it too when I found out he hadn’t. Also still a favorite of mine. I read other Fitzgerald on the strength of that one but didn’t really like any of his other books nearly as well.
I also liked Beowulf (translated into modern English) a lot, but I’m sure that had more to do with my English teacher at the time being amazing (and also maybe that he mentioned that Tolkien was a Beowulf scholar, which led me to Tolkien’s “The Monster and the Critics” essay). (By contrast, I don’t recall anything my teachers said about Gatsby or Mockingbird; I loved the books independent of whatever was said about them in class.)
I took a scifi lit course my senior year which was pretty good on the hits: The Time Machine, Frankenstein, 1984, I, Robot and The Martian Chronicles were all good reads. I don’t remember much from the basic English portions of school that really grabbed me. Great Expectations, Romeo & Juliet, Grapes of Wrath, Moby Dick, etc were more “gotten through okay” than anything that really grabbed me. I almost struggle to remember what we read; it’s more of a “Oh yeah, we did that one” if I hear the name than a fond remembrance. I know I read All Quiet on the Western Front and think it was in freshman HS lit so I’ll give that one credit as worthwhile on its own merits.
Junior High was a great time for me with assigned literature. The Outsiders, No Promises in the Wind, The Pigman, I Am the Cheese, White Fang… all bangers. I’d rather reread No Promises than Great Expectations any day of the week. Maybe because they were just more books & stories than Very Important Literature.
It’s one of my favorite books. I read it when I was 13, but it wasn’t an assignment. As a young writer, I needed to learn just how flawed protagonists can get, and I related to a lot of the themes, and I kinda had a crush on Holden, because he white knighted a lot of girls.
10th grade English introduced me to my favorite writer, Ray Bradbury, in the short story All Summer in a Day. We also read Poe, who I honestly think is the only writer who can give Shakespeare a run for his money. His prose is astonishing.
And while Shakespeare is not my favorite author, I enjoyed reading him. I wrote a very long poem summarizing The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.
An early morning meeting held by Caius Cassius
That day to seal the Caesar’s fate was all the traitors needed
The (Caesar’s wife?) was terrified and put up such a fuss
Her dream a vivid warning that alas, just was not heeded
And we had to choose a scene of Romeo and Juliet to perform, and of course I went for the priest as he was the most interesting character to me. Everyone else was working in groups, but I did it by myself, playing both characters, with a sign that I flipped depending on who was speaking. I memorized the whole thing even though we didn’t have to. I was weird.
It wasn’t just reading; in that class we also had to watch the Hitchcock classic The Birds and then write a short story based on it. I wrote a story from the perspective of a young girl who had grown up with killer birds as a fact of life. She didn’t perceive it as out of the ordinary. My teacher responded that it was college-level writing, and then he did the most wonderful thing: he critiqued my work. Like a full critique you would get in a writing workshop. It was the first time in my life a teacher didn’t just rubber-stamp everything I wrote. The first person to take me seriously as a writer. I was over the moon.
And I mentioned this in another thread, for our final exam we watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
This almost qualifies. My best friend in 10th grade was in a different English class, where the teacher decided to do a unit on existentialism. They read Sartre, Camus, and Kafka, and my friend passed the books and stories along to me. Goddamn did existentialism hit just right for my depressed teenaged self.
I signed up for a course with that teacher, but two weeks before the course was to begin, he put in his two weeks’ resignation. He started an artsy theater in town, which I went to a lot, but I never really forgave him.
I wasn’t looking forward to Slaughterhouse-Five in 9th grade because I’d already seen the movie and it just confused me. I fell in love with Vonnegut’s writing and devoured the rest of his books during the summer before 10th grade.
I have a few (but only the last one was actually in high school):
The first one was Where the Red Fern Grows. My 5th grade teacher actually read it to the class over the course of several weeks. When he finished, I asked to borrow it over the weekend so I could read it again. I then proceeded to read the whole book that night from start to finish in one sitting. (Actually I was supposed to be in bed so I read it under the covers by flashlight.)
When I brought the book back on Monday morning, some kid made a sarcastic remark saying, “I thought you were going to read the whole book,” probably because it had taken our teacher weeks to read the book to the class. “I did,” I replied, “…before I went to sleep on Friday night. And then I read it again on Sunday.” Anyway, I have read the book many times since and the ending always chokes me up.
The next was Watership Down, which I read in 7th grade. We were required to pick a book off a list to read (with no description whatsoever and only the author and title to go by) and I picked that one because I had recently seen Gray Lady Down in the movie theater and thought the book would be about a ship or submarine. Imagine my surprise when the book arrived and there was a rabbit on the cover! Anyway, I read the book and absolutely loved it.
The high school-assigned book was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which we were required to read in 9th grade. It’s not a book I would ever have picked up without being forced to (as I was more into science fiction and fantasy at the time), but I think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.
