I recall enjoying Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, and Red Badge of Courage. What worked for me was basically visualizing the book as a movie as I read along.
The most fun book I can remember reading in high school was The Kon-Tiki Expedition by Thor Heyerdahl. I don’t think the scholarship holds up nowadays (or even then), but it was a ripping adventure yarn. I also remember thinking The Admirable Crichton was funny.
Other books that were better than average were Of Mice and Men and The Chosen.
I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings during my high school years. I also read the two Alice books by Lewis Carroll at that time. These are still my choices for the best fantasy books ever written. I read my most personally important nonfiction books before I even entered high school. They are Music of the Spheres by Guy Murchie and One, Two, Three . . . Infinity by George Gamow. The first was what made me decide to be a scientist. The second was what made me decide to more specifically be a mathematician when I read about Cantor’s proof of the uncountability of the real numbers.
Ooh. I just realized that he was NOT – it was Simon in Lord of the Flies, which I read in eighth grade. (I did like the doomed ones. Naturally, I also loved Hamlet.)
I am not sure I would say that I loved LotF, but it did validate what I had already learned from experience, at a time when none of the adults in my life were validating it. (Namely: that some of my peers were absolutely vicious brutes, that when they got together they fed off of and amplified each others’ viciousness, and that being a target didn’t mean you’d done anything wrong.) So thanks, William Golding, for that.
1984 was another novel I was assigned in high school and enjoyed very much. It led me to Brave New World and other dystopian future novels. Interesting, @themapleleaf, that your teacher compared it thematically to The Tempest. I’ll have to reread BNW again-- I do a 1984 reread every 10 years or so but I think I only read BNW once, over 40 years ago.
Yep, I went through an existentialist phase. But like @Spice_Weasel, later on in college for me. A friend of mine lent me a book called The Christian Existentialists (which I think I still have somewhere-- but I lent him books he kept as well). It included passages from famous works of fiction that depicted examples of such. It was very interesting, as one might think that Christianity and existentialism is mutually exclusive. One example was The Grand Inquisitor passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which led me to reading the whole novel.
I went through a Vonnegut phase in high school too, though again I’m not sure if I was introduced by an assignment to read a Vonnegut novel or picked one up on my own.
Another one I loved that I read early on, before the movie Apocalypse Now existed. It was fun to realize, once I did see the movie, that it was based on Conrad’s novel.
Visualizing the book as I read it is something I do as well-- so vividly sometimes that years later in the case of a novel that a movie was made from, I’m not always sure if I actually saw the movie or am just remembering my visualization of the book.
The title of the Aldous Huxley novel is taken from a line in Shakespeare’s play. Prospero’s daughter Miranda, who has grown up on an exotic island where she and her father were exiled by Prospero’s brother, who wanted to usurp from him the dukedom of Milan, only knows the company of Ariel, an air spirit or fairy, and Caliban, an ugly creature who is the product of a liaison between a witch and the devil. Then near the end of the play, having fallen in love with the shipwrecked son of the King of Naples and having finally met his father, her uncle, and their retinue, who have all survived the shipwreck, she is impressed at looking at actual humans, and comments:
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in 't.
The catch being that she doesn’t realize that her uncle and the King are responsible for her exile - she doesn’t realize that humans can be corrupt.
Both The Tempest and Brave New World are about a clash between societies, neither of which is ultimately perfect or completely free.
I know I must have read several books as part of my high school coursework, but mostly I’ve forgotten them. The ones that stand out…
The Great Gatsby, Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, Native Son by Richard Wright.
I don’t count book report reading where I got to choose the book, with one exception. As a freshman, I was given a list of important books that I could choose from for a book report. I chose Kon Tiki, the Thor Heyerdahl account of his crossing of the eastern Pacific on a raft. And while I chose it, when I got to the library with only a couple of days to go before the due date of my report, they didn’t have it.
So I grabbed his earlier book, Fatu Hiva about his time on the Marquesas island of the same name. I was just obsessed with that book. To the point that even now, 40 plus years later, I still want to sail there and set up camp near the central highlands and live close to the land. I’m holding a Powerball ticket for this next drawing. Maybe I can make this happen.
If not the Marquesas, you can fly from Santiago, Chile to Rapa Nui pretty easily. Tours with hotel plus a guide are quite good, and the giant heads, birdman carvings, and the calderas are great. You can see the moai Thor and his companions erected as described in Aku-Aku, and many others are now standing again. I wanted to go there for over 50 years, and while COVID killed our first set of reservations, we made it there last year. Delightful!
Love that!
For me, part of what captured my imagination was the long sea voyage just to get there, so that’s integral to this fantasy.
The part that I’m conveniently forgetting from their time living in the island jungle is their constant battle with parasites and giant, disgusting insects.
Three come to mind immediately:
Brave New World: My introduction to a dystopian future world. It got me interested in such things, and I would go on to enjoy Orwell’s 1984 on my own, which set me up well to study Evgeny Zamyatin’s We when I got to university. And that one is even bleaker than 1984.
Animal Farm: I knew enough history to see it as an allegory, and I really enjoyed how Orwell developed the various personalities of the animals. It piqued my interest to the point where I would later, at university, take a course on the history and politics of the USSR.
Lost Horizon: I knew the basic story from the 1973 movie (as bad as it was, it at least told the basic story), so I was looking forward to reading it when it was assigned. I was not disappointed; the book was much better than that movie. Years later, I would catch the 1937 film version, and it was just as good as the book in every way.
Ah, so the title is a callout to another literary work, like, say, Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ is a callout to ol’ Robbie Burns. I didn’t know that. I’m definitely going to do a reread of Brave New World soon, and maybe The Tempest, too. And maybe Robbie Burn’s work, as well! My Scottish grandma loved Burns. The ‘We hae meat’ quote / poem served as saying grace at holiday meals. Thanks for lessening my ignorance!
I’m glad to have seen this thread because I was about to have started it myself. My sixth grade teacher introduced us to the Hobbit. I was sure I wouldn’t like it but devoured it after starting and of course went on the The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Then there was To Kill a Mockingbird. I once did a thing where I tried to make a list of ten books I could not be without. And TKAM was on it.
I checked out Don Quixote from my high school library and then went to my next class, Spanish. My Spanish teacher saw the library book on my desk and asked me how far I was into it. When I told him I had just checked it out and hadn’t started it yet, he held onto it, went back to his desk, pulled out his copy of the book, which a Spanish edition, and said, “I’ll return the library book for you. Read this one instead.”
I loved that book because I got to talk to him for the rest of the year about it, about the story and the language. My Spanish wasn’t good enough then (and certainly not now) to read it quickly on my own, but his love for it and for Spanish were two things that got me through it. To date, I have not ever read it in English. I’m kind of afraid to do so.
What a great teacher! And, of course, a great book.
A deeply funny book, too.
I loved The Great Gatsby, it’s the first book I recall reading where my feelings about the characters changed across the course of the book, all the way to the ending. It was also the first book where I realized we had an unreliable narrator on hand.
And a play, not a book: Tom Stoppard’s “Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” It wasn’t required reading, but Hamlet was, and I liked that so much that my English teacher recommended the Stoppard play to me. So clever!
I also liked Beowulf and The Great Gatsby. In particular, the particular translation of Beowulf that we read preserved the rhyme scheme of the Old English original. That made it a lot more interesting, plus we read it out loud in class, so you could hear it as it was originally told.
Another one I loved was The Once and Future King by T.H. White.
1984 is one we read at some point; I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, but I’m glad I read it. Most of the books we read didn’t grab me much, and several actually sucked out loud. Others that fit into this category were The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales, and The Brothers Karamazov.
Some of the ones I read on my own that I did enjoy, or am glad I read are: All Quiet on the Western Front, "To Kill a Mockingbird*, "Fahrenheit 451*, The Martian Chronicles, I, Robot, Animal Farm, Red Badge of Courage, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Time Machine.
Ones I was coerced into reading and absolutely loathed: Catcher in the Rye, Great Expectations, The Sun Also Rises (poor Jake gets fucked, except by Brett), ast of Eden, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Most of the rest were unmemorable, and probably unpleasant.
Yea, I liked that one, too.
We had to read On the Beach by Nevil Shute. Really enjoyed that one.
My brother, 6 years older than me, had already introduced me to SF when he was in high school. Books he brought home from college included a boatload of Vonnegut books (which I devoured), and, still one of my all-time favorites, Catch-22, which I read as a high-school freshman.
The one book that I remember that was on the suggested reading list was Lord of the Flies, which I liked, until the ending.
Haha, you saw Gray Lady Down and decided to become a submarine officer, robby? Pretty grim!
(It was HFRO for me, both the book and the movie.)
Actually, I became a submarine officer in spite of seeing Gray Lady Down when I was ten years old. 
That movie gave me lasting nightmares, especially the scene where a guy helped close a heavy watertight door that he was on the wrong side of and subsequently drowned. 
What made me want to join the Navy was a combination of Top Gun (the movie) and the The Hunt for Red October (the book). I subsequently found out I needed eyeglasses during my entrance physical, so being a Navy pilot was out. But serving on subs seemed like a nice consolation prize.
(By the time the HFRO movie came out, I had already signed up, had spent a summer as a midshipman on an SSBN, and was less than a year from graduating and getting my commission.)