Just curious as to which works are assigned in High School now.
My High School English Lit. classes included:
Alas Babylon
To Kill a Mockingbird
Crime and Punishment
1984
Animal Farm
Julius Caesar
Romeo and Juliet
The Crucible
Our Town
Fahrenheit 451
The Scarlet Letter
This is a recollection of several high school English classes, in the late 1970s-
Siddhartha
Crime & Punishment
Tale of Two Cities
Animal Farm
The Scarlet Letter
Those I liked…
and now the three worst books I had to read for school-
Giants in the Earth
Main Street
An American Tragedy
I went to high school in the 70’s, and read many of the selections posted.
I have a kid who is a freshman in high school. Here is what he’s reading:
Maus
Julius Caesar
Kindred
The Color of Water
Homer’s Odyssey
Inherit the Wind
Siddhartha
The Green Mile
There’s more but that’s all I can think of right now.
I went to high school in the mid-late eighties. Our list included the following (in no particular order).
The Grapes of Wrath
Of Mice and Men
The Good Earth
Animal Farm
The Chocolate War
Romeo and Juliet
Julius Caesar
MacBeth
Hamlet
R.U.R.
Oedipus The King
Flowers For Algernon
The Scarlet Letter
The Jungle
The Crucible
Death Of A Salesman
Catcher In The Rye
Billy Budd
Heart of Darkness
Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
In the late 70s, we read:
The Pearl
The Old Man and the Sea
Cannery Row
1984
Animal Farm
The Scarlet Letter
To Kill a Mockingbird
Julius Caesar (by the way, you do know why all high school students get to rid this particular one–it’s the only Shakespeare play with no sex.)
My personal theory, developed after we were assigned THE PEARL for the third year in a row, is that all books assigned in high school are required to be depressing and despairing.
I remember reading (late 90s)…
Lord of the Flies
Candide
Some of The Inferno
A Modest Proposal
The Scarlet Letter
Julius Caesar
The Crucible
Death Of A Salesman
Catcher In The Rye
Antigone
The Tempest
Cat’s Cradle
Leaves of Grass
The only one I enjoyed was Candide. They make kids read bleak, depressing books, then wonder why they don’t read.
High School 1996-2000. Let’s see what I can remember.
Freshman Year
Lord of the Flies
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Diary of Anne Frank
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
When Legends Die
Julius Caesar
Antigone
Sophomore Year
The Crucible
The Grapes of Wrath
Huckleberry Finn
Walden
Junior Year
The Once and Future King
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Ethan Frome (ick!)
The Importance of Being Ernest
MacBeth
Senior Year
Les Miserables
The Fountainhead
The Iliad
1984
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Hamlet
The Catcher in the Rye
Flowers for Algernon
I’m probably missing some, but this is from 1996-2000 as well.
A Separate Peace
Great Expectations
Romeo and Juliet
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Into Thin Air
The Prince and the Pauper
MacBeth
Le Morte D’Arthur
Canterbury Tales
A Modest Proposal
Alice in Wonderland
Gulliver’s Travels
Night
All Quiet on the Western Front
Les Miserables
Oedipus
Hamlet
The Color Purple
What schools did you people go to?
8 novels in 9 months? i don’t believe it. I might believe an excerpt. But I can’t believe even the best private schools had that heavy of a reading list.
I taught English, on the college level, and the only course I’d see that kind of reading in was The Novel. There we did a book a week. But even in College Lit. . .sophomore level course, there was never a novel a month. . .
Just your average suburban public school…
Perhaps I should have made it clear that Night and All Quiet on the Western Front were both required readings in my History class, not English. And Alice in Wonderland (plus one other book I can’t recall) were a part of our summer readings. So that makes it around 5 or so books in one year of English. I’m sure that seems a bit more reasonable.
1994-1998 my high school assigned
The Old Man and the Sea
The Red Badge of Courage
Les Miserables
Siddhartha
The Jungle
Great Expectations
Death of a Salesman
Raisin in the Sun
The Crucible
Wuthering Heights
Beowulf
…plus the Holy Trio of Shakespeare: Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar. Another English class read A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
When I was student teaching at another high school in 2001-2002, my class read
Julius Caesar
The Song of Roland
Night
All Quiet on the Western Front
Gilgamesh
Utopia
High school sophmore checking in. Im in the AP class, so while we don’t read harder books per say, but more of them.
Freshman:
A Tale of Two Cities
Great Expectations
Mythology
Romeo and Juliet
Animal Farm
Sophomore:
To Kill a Mockingbird
A Seperate Peace
Brave New World
Much Ado About Nothing
Julius Caesar
Lord of the Flies
thats all I remember right now, prolly gonna have a lot more this year
High school 1987-1991 and these are what I remember reading during that time (as far as what years…I don’t really remember).
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Lord of the Flies
Great Expectations
Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Jungle
Brave New World
1984
Frankenstein
Space
Romeo and Juliet
Beowulf
Grendel
The Handmaid’s Tale
Canterbury Tales
Don Quixote
Antigone
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Once and Future King
The Scarlet Letter
An American Tragedy
This includes the summer reading that I remember along with what was read during the school year.
The English isn’t very interesting, really, and a few books we just blew through in two or three periods because the curriculum required them, no test/writings. Aside from the old standby of Catcher in the Rye, probably the favorite book I’ve ever read for school, there’s not much that kept my mind. Here’s the few highlights (for 2000-2004)-
The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Odeipus Rex & Antigone
Ender’s Game Orson Scott Card (Well, interesting to a sophomore who’s never read much and has a way-too-low opinion of people who actually do know better. It seemed moderately bland and incredibly sloppy the second time I tried to read it, though.)
Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and R&J
Homer’s “Oddessy”
Watership Downs, Richard Adams
All the King’s Men Robert Penn Warren (or is it Warren Penn?)
The Books for history were much more memorable.
A World Lit only by Fire
Taipan
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Guns of August
Candide
The Prince AND Sun Tzu’s Art of War in one double-print book.
From sophomore year on in my high school, the advanced English classes read books during the summer. (And now, even the freshmen have summer reading.) That would definitely account for a portion of my list.
I was in high school from 1999-2003 and these are the plays & novels/extremely long short stories that I can remember:
I went to just a normal, suburban high school, but all my classes were Honors/AP, and I ought to have specified that my list included summer reading as well. For example, my senior year, Les Mis and The Fountainhead (the biggies) were both summer reading.
That’s down to six novels over nine months. 1984 and The Catcher in the Rye are both fairly easy reads; I would guess we spent about two-three weeks each on those. The only other tough book from my senior year was The Iliad, and so we went a bit more slowly through it. If I recall correctly, though, it’s still fairly short, about 150 pages, so it didn’t take that long to get through.
Otherwise, all I can say is (my senior year especially), I had some pretty intensive English classes in high school.
High School 2001-2004 (3.5 Months left), all MYP/IB English classes. A random sampling, not an exclusive list of what we’ve read since freshman year:
Romeo and Juliet
The Metamorphosis
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
Great Expectations
All Quiet on the Western Front
Animal Farm
The Scarlet Letter**
Siddhartha*
A Tale of Two Cities
Things Fall Apart
God’s Bits of Wood
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Hamlet
One Day in the LIfe of Ivan Denisovich
Chronicle of a Death Foretold*
The Stranger**
One Hundred Years of Solitude**
The Invisible Man
Jane Eyre
To Kill a Mockingbird
Julius Caeser
The Oedipus Trilogy
Candide*
The Things They Carried
Master Harold and the Boys
A Seperate Peace
July’s People
1995-1999
Let’s see if I can divide the books into years.
Freshman
Aenied (summer I think)
Illiad
Odyssey
Great Expectations
Oedipus Rex
Antigone
Oedipus at Colonnus
Sophomore
Moby Dick (just selections, most of which I didn’t read either. Sixteen year old girls don’t really have an abiding interest in whaling)
Scarlet Letter
The Crucible
Death of a Salesman
(and a few other things, but god help me if I can remember them. It was the American literature year.
Junior
1984
Brave New World
Beowulf(not sure if you want to count that though)
Frankenstein (summer)
Pride and Prejudice (summer)
Wuthering Heights
Return of the Native
Heart of Darkness
Senior
Brothers Karmazov
Crime and Punishment
Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Selections from Dubliners
All Quiet on the Western Front (History)
Shakespeare
through the years we read these plays, I gave up on trying to figure out when we read what.
Othello
Hamlet
Romeo and Juliet
The Tempest
Merchant of Venice
Julius Caesar
In Junior and Senior years, we also read poetry out of what we all called “The Tome”. It’s a huge anthology of poetry collected by the teachers at my high school over the years and printed up for the students. I’m actually a little sad. I was one of the first years to get a tome in two halves. My sister has the massive full size tome. It’s almost an honor to get one.
-Lil
I’m horrible at remembering things but this year we’ve read so far:
City of Glass
Waiting for Godot
Hamlet
Oedipus and Antigone
All Quiet on the Western Front
The French Liutenant’s Woman
Left to go we have Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours
We also spend time prepping for an AP exam, which is about the least interesting thing I’ve ever done.
(1996-2000)
9th Grade:
Great Expectations
Romeo and Juliet
The Name of the Rose
Things Fall Apart
The Odyssey, but only about half of it.
10th Grade:
A Separate Peace
Antigone
Julius Caesar
Of Mice and Men
11th Grade:
The Grapes of Wrath
The Scarlet Letter
Beloved
The Great Gatsby
Huckleberry Finn
As I Lay Dying
12th Grade:
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Their Eyes were Watching God
A Doll’s House
Hamlet
Macbeth
Canterbury Tales