Sorry, the setup was so obvious and tempting I couldn’t resist—and I suspected you might have put it there deliberately, and would have been disappointed if nobody took the bait.
No. Might be why we’re not very good at irony.
I checked the official ‘examenprogramma’ (program of examinations?), which specifies as a minimum, under domain E: Literature: Subdomain E1 literary development, 8 books for HAVO(don’t know international equivalent), 12 for VWO (prepares for university, in principle), including 3 dating before 1880, originally written in Dutch. So books by in Belgians in Dutch (e.g. Willem Elschot, Hugo Claus) or by someone from the former colonies (e.g. Frank Martinus Arion, the Antilles) could also be read.
There is usually no option to take an English lit class in high school. If you go to a private high school an English lit class may be available as an after school option. I actually teach such a class, and yes, we do read novels. So far we’ve read Of Mice and Men, Flowers for Algernon, and The Color Purple.
A play by David Williamson. My Brother Jack by George Meredith. I Can Jump Puddles by Alan Marshall.
I can’t think of anything in New Zealand that would’ve been considered mandatory, or default assumed, reading in our schools. There are a few ubiquitous children’s authors like Margaret Mahy and Maurice Gee that are often included in the curriculum, but no guarantees you’d see either of them. Classical NZ authors include Katherine Mansfield, who was barely a New Zealander at all as most of her writing was done in England, and Frank Sargeson, a short story writer who used a lot of local colloquial terms which was an unusual practice for the time.
But as New Zealand is such a young country, and local writing is constantly changing with the times, I would suspect that most schools now read completely different authors, probably more often contemporary, than I grew up with, so for that reason I don’t think there’s likely to be anything that really fits within the OP’s description.
We read To Kill A Mockingbird at my High School. I didn’t get it, it’s about things I have no understanding of (especially at the age I read it, 14yrs) and it flew completely over my head.
I attended a South African English-medium secondary school, and our canon was the standard Western fare - Shakespeare, Dickens, DH Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Steinbeck, Lee, Orwell, Lord of the Flies, and a couple of Victorian and Modern poetry anthologies (so everything from Ozymandias and Ode to a Nightingale to Emperor of Ice Cream and You Fit Into Me)
I think every educated adult would have at least a passing familiarity with Shakespeare, but I don’t think the other stuff is the same for everyone.
I was at High School from 1989-1993, we read Lord of the Flies but not To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye I still haven’t read either, and likely never will. I did try to read Catcher once but found Holden Caulfield to be such a whiny little shit I gave up after a chapter or two.
I remember reading The Old Man and the Sea, and That was then and This is Now for High School English as well. For the Bursary exams we could choose any novel we liked, I chose Brave New World.
Looking at the NZQA NCEA English standards for level 3 this still seems to be the case - there aren’t any set texts for novels, but everyone has to do one of 5 plays by Shakespeare - in 2012 the list was Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, King Lear, and The
Merchant of Venice. I remember doing Macbeth and King Lear back last century.
Not when I was at school.
Pretty much this. Of the New Zealand novels I’ve read I think Man Alone and Season of the Jew would be good novels to include. Maybe Owls do Cry as well? Certainly not The Bone People anyway.
Ah yes, Maurice Shadbolt. We read Among The Cinders. I don’t know what the criteria are for picking books for schools, but they sure knew how to pick dull ones.
For Canada, there is no work that would meet this criteria, for two reasons:
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Since we are a bilingual country, kids in French schools will take French literature, kids in English schools will take English literature. Particularly in Quebec, the curriculum will cover a lot of Quebec authors, who are not read widely in the rest of Canada at the school level.
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Our culture is strongly regional. For instance, if you’re in Saskatchewan, odds are that you’ve read “Who Has Seen the Wind?” set in Saskatchewan in the Depression, but I doubt that it’s read widely in the Maritimes.
Overall, I can’t think of a specific Canadian work that I would assume all Canadians are familiar with. We’re more likely to get the “Western Canon” that other posters have mentioned (Shakespeare, Dickens, etc. ), with some Canadian works tossed in.
When I think of (English) Canadian authors that got read in school when I was a kid, Farley Mowat, Margaret Atwood and Mordechai Richler come to mind. I bet anyone of my generation would have read at least one of “Never Cry Wolf”, “The Handmaid’s Tale” or “Jacob Two-Two Meets The Hooded Fang”.
Of those three, I’ve only read Never Cry Wolf, but it wasn’t in school.
And of those three, I’ve only read Jacob Two-Two. The “one of these three” system works! 
In our area, there seemed to be a big list and teachers from junior high and high school would choose what they wanted to work with from the big list. As an example, in junior high and high school, I knew friends who were reading Lord of the Flies. But I’ve still never read it. (When I told my son that, recently, he was annoyed. Because he changed schools several times, he’s had it assigned by six different teachers.) I’ve also never read To Kill a Mockingbird.
I think I only read a few novels until Senior English (AP), and the only one I can remember off hand is Animal Farm. There were a lot of anthologies. The Summer before AP English we were given a big list of books to read before Fall. I think I read half of them. Things like **The Red and the Black **by Stendhal, The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce. I bogged down on that last one.
When school started, the teacher didn’t care who had read what. We were all going to pick an author, read their works, read books about them, and teach a class on them to our fellow students toward the end of the school year. I got dibs on Steinbeck while several people were lobbying for Vonnegut. (Mom had recently taken college clases to complete her AA and had bought most of Steinbeck’s novels in paperback for one class.) So my high school reading is Steinbeck heavy.
I’ve been trying to put a response to this into words, and something which came up yesterday finally gelled it.
First, while we did get fragments from books originally written in other languages, or the whole books, in Universal Lit, or History, or Philosophy, there was never an option to study Elsewhere Lit.
Second, there are a TON of things about that second language’s literature which should properly be taught but are not, not even at the highest levels which in theory qualify you to teach that language yourself. Some bits from English which I’ve caught here and there, but which I never got taught, despite having attended ESL classes in Spain, Ireland and the US for over 20 years:
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in English, dialectal pronunciations are usually represented. Spelling of dialogue or song words will attempt to reflect any non-standard pronunciation. I learned this thanks to the lyrics to Queen’s The Works (age 15), later encountered it in comic books (18), confirmed it during my first visit to the US (20).
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any similarity between names of literary devices or elements in English and Spanish is likely to be misleading (cf. aliterativo/alliterative in this same thread)
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same goes for literary forms. Both an English sonnet and a Spanish soneto are descended from the same Italian form, but they’re very different. A Spanish romance is a type of poem with rima asonante (again those false friends) every other verse, often a saga; an English romance is a lovey-dovey novel.
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English verse is measured in feet rather than syllables. This is enormously important! It’s linked to that question asked by so many ESL-speakers whose first language is syllabic-based and who ponder “how come if you give to an Englishman a sentence with ten words, of which only one is polysyllabic, he’s likely to stop and breathe in in the middle of the polysyllabic word, which is the last place I’d do it?” - answer, the Englishman doesn’t think in terms of syllables as we do. It’s also linked to “why are EFL-speakers so bad at separating syllables in another language?” - answer, they’re not used to doing it in their own language, we do it without thinking but they need to think. Most EFL folk separate syllables in Spanish at about the same level as a child who’s in the first year of doing it, whereas an Italian or a Frenchman have zero problems.
I learned this from reading the intro to a book of Spanish verse with English comentary, age… 40 or so. -
I still don’t know how the heck to count feet. I don’t know how to detect them! Which means that yes, and I and many other foreigners have been told this by English-language teachers whose first language was English, I come up for air in places they find strange.
Would that be 매밀꽃 필무렵?
Actually it’s titled 소나기 (shower, as in a rain shower).
Norway doesn’t have a set of books everyone reads in school so much as certain authors who everyone reads in school. You don’t get through school here without reading some Ibsen, some Hamsun, some Bjørnson and some Undset. The two guys in the house who have been through a full run of Norwegian public schools said to add Kielland and Vergeland (a poet, not a novelist so much).