Let’s see…
A Tale of Two Cities
Things Fall Apart
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Heart of Darkness
A Hero of our Time
Romeo and Juliet
Othello
Macbeth
Taming of the Shrew
The Great Gatsby
The Sun also Rises
The Scarlet Letter
Frankenstein
Dracula
Jane Eyre
Lord of the Flies
The Jungle
The Crucible
*
Probably more I’m forgetting, but that’s off the top of my head.
What I can remember
Freshman year:
The Old Man and the Sea
Romeo and Juliet
Much Ado About Nothing
Sophomore year:
A Tale of Two Cities
Great Expectations
Julius Cesaer
A Separate Peace
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Count of Monte Cristo (abridged version- read the full version a few years later on my own. I love that book.)
Junior year:
The Scarlet Letter (I hate this book. We spent an entire semester on it. My teacher was obsessed with Nathaniel Hawthorn. She even had a framed picture of him on her desk.)
A Raisin in the Sun
The Great Gatsby
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I skipped out on senior year English class. Instead I started freshman English in college rather than taking an AP class.
On the Beach by Nevil Shute
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
The Great Gatsby by F. Fitzgerald
I love the commonality here. I can add The Awakening and A Separate Peace (Junior year) and The Bluest Eye (Senior year, and may I add "yuck).
What I can remember:
Brave New World
Song of Solomon
As I Lay Dying
Rashomon
The Once and Future King
Henry the IV, part 1
Romeo and Juliet
A Raisin in the Sun
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
The Great Gatsby
Of Mice and Men
To Kill a Mockingbird
Canterbury Tales
*Parts of *Huckleberry Finn
A little ofMoby Dick
Stars by the ones I wouldn’t recommend reading alone.
The Advanced Placement English Literature reading list will probably give you a good starting point.
Let’s see what I can remember:
Hiroshima
Catcher in the Rye
Great Gatsby
The Crucible
Old Man and the Sea
To Kill a Mockingbird
Hamlet
Macbeth
The Scarlet Letter
Red Badge of Courage
Death of a Salesman
I know there were more, but these are the ones I remember. I know that I read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass for my 10th grade paper, several Kurt Vonnegut novels (including Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions)for my 11th grade paper, and several Bertolt Brecht plays for my 12th grade paper.
Hm. I always thought our Lit teacher was a manic depressive because of the crap she gave us to read. Such as:
The Bell Jar
Go Ask Alice
On The Beach
Lord of the Flies (to this day, I get the creeps just looking at the cover)
1984 & Brave New World at the same time. Then compare & discuss. :rolleyes:
The Red Badge of Courage
Wuthering Heights. OMFG, Wuthering F**king Heights. I would cheerfully open a vein rather than ever have to read that godawful thing again. With so many fascinating books to read, why would someone inflict this depressing dreck on a bunch of hormonal teenagers? Okay, faves: Stranger In A Strange Land, Grapes of Wrath
High School:
Treasure Island
Kidnapped
Silas Marner
Red Badge of Courage
Tale of Two Cities
Moby Dick
Animal Farm
Zev Steinhardt
Freshman year:
The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Odyssey, by Homer
Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare
Beowulf
Sophomore:
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Billy Budd (AAAAAAAAAARGH!) by Herman Melville
You Can’t Take It With You, by Kaufman & Hart
Macbeth, by Shakespeare
Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
Junior:
Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh
The Dead, by James Joyce
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by Shakespeare
Othello, by Shakespeare
Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde
Senior:
Well, senior year, we had a host of electives… but within my electives, I remember reading:
Ulysses, by James Joyce
Diary of a Country Priest, by Georges Bernanos
Polonaise, by Piers Paul Read
Viper’s Tangle, by Francois Mauriac
The Cherry Orchard, by Chekhov
Mind you, I’m leaving out a lot of poetry and a lot of short stories we had to read.
I went to a Christian school which strongly dissaproved of “secular” literature, so we had to read such literary gems as * In His Steps * and * Martyr of the Catacombs. There were many others, the titles of which I have successfully blocked from my memory-- stories of Christians standing up to persecution and whatnot. All were terrible. Half of the reading list was books by one woman who seemed to have a bitter anti-Catholic bias.
In eleventh grade, they considered us indocrinated enough to risk reading one “secular” novel: * Heidi. * Even this was a bit too risque to pass without a disclaimer lable pasted in the front cover which said the ideas expressed therein were not necessarily those of the administration. I kid you not.
In no particular order:
*Rebecca
Romeo & Juliet
Hamlet (I couldn’t have hated this more)
12th Night
Midsummer Night’s Dream
Grapes of Wrath
Dubliners
Wuthering Heights (12 girls discussing Heathcliff is an invitation for suicide)
Return of the Native (Class discussion started with "Eustacia Vye is a BITCH)
Pride & Prejudice ( I had already read it several times…)
Scarlet Letter
Cat’s Cradle
Importance of Being Earnest
Things Fall Apart
Kaffir Boy
Great Gatsby
The Awakening
A Brave New World
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings[/i[
There were more that have escaped my memory. In addition to all of this reading, we had to memorize one poem a month as freshman and sophomores and present them to the class… Invictus will remain with me until the day I die
I take it you mean this in a negative way? (Just curious.)
Actually not.
As it is every year at my school, Invictus was the very first poem that we were assigned to memorize and we were all paranoid that we wouldn’t be able to do it. So we started early and practiced often to make sure we had it. On the day it was due, the freshman class would be walking the halls muttering “Out of the night that covers me” At which point, the rest of the school would join in and finish the poem. Imagine 150 girls wandering the halls of school chanting “under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloodied but unbowed”
Side note: When I got to college and was discussing this with a friend of mine who then chimed in and recited the poem with me. It turns out that the Omega Psi Phi fraternity (at least at my school) required their pledges to memorize it as well.
Here’s an incomplete list off the top of my head:
-To Kill a Mockingbird
-Antigone
-Romeo and Juliet
-A Tale of Two Cities
-The Awakening (Wow, I hated that book.
I actually cheered out loud when she drowned herself. Finally, something happened in that book.)
-The Scarlet Letter
-Billy Budd (Ick.)
-The Heart of Darkness
-Crime and Punishment (In retrospect, a good book, but it was a summer read and I got confused easily.)
-Potrait of an Artist as a Young Man (It was June of senior year. I read the first part and blew the rest off. I have no regrets.)
-As I Lay Dying
-Antigone (Anwee’s[sic] version)
-The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
-The Sun Also Rises
-Hamlet
-The Sign and the Seal (I had a very cool, very liberal world cultures teacher senior year.)
Mem’ries…INPO:
Of Mice and Men
Brave New World
Catcher in the Rye
Hamlet
Macbeth
Romeo and Juliet
Julius Caesar
The Old Man and the Sea
A Separate Peace
Oedipus
Antigone
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Huckleberry Finn
Tale of Two Cities
The Metamorphosis
A Christmas Carol
Pride and Prejudice
The Crucible
Death of a Salesman
The Scarlet Letter
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Great Gatsby
All My Sons
The Glass Menagerie
Jesus I hope that was it! That list turned out to be longer than I thought it would, but I kept scrolling back and seeing other titles I’d forgotten about.
From what I can remember:
Freshman year:
Romeo & Juliet
certainly some other works, but they obviously didn’t stick with me at all
Sophomore year:
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
Death of a Salesman
The Crucible
a great deal of Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories
Junior year:
Hamlet
Macbeth
Lord of the Flies
Pride and Prejudice
Beowulf
excerpts from The Canterbury Tales
the book of Genesis from the Bible
excerpts from Paradise Lost
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (not an assignment, exactly, but we had to do a term paper that year and I picked that book off the list)
Senior year:
(this teacher was more into modern works than any of the rest, so we read a big variety to work everything in that we needed for the AP test, especially those of us who were in English and then her survey of western lit class…I think I did more reading for those two classes than my whole time in high school prior)
Mama Day by Gloria Naylor
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
Oedipus Rex
Othello (after we read/watched this, she showed us Branagh’s version of Much Ado About Nothing since we never read anything by Shakespeare but his tragedies)
Henry V (actually, we read excerpts and watched Branagh’s version thanks to her whole “plays are meant to be watched” mentality)
Billy Budd (gahhh…I hate Melville’s style. My class had a ritual “bonfire” with our copies once we finished reading)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (I liked this book so much, I decided to try Ulysses on my own. Definitely not the best idea I ever had.)
selections from Dubliners
The Cherry Orchard
some Tolstoy & Chekhov “short stories” that would qualify as novels if written by anyone else
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Importance of Being Earnest
Waiting for Godot
Looking at this list, I wonder if there’s not some weird gap in my knowledge of American literature. I’ve not read all that much, considering. 10th grade was the American lit class, but my teacher was rather incompetent.
I can’t remember all of them, but here’s a list of what I can think of offhand:
Animal Farm
Great Expectations
Silas Marner
The Glass Menagerie
The Telltale Heart
Wuthering Heights
Henry IV Part I
Brideshead Revisited
Grendel
Catcher in the Rye
My Name is Asher Lev
MacBeth
Romeo & Juliet
Hamlet
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Great Gatsby
The Portrait of Dorian Grey
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
King Lear
Macbeth
Animal Farm
Romeo and Juliet
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Great Gatsby
and some some autobiography about One Woman’s Struggle Against the Kamh Rouge (forgotten the name)
Short Stories:
“my years junior” = My junior years :smack: