Inspired by the worst classic book you read thread. Many of the posts reference books that were assigned in school, and I agree with a lot of them. I thought it might be fun to do the inverse.
What books that you read only because it was assigned in high school (or earlier) did you end up enjoying? For the purposes of the thread, stick to books assigned to the entire class. If you got to pick something off a list, like “pick a Newbery winner” there’s a better chance of it being something appealing to you.
For me…
Gulliver’s Travels - We were assigned only parts 1 and 4 (Lilliput and the Yahoos), but I liked it so much I read the entire thing.
Animal Farm
Jane Eyre - Can’t say the same for Wuthering Heights, though.
Huckleberry Finn
Great Expectations - although I think we were assigned an abridged version.
Flowers for Algernon (short story, not the novel)
In 8th grade, a very cool teacher assigned lots of macabre short stories like “The Monkey’s Paw” and “Button, Button”
We read A Wrinkle In Time in fifth grade, and I really got into it, even if the accompanying worksheets (“Define Love”) were bewildering.
Sixth grade was Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Let The Circle Be Unbroken. I wouldn’t say they were tons of fun, but they really stuck with me.
Junior high? Hmm. I was in a bad place in junior high, and the only one I remember really enjoying was “The Mysterious Stranger”, in a Mark Twain collection were were assigned selections from. When I mentioned this one to the teacher, though, she was chagrined and told me it wasn’t part of the assignment.
High school was better. We read Beloved and Cats Cradle and MacBeth and others.
In one high school English class, we were assigned to read “Marathon Man” for some reason. I’m not sure it had any literary merit, but it was a pretty good novel.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The Grapes of Wrath
The Handmaid’s Tale
Dracula (I actually read that before it was assigned, but it still counts, dammit)
The Princess Bride
The Great Gatsby
And from university:
The Disposessed
The Time Machine
The Forever War
Mrs Frisby and The Rats of NIMH. by Robert C. O’Brien It is one of my favorite books and I’ve reread it numerous times. It was retitled The Secret of NIMH when it made into a animated film in the 80s. The film is alright even if it add supernatural elements that weren’t in the book.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. I’ve also read it numerous times. The 1939 movie with Judy Garland is great as well even though it omits parts of the original book.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. A literary classic. I enjoyed it more than *Adventures of Huckleberry Finn *
I also remember reading *The Great Brain * by John D. Fitzgerald and its sequels.
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad – partially: I found most of the book deadly dull; but to my surprise and pleasure, for its final perhaps 50 - 60 pages, for me it suddenly took on un-put-down-able coming-to-life and exciting qualities.
One of the Zolas, I forget which one - I think it was Doctor Pascal ? Got me hooked on the guy.
Most of the theatre was great - Molière, Marivaux, Corneille’s El Cid, Cyrano…
As I said in the other thread, while Notre Dame de Paris wasn’t exactly well received by 11 year old me (I mean seriously, who assigns such complex and overwritten doorstoppers to kids ?!), I really enjoyed the political poetry of his we were assigned when I was 16. Lord of the Flies I remember enjoying at the time, but I think I didn’t really get what it was *really *about until I read it again much later in life. Same with Gulliver’s Travels and Voltaire’s Candide.
Those were all high school books. In college I was assigned Jane Austen *Emma *(which can go fuck itself with a rusty chainsaw) but Midnight’s Children was oddly enjoyable despite some very dull episodes ; Ethan Frome was all right and the complete works of Edgar Poe were just fantastic. Sadly, the final exam landed on fucking Emma, because of course it did. But whoever graded me must have enjoyed my ferociously ranting about what utter shit that book was and how Jane Austen wasn’t subtle, clever, funny nor progressive over 8 pages, because I got a rare 16/20 on that essay…
Unlike some of you, I was never in a class that was assigned whole books to read earlier than high school. Once I got to high school, there were plenty of books we were assigned to read (mostly in English class, but a couple in U.S. History), and most of them I liked okay but didn’t love. The one I remember liking more than I expected to was Oliver Twist: for one thing, I was pleasantly surprised at how much humor there was in Dickens’s writing.
I was forced to read Johnny Tremain in High School. Not something I probably would have selected myself as at that time I was into Steven King and Umberto Eco and various and sundry. I didn’t hate it and still remember most of it 'till this day. For an Australian we learned a lot of American history in our humanities classes through either History proper, Social studies, Politics or Literature. I even took an elective course in American History.
I wasn’t really assigned many books to read in my entire school career. The only one I recall was S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, in ninth grade, and I didn’t think much of it.
However, I was reading up a storm on my own. I was always excited to get my Literature book at the beginning of the year, and I’d take it home and read it straight through…at least for a few years, and then it was all stuff I’d had before.
I remember once in sixth grade, we had a substitute teacher who read aloud to the class from her current book, a biography of Milton Hershey. I borrowed it from her so I could finish it.
I think all the books I read prior to high school were hits: The Pigman, The Outsiders, I Am The Cheese, A Walk Across America and I remember a fondness for No Promises in the Wind which my grandmother bought me for Christmas the year I had read it in 7th grade. She seemed a bit crestfallen when I said I had read it but I really was happy to own a copy (and think it’s still in a closet somewhere).
In high school, I generally liked the Shakespeare stuff we read, thought To Kill A Mockingbird was good, was suitably impressed with Johnny Got His Gun and took a sci-fi lit class where we tackled Frankenstein, The Time Machine, 1984, Flowers for Algernon and Brave New World. Somewhere in middle school or high school I read White Fang which I also enjoyed.
Most of them, really. I enjoy reading in general, even if some of the assigned books I didn’t enjoy as much as I would books that I chose for myself.
Perhaps the most surprising was Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. We read excerpts in English class, which I enjoyed enough that I read the whole thing (and then peppered my subsequent essays in the class with references to the parts that weren’t assigned, on the theory that the teacher must have liked the book or he wouldn’t have assigned excerpts from it). I particularly enjoyed Boethius’s intellectual honesty in not even attempting to prove the existence of God, and just taking it as an axiom.
And I can’t remember if To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were required at the time I first read them, but I’m quite comfortable saying that they’re the two greatest works of American literature.
Little House on the Prairie books were introduced to me in elementary school. I went on to devour them.
Animal Farm was a class assignment in 6th grade. I loved it! It led me to 1984 and also to Brave New World
In 10th grade, a fellow classmate’s rather incoherent oral book report on The Hobbit piqued my curiosity enough to pick up The Lord of the Rings and thus my world was changed.
That reminds me, in the sixth grade I was playing Dungeons & Dragons and my teacher bribed me to do my homework by making mimeographed character sheets if I was caught up. One of the fifth grade teachers must have heard the story in the teacher’s lounge because, when his class was reading The Hobbit, he got an extra copy of the book for me to read independently despite not being in his class or grade. Guess it doesn’t fit the OP (hey, I answered that above) but the posts above jogged my memory of that event.
Gullivers Travels and A Christmas Carol – I read selections from them in grammar school, and liked them so much I got the books and devoured them.
The Odyssey – the complete Robert Fitzgerald translation. We read the whole thing in Freshman (high school) english, and I loved it. I borrowed my mother’s copy of the Richmond Lattimore translation of the Iliad, but I didn’t like the translation. when Fitzgerald’s came out a few years later, I loved it.
A Tale of Two Cities also in Freshman English. Loved it, but when the same class later assigned us Dickens’ Hard Times I learned that, despite Tale and Carol, I didn’t like ALL Dickens.
In college:
Canterbury Tales – I only was assigned a selection, but I ended up reading the whole book.
Androcles and the Lion – This and a great production of Pygmalion were my introduction to George Bernard Shaw. I loved Pygmalion (I hadn’t seen [IMy Fair Lady* yet, so it wasn’t spoiled for me). I didn’t care all that much for Andriocles, but Shaw’s “Preface”, which takes up about as much space as the actual play, was amazing. I started reading all of Shaw’s plays, prefaces and all.
De Rerum Natura by Lucretius* – who would’ve thought a Roman poem on Epicureanism would be so compelling. There wasn’t any more Lucretius, but I started picking up a lot of classical Greek and Roman authors after that.