I, too, enjoyed most of my academic assigned reading. A couple that have always stuck with me as very glad to have been assigned, as I would probably have never picked them up on my own, were Crime and Punishment and Candide.
Lots of Greek plays
Heart of darkness
A separate peace
Catcher in the rye
Lots of stuff. I should probably look at a list of classics to remind myself what i read, then. I hated a lot of it, especially the American literature, for whatever reason, but i liked a lot, too.
Huckleberry Finn was the best without question.
e
The Old Man and the Sea
The Prince and the Pauper
The Mosquito Coast
In grammar school, in third or fourth grade we were assigned The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary and Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. I don’t remember much about the former, but the latter established my love for Judy Blume and I tore through pretty much all her books the next few years.
Also, in seventh or eighth grade (we had the same English teacher for both, so I can’t remember which grade it was), we read Flowers for Algernon, which I remember both enjoying very much and being creeped out by. In retrospect, it did seem a bit of an odd choice for a somewhat conservative Catholic school due to its sexual bits, but I don’t remember any parent complaining or any kids snickering about it. I’d be curious to revisit it to see what I think now.
Oh, and there was also Lord of the Flies in eighth grade. That was right up my alley.
In high school, I loved Catcher in the Rye. I know lots of people hate it, and I wasn’t even a particularly rebellious kid with a great distaste for authority (hell, I was Republican at the time, so much as a high school junior or senior could be a “Republican.”) But I loved the hell out of that book and enjoyed Holden Caulfield’s character. I revisited it years later in college, and I still enjoyed it every bit as much. I wonder how I’d view it now as a 43-year-old, but my guess is that I’ll still like it, as I do like Salinger’s portrayal of angsty adolescence.
That’s about all I really remember loving from high school. The others I got through, and enjoyed well enough, but don’t remember much about them. I vaguely remember enjoying Lost Horizon and Heart of Darkness and Wild Sargasso Sea. But English was my least favorite subject in high school (ironic, as I ended up an English major in college after a series of events where it happened that come senior year, the fastest way to graduate was to take six more English courses, which is what I did. Not because of a particular love of literature, but because I wanted to get out of there with a degree.) However, there did end up being a lot of books I loved in college, but there’d be too many to list (plus a lot of the reading material I did was concentrated on poetry.)
Not counting short stories…
Huckleberry Finn
Of Mice and Men
Hamlet
Lord of the Flies
The Pigman
Beowulf
Brave New World
To Kill a Mockingbird
A Catcher in the Rye
Great Gatsby
I needed to read all of these in high school and enjoyed them immensely.
In the “not-quite-the-OP” side, we had to read a book from a specific list and I chose Tess of the D’ubervilles and I LOVED that book.
In 10th grade, I had a class that focused on “monsters.” The two that stuck with me were Frankenstein and Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. (I think Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle may have been the same class, and I loved it, too.)
A lot of my junior high and high school classes let us pick our own books, and The Three Musketeers was awesome. For my drama class, we had to pick the biography or autobiography of a famous entertainer and I picked Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, which I guess tops the list.
The ones I remember liking jump instantly to mind:
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon
John Knowles, A Separate Peace
George Orwell, Animal Farm
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Pride and Prejudice
Emma
Macbeth
Henry IV Part 1
Chaucer (at university)
One of the best books I’ve ever read was assigned to me in 9th grade English class: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It had a picture of a young girl on the cover, and was not a book I ever would have picked up on my own.
Another was already mentioned upthread: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I liked it so much I finished it in a day.
Another was one our 5th grade teacher read to the class over a period of weeks: Where the Red Fern Grows. After the teacher finished reading the book to us, I asked to borrow it so I could read it again. I remember taking it home on a Friday afternoon, and finishing it before I went to sleep that night by flashlight under the covers.
Another was in 7th grade: Watership Down. Actually I did pick it off a list of options, and assumed it was about a ship or submarine sinking. (I’d recently seen the movie Gray Lady Down about a submarine sinking.) Imagine my surprise and disappointment when the cover had a picture of a rabbit on it! :smack: Nevertheless, it was one of the best books I’ve ever read.
Thanks for the recommendation! I loved the film as a kid, and recently got it on Blu-Ray (haven’t rewatched it yet.) I’ll have to track down the book.
I was never assigned this to read, but I read the whole series anyways and loved it. I got the series for my son as well when he was younger.
Of Mice and Men turned me on to my all-time favorite writer, John Steinbeck. After reading that I read everything else he wrote within a year or so. I think I was probably in seventh or eighth grade at the time. Everyone else was reading VC Andrews and I was telling everyone how awesome Grapes of Wrath was.
I haven’t thought about this in years. 
I remember liking To Kill a Mockingbird.
I never read assigned books. Just enough of cliff notes or asking other students to fake it through reports.
After graduating I eventually went back and enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, and Animal Farm.
The Monk by Matthew Lewis
Far and away, the best - and most lurid - book I ever read in college, for college.
Alas Babylon is the only one I recall right now that I enjoyed reading in high school, and I was an avid reader from gradeschool thru high school (novel a night kinda thing), but none of the ‘required reading’ interested me.
On reading a couple of other replies - yeah Brave New World is another one.
I really only remember being “forced” to read two books (the rest i can’t remember if i chose them or they were forced on me). The two were: The Grapes of Wrath and The Red Badge of Courage. I remember moderately enjoying Grapes, and thinking Red Badge was terrible. What I can say for certain is that in highschool I was not yet smart enough to really understand either of those books. At that age I still saw books as just stories, and didn’t really understand metaphor or allegory.
I can think of three authors whom I was initially introduced to at school, but then went on to read a whole bunch of their other books on my own time:
- The People of Pineapple Place by Anne Lindbergh
- The BFG by Roald Dahl
- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
I also adored The Princess Bride, although I didn’t go on to read anything else by the author.
I enjoyed Shakespeare. Mostly, I think, because the guy was actually writing for a commercial audience and was trying to be entertaining, instead of navel-gazing “profundity”. There’s plenty of profundity, of course, but it’s an organic side effect of him being a genius.
I like The Crucible, too.
Then there were the occasional gems in those thick “English literature” books that got forced on us. Reading through them on my own time, I liked The Cremation of Sam McGee, The Lady or the The Tiger?, and pretty much anything by Saki.