Mister Kot-TARE! Mister Kot-TARE! I know the correct answer!
Nothing.
I graduated in 1982 and we read a bunch of the same books listed. I definitely remember:
Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Lord of the Flies, A Separate Peace, The Scarlett Letter, Pride and Prejudice, The Grapes of Wrath, A Man for All Seasons, A Passage to India, Tess of the D’Urberbilles, Jude the Obscure, Crime and Punishment, The Great Gatsby and some poetry (Shakespeare sonnets, Prufrock, Fire and Ice).
To me it seemed a little heavy on the “prep school kids treat each other badly and have tragic outcome” which had absolutely no relationship to my life. OTOH I loved Jane Austin and Dostoevsky (wrote about Crime and Punishment for the AP exam). I found it much easier to read and a million times more interesting than slogging through Thomas Hardy (were we the only ones who had to read Hardy?), although we did pass the time singing:
Hey Jude, don’t be obscure
Take a bad book and make it better
I’ve been trying to catch up on books that I think I should have read but never did. Still haven’t got to To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye although they’ve been sitting on my bookshelf for ages.
Nope. Had to read him for AP English. Almost made me give up on the whole “literacy” thing altogether.
Another who had to study Hardy in high school here, though we didn’t do Tess. As I recall, it was The Mayor of Casterbridge for us. And Catcher in the Rye–we did that one too.
Same here, I think there are just too many “classics” to cover them all.
Here’s what I can remember reading (combo of memory off the top of my head and looking through a list of usual required reading books in high school):
Romeo and Juliet
Much Ado About Nothing
Macbeth
Hamlet
Jane Eyre
Madame Bovary
The Scarlet Letter
The Great Gatsby
Heart of Darkness
Huckleberry Finn
To Kill a Mockingbird
Inherit the Wind
The Catcher in the Rye
Animal Farm
1984
Of Mice and Men
Great Expectations
Beowulf
The Canterbury Tales
A Separate Peace
Crime and Punishment
Our Town
A good mix of good, interesting books, and some absolute dreck that I wish we had never covered (seriously, fuck A Separate Peace). Kinda sad we never read some stuff like Dante’s Inferno or the Odyssey, but, suppose I can always do that myself…
Hey Spoons.
I don’t think I’m THAT much younger than you, but in Ontario I never learned any of your quoted authors in high school. Shakespeare was about as … sophisticated as we got.
I know some Dickens, but mainly because of movies.
We performed Of Mice and Men, Our Town and Inherit the Wind as our fall plays in drama class. We covered the abridged versions of Inferno, the Odyssey and unabridged The Great Gatsby and The Old Man and the Sea in middle school.
A couple more that came to mind are Great Expectations and Les Miserables, neither of which I truly liked.
I don’t know about literature, but they definitely don’t learn how to spell or use decent grammar.
The young guys I work with almost exclusively use an apostrophe to form plurals (the finest example being box’s for boxes) and never put the -ed on when using past participles (e.g., “This material has been inspect”). Spelling errors like heavey, rotoray, and* hieghth* abound. If they really know they can’t spell something, they come and ask me. It’s amazing how many times that happens. Even our guys from Vietnam and Cambodia spell better than the American kids.
It’s a good thing this thread isn’t about mathematical ability, because that’s what’s really pitiful.