I can name only one that (I think) few high school students would be required to read, and that is Tarzan of the Apes (1912). I have almost zero recollection of the assignments or discussions that accompanied it. Maybe my 9th grade teacher just wanted to demonstrate that reading was fun. I mostly remember this, because it was the first school book that I was required to purchase with my (well, my parents’) own money. The paperback was $1.95 and could be purchased from the same window where we bought our gym clothes.
By far the strangest high school English reading assignment I had was reading Arthur Hailey’s teleplay Flight Into Danger which was remade as the film Zero Hour! which was later remade as the movie Airplane!. Trying to seriously analyze a scene with a doctor asking the pilots if they ate the chicken or the fish for dinner was a tad surreal.
The one which springs to mine is The Chocolate War, a young-adult novel (which was still a relatively new publication when we read it) about a Catholic all-boys high school, and the student body’s tormenting of a non-conforming classmate. I suspect that part of the reason we were assigned it was because we, too, were a Catholic all-boys high school, with an unfortunate history of bullying and hazing.
We also read Herman Melville, but instead of Moby-Dick, we read the lesser-known Billy Budd.
Well, I dunno if it’s non-cannon, but it seemed unusual to me at the time. Our textbook in 10th grade consisted almost entirely of the best short stories in horror and science fiction. We read Bradbury’s All Summer in a Day,The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, we watched “The Birds,” we read a bunch of Poe, and to top it all off, our Final Exam was to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
If that’s the qualification for inclusion in this thread, then I’ll offer William Faulkner’s The Reivers. I’ve never met anybody else, not even in other English classes in our school at that time, who had to read it at high school. But our teacher really enjoyed Faulkner, so maybe that’s why we studied it.
It was (if memory serves), Faulkner’s last novel; and it was made into a movie in the late 1960s. I’ve seen the movie in the years since, and it’s not bad. Steve McQueen is in it.
Not that I complained about having to read the book; I rather enjoyed it. It was a good story.
My high school teacher loved Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and so we read it. Maybe that was canon in the 50’s? I ended up quite enjoying it.
I’d never heard of this, but for many years our book club facilitator was that author’s daughter, and a lot of folks seemed to be familiar with it & like it.
Feels like everything I read in high school was pretty standard fare. Perhaps either Jonathan Livingston Seagull or Grendel by John Gardner. Maybe Night be Elie Wiesel?
The Birds and definitely Monty Python definitely seems atypical (my classes certainyl didn’t do that), but “All Summer in a Day” and “The Lottery” were both pretty standard school canon, I think. I’m amused that my high schooler has just read Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” which I also read in a school textbook at about that time.
Bradbury is my favorite writer. All Summer in a Day haunted me for a long time after I read it, but I never attached the author’s name to it and so for years I didn’t know who wrote it. Fast forward to college, I checked out a book of Bradbury short stories, not really knowing who he was, but his stuff was great! The more I read, I was like, this seems familiar. Just the tone and the voice. And then I found that story again, and it was a moment of true joy when this nebulous haunted feeling finally found its source, and I found my favorite author.
A lot of people mentioned having to read The Brothers Karamazov but we read Crime and Punishment, which I actually liked even though it was very long.
Another book we read that I haven’t seen mentioned was Mrs. Dalloway. That, I didn’t like. But I was very lucky: One of the reading passages in that year’s AP English exam came from that book, which made answering those questions easy.
Oh, and a lot of people mentioned Tess of the D’Urbervilles. We read The Return of the Native instead. It was ok. Not my favorite, but I didn’t hate it as people seem to hate Tess.
We read that one as well but I don’t remember if it was in high school or junior high. I had forgotten about it until you mentioned it now. I assume it’s coincidence that we’re both in the Chicago area since it’s different counties, towns and districts (plus I was in public school, not Catholic) unless it was just on some IL Dept of Education list of books to teach.
