Clarissa. Like hanging by my thumbs for a whole quarter, but man is that thing memorable.
Moby Dick. I reread it every 5 years or so.
Persuasion. I struggled through it as a teenager and thought it was all teacups and boredom. Now it is probably my favorite book.
Dune. My first science fiction novel and it was so much fun I couldn’t believe it was really an assignment. I was married to that book in the tenth grade.
[I wonder if all you Dickens haters would have wound up liking him any better if you had been forced to read **Bleak House** in high school, rather than **Great Expectations**?]
A Wrinkle in Time & Bridge to Terabithia both ended up becoming favorites of mine. The Good Earth, Jane Eyre and Uris’s **Battle Cry **were also really really good. The latter moved me so much I had trouble writing my report on it.
As a senior in high school, I took an elective course on Russian history. For that class, I was required to read Ivan Turgenev’s*** Fathers and Sons***, which is still one of my all-time favorite novels.
I actually enjoyed The Chrysalids. I don’t remember much about the book, just that I did enjoy reading it.
I’m thankful I didn’t have to read 1984 in school because of the way you have to analyze and pick apart books in class. I read it years later when I went back to school as an adult for a free-choice book report and I loved it. One line scared me so much I had to physically put the book down and walk away from it for a few hours.
For a college course on experimental modern and postmodern literature, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. It had a profound effect on me. It was like nothing I’d ever encountered before, and gave me bewildering new ideas as to what constitutes a novel.
I did a book report in the tenth grade where we had to pick a book to read and compare it to one of our required readings. I picked 1984 and compared it to the required reading Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie. I ended up liking the Dai Sijie book much more for it. Way to go Teach’, making me learn and appreciate books more.
Candide I really didn’t get it at the time (as if I do now) but that was some whacky stuff.
I was in school in the late 60s - early 70s, in the less than smart English classes. They usually let us read whatever junk was popular because, and they let us know this, we weren’t going to be using it anyway. Thank you high school English, for letting me enjoy books and learn to appreciate the classics without your interference.
Easily my favorite of the books I had to read for a class. I re-read it just a year or so ago, and it’s still a thing of beauty.
Another that wasn’t required reading, but rather a book that the librarian read to us when we were in elementary school, was The Phantom Tollbooth. Still one of the best kids’ books ever. The Firebug ought to be ready for it in the next year or two, and I’m really looking forward to reading it to him.
In eleventh grade I had to read Lord of the Flies. I was bowled over. It’s still one of my favorite books. Some parents made a fuss, and the school pulled it from the reading list the next semester.
I once took a Spanish literature class because I needed the elective and it was in a time slot I had empty. I came away with a deep love for Gabriel García Márquez, espically One Hundred Years of Solitude
I reread it every 5 years or so.