People always say this. Thing is . . . I don’t recall being required, or instructed, to read anything in high school. Is it really common to be required to read books for high school classes? In 9th grade we read Romeo and Juliet in class, and then in 11th grade we read excerpts from The Joy Luck Club and Things Fall Apart - also aloud in class - but that’s it. Then again, I went to a county school in one of the last states in education . . .
It’s funny but it’s true.
I’ve read parts of Gilgamesh, but not enough to IMHO really qualify. I’ve read the Old Testament all the way through, which I’d probably say is my real “qualifier”. The oldest thing I’ve read in its original language is Chaucer in Middle English - took a whole class in college.
ETA - Cisco, I went to public schools in South Carolina and we read books in high school. Are you sure you didn’t actually grow up in, say, Darfur? Or does it seem you’ve always been at war with Eastasia? What did you do in English class if you didn’t have to read any books?
Hmm, good point. Actually, I was assigned The Epic of Gilgamesh in university. Actually, I didn’t read *The Ilad * or The Odyssey until university. I did have a lame high school, though.
The oldest book I’ve read on my own is probably Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which is sitting on my shelf now. The oldest European work would be Don Quixote.
The oldest I’ve read in the original and not in translation would be in German and probably some of the works by Goethe. Way back when, I could read a fair bit of German, and I took a class or two on Goethe. I specifically recall reading The Sorrows of Young Werther and Faust. But then, those two were assigned.
What did you do in English from grades 10 through 12?
I’m not being snarky-- I reall want to know.
I took Latin in school, and read parts of The Illiad, Pliny’s letters, and a few odes of Horace in the original language.
And Lessing. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Overlapped a bit with Goethe but wrote some works a little earlier. I read some of his stuff in German that predated Goethe’s works.
I was going to say Persuasion from 1814, but then I realized I’ve read The Canterbury Tails from the 14th century, a bunch of Shakspeare, Allegory of the Cave by Plato, and writings from Emanual Kant.
So really, I have no idea apparently.
The bible, Homer, Plato, Beowulf… when was Popol Vuh written?
Wow, really? I can probably dreg up the memory of 75% of the books I was required to read in high school, from Romeo and Juliet and Summer of My German Soldier in 9th grade to MacBeth and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 12th. The only high school English classes I took that didn’t have books assigned were fiction and non-fiction writing sophomore year.
I was your neighbor to the north. Did you go to city schools or county?
You’re asking me to dust off some old memories . . . I think 10th grade was grammar, 11th was creative writing, and 12th was persuasive writing/the 5-paragraph essay.
Ah, it sounds like it focused on writing. We didn’t have plain old English, we had English Literature-- which meant we had to read a lot of boring stuff. On the upside, we got to read a lot of cool stuff too.
I’d like to point out that I didn’t read Pilgrim’s Progress in high school and not everybody in my h.S. read Beowulf.
Ah! The prototypical Goth novel! Could on translate it (though even 1970-vintage high schoolers could stomach it) but it remained barfatroucic. Gotta admit I’ve recently gotten in contact with a classmate, but memories of her yellow dress, spangled with daisy eyelets, had more to do with it than the verbiage.
In translation, Gilgamesh.
In the original language, all of Beowulf and bits of Homer. Very slowly in both cases.
Herodotus’ Histories, followed by Aristotle’s Rhetoric.
Wait – so there’s a chance I learned things that other people didn’t? I never looked at it that way. I always figured everybody else did the stuff we did plus read books. Maybe that’s why first year college english was ridiculously easy for me and everybody else I know struggled.
That must be the porno remake. 
Remake?
The Iliad and the Odyssey for me also. For true novels, probably Robinson Crusoe.
It’s Gilgamesh for me as well, though that rather stretches the definition of “book.”
We only have county - they’re all county. I think that’s true for the whole state.
I was wrong, before - I said the oldest thing I’ve read in the original language is Middle English Chaucer, but I’ve also read the Aeneid and the Gallic Wars and some other stuff in Latin.
Gligamesh in translation, Homer in the original … couldn’t do that these days, my Greek has rusted away from disuse. Pity.