I remember enjoying the following:
To Kill a Mockingbird
A Tale of Two Cities
Congo (in the 9th grade)
Cry, the Beloved Country
Huckleberry Finn
Heart of Darkness
I did not particularly care for:
Frankenstein’s
any of the poetry.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I hate Melville! All of it! THat is the only thing that I was ever assigned that I truly abhor. If Herman weren’t already dead, I would kill him. He is the only excuse ever to read Cliff’s Notes, and I suspect that the guy who wrote them only skimmed. Icky icky bad evil Melville. shudder
Okay, so I forgot a few that you guys already mentioned…I should have waited.
Wuthering Heights-I liked it. Romance is always good. Doomed romance is even better.Didn’t read all of it before the test, though.
To Kill a Mockingbird-Love it. One of my fave books. Loved the movie too.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn-It was during my sophomore year in high school; the worst possible teacher in the world. I just remember the movie with Elijah Wood. Ewww!
Scarlet Letter- Didn’t read it all, it was so boring for me. Same teacher as above.
Death of a Salesman - There is a kinda funny story to this book. Over summer, our school made all the Juniors, soon to be seniors, read a list of books. The list was divided into Honors and Regular sections. It was clearly defined. So what do they do? They mess up and list Death of a Salesman under Regular(which I was). So I get it, read it(bored to death), and find out the first day of school that I needed another book. Ooooohhh! I was so mad that I wasted my time on that book!
Beowulf-Loved it. 'Nuff said.
Fahrenheit 451- I liked it, but do you think I can remember it all?
1984-Hated the book, hated the movie.
Summer of My German Soldier-Read it in Junior High and fell in love with it.
A Separate Peace-Don’t remember what it was about, but I can tell you that I did not like it, not one bit!
The Outsiders-Didn’t like, but that is okay. It was taught by another teacher I couldn’t stand. Also, I had to read it for Summer School. Yuck!
Red Badge of Courage-Couldn’t get through it. Another winner book from my awful teacher.
Catcher in the Rye-Couldn’t get through this book. It was too slow, and some parts were a little disturbing(if I remember correctly).
Absolutely hated Steinbeck’s “The Pearl.” The funny thing was, when I mentioned that in my English journal, my teacher returned it with a note that she thought it stunk, too.
I loved to many books to list. (Though like many of you, Animal Farm was high among them!) Here are some that I was surprised that I enjoyed:
Joseph Andrew, by Henry Fielding - Hilarious! I expected a stodgy novel, and found smutty humor instead!
“The Birds” by Aristophanes – Ditto, except it was a play.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe—unbridled propaganda, but a good potboiler read anyhow.
I loved:
The Handmaid’s Tale (Woohoo for estrogen-based 1984 :))
Macbeth
Animal Farm
Lord of the Flies
Antigone
Hated:
Lure of the Labrador Wild (synopsis: 3 went in, 2 came out)
Obasan
Dracula (not a horrid book, but reading it in class was painful)
Winter’s Heart (my cousin wrote it, and you’re lovely Cassie, but JESUS)
A Christmas Carol
Hrm… I’ve been using other people’s lists to add to my summer reading list. Good thread, Outrider.
FD.
The one book I was unable to finsish and I completely hated was “The Old Man and the Sea”. I found it unreadable, uninteresting and overrated.
One that I looked forward to but turned out not to be what I thought was “Frankenstein”. I probably was expecting the hollywood version, but I did not find it scary, but am glad I read it.
My favorite had to be Orwells “1984”, I could not put it down.
Ack, I’m seeing so many of my favorites on people’s “hated” lists! :eek:
Actually, a lot of my favorites were assigned reading, but here are my personal love/hate lists…
Hated:
Ethan Frome
Dubliners
Wuthering Heights
The Pearl (who DOESN’T hate “The Pearl”?)
Dandelion Wine
Daisy Miller
I hated Heart of Darkness the first time I read it, but the second time I appreciated it a great deal more. Same goes for The Great Gatsby. I didn’t like Beowulf at first, either, but now I love it. (Especially since I can read the original Old English now! :))
Loved:
All the Shakespeare – but especially Romeo and Juliet (first Shakespeare I read), The Tempest, King Lear, and Henry IV. (I think I was the only one in my class who liked it.) Oh, and Henry VI – I can almost certainly say I’m alone in that. 
The Canterbury Tales
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Star Maker
Paradise Lost
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Waiting for Godot (I really want to see it in performance, though…)
The Divine Comedy
To Kill a Mockingbird
Agreed on Crime and Punishment, A Tale of Two Cities, and the Odyssey. Haven’t read some of the others. I also liked Les Miserables (despite, as you mentioned, it’s disturbing similarities to ATofTC) and Julius Caesar.
I disliked The Good Earth (I know it was a decent book, I know the theme was cycles, but it just seemed so redundant). I also didn’t care for Don Quixote.
Ethan Frome is worthless. Can’t believe I finished that book.
Worst: The Scarlet Letter and Death Comes For The Archbishop.
Best: 1984 and Fifth Business.
HATED
A Seperate Peace [Lisa Simpson]I hate John Knowles[/Lisa Simpson] My 10th grade English teacher absolutely adored it. We didn’t get on too well.
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Gatsby The book in and of itself wasn’t too bad, but the endless discussions of the symbolism of the &#@!#$% green light killed it.
Gilgamesh
The Old Man and the Sea Here’s the entire story: An old man went fishing. He caught a big fish. Sharks ate the big fish. The old man went home. The End.
LOVED
All the Shakespeare
The Giver
Wuthering Heights
All the Greek tragedy (Oedipus, Anitgone, The Oresteia)
The Iliad and The Odyssey
Aw, you hated My Antonia? Crap, I loved that book because the same thing happened in my family, only the gender roles were reversed (Respectable protestant Nebraska farm girl falls in love with Catholic Bohunk immigrant stock) only in my family, they got married. My grandmother (the farm girl) was disowned from her family for that. I never understood why until My Antonia gave me an understanding of the prejudice of the time.
As I said in the “books that changed me thread”, I loved Last of the Mohicans.
I am NOT a Faulkner fan. Anything by Faulkner I loathed, “Absalom Absalom” being the absolute last straw.
I loved Heart of Darkness for reasons probably more to do with the moody, broody, artsy, teen angst phase I was going through at the time than it’s actual literary merit, though it’s got plenty of that, IHMO.
The year we read Crime and Punishment in high school, I couldn’t get through it. It had nothing to do with me or with the book. You see, my English teacher at the time had just come back from an extended leave during which she sat in a courtroom while her son-in-law was being tried for the murder of her daughter.
After she returned, C&P was the first book we covered. The situation she was in just tore me up, and I never even bothered trying to read it. Still haven’t.
I hear it’s good.
What a coincidence. I did a journalism piece on this topic for my Journalism class last year. We (my partner and I) polled kids and interviewed them. The number one was 1984 by Orwell (oddly enough this book has been taken off the required readings list for my school…coincidence? I think not.), and the most hated was, ironically, Animal Farm and (not ironic) Old Man and the Sea. One of the most popular quotes for their reason of not liking Animal Farm? : “I couldn’t get used to the fact that the animals talked.” or “Why would animals be used to represent Russians?” I kid you not.
But enough about that. My favorite required readings were To Kill a Mockingbird in 8th grade, Animal Farm in 10th grade, and The Great Gatsby in 11th grade. I also like Lord of the Flies this year, but I had already read that a million times before. The ones I hated were Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, and The Old Man and the Sea in 10th grade. That’s probably why I loved Animal Farm so much, is because we read it right after Old Man and the Sea and I was just greatly thankful for another book.
I was assigned Melville’s The Confidence Man for an English course my freshman year in college. The premise of the book is intriguing, but I couldn’t get into it. I suspect no one in the entire class finished it.
Loved:
Candide
Crime and Punishment
Madame Bovary-we were only assigned a chapter, about the party she attends at a local nobleman’s mansion. I had to go out and buy it to see what happened next.
The Crucible
Disliked:
The Inferno
The Epic of Gilgamesh
I don’t remember a lot of what was assigned in high school… I am/was a voracious reader, and it’s a little fuzzy what I read on my own and what I read for school. I know I read To Kill a Mockingbird, but it really didn’t leave an impression, maybe I should read it again? The two assigned books from high school I remember and love were Return of the Native and Watership Downs.
At Purdue, I managed to drag myself through Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man only to finish it and say “I HATE this BOOK!”
On the flip side, I loved One Hundred Years of Solitude (put me on a real Gabriel Garcia Marquez Kick)… loved it when the ants carried off the baby… and also Prayer for Owen Meany, which led to World According to Garp (John Irving… also an old Robin Williams movie, although in the movie it doesn’t show the wife biting off her lover’s… well, you get the idea.)
Great thread 
Count me in with everyone else who loved To Kill A Mockingbird.
I also liked:
The Crucible
The Outsiders
Catcher In The Rye
Romeo & Juliet
All Mark Twain
Wuthering Heights
Greek and Roman mythology in Junior High
Hated:
1984 I graduated from HS in '82, so we all had to read it (as Seniors) and write a paper on which we compare and conrast current events vs. the book. Very boring.
Animal Farm
Moby Dick
Summer Of My German Soldier
The Great Gatsby
The Old Man And The Sea
I too absolutely despised “The Great Gatsby” and “Death of A Salesman.” Not so much that they were badly written, they weren’t, but for the leads. The incredible weakness and whinyness. I wanted to slap both Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman, no, I wanted to beat them horribly with my fists until I was too tired to punch them again. It is rare that I feel so must despicability toward fictional characters, so in one sense, I suppose both authors did their jobs.
But still, I’m glad Gatsby got shot (or drowned, or whatever), and when Mrs. Loman tells Willy’s grave that the mortgage is paid of, I always say, “No thanks to you Willy, you weak, worthless piece of shit.”
And yet, it is possible to write about weak characters (“Macbeth”) without rasing my ire. Go figure.
I suppose it’s because I came from a dirt-poor southern background and rose above it with hard, steady work, not whining or schemes like Willy’s, though this doesn’t explain why I hate Gatsby so much.
Practically everything else I was assigned, I enjoyed.
Sir
The only book that I remember hating was “Silas Marner” I liked all the rest of them.
Loved:
Hated:
Being the poor student that I was, I recall very little of what was assigned, and what I do remember is fixed in my memory due to my hatred of it. Fortunately, I read a lot of the titles listed above on my own.
That being said, Dickens and Hawthorne would do well not to ever bump into me at the bar.
Twain and Salinger, on the other hand, would drink free all night.