Disliked:
To the Lighthouse
On the Eve
Catch-22
Pride and Prejudice
Emma
Old Man and the Sea
Of Mice and Men
Heart of Darkness
and many others
Liked:
The Stranger
The Metamorphosis
The Sound and the Fury
Pale Fire
Brave New World
The Bell Jar
Death of a Salesman
The Glass Menagerie
A Streetcar Named Desire
The Plague
The Trial
and many others
In high school english, the entire class more or less rebelled against Babbit about a third of the way through. Hated it more with each dull leaden page.
The only other book that I can qualify with “hated” was The Prairie, which I had to read for a upper-level course focusing on “Frontier Lit”.
Stand-outs in the “liked” category:
Animal Farm
most of Shakespeare (I could have done without Romeo & Juliet, but that was mostly the teacher and not the work)
Abbey’s Road (a collection of essays from Edward Abbey)
Everything else is just sort of a blur in memory.
I hated A Separate Peace. I had to read it for two different classes. It doesn’t get better with repetition.
I also hated A Death in the Family by James Agree.
I haven’t yet liked anything by Henry James that I’ve been assigned. A Turn of the Screw is the most boring and least-scary ghost story I’ve ever read. His The Beast in the Jungle is a novel where nothing happens. The whole point of the ook is that nhing happens, so perhaps shouldn’t blame him. But it akes so damned long not to happen.
I also have to admit that I’ve hated the Jane Austen I’ve been forced to read. It was a real struggle to get through.
I am so pleased that Jeffro didn’t much care for Silas Marner. That book nearly destroyed my sophomore year in high school. Without a doubt in ranks in the top ten of mind numbingly boring, pointless, incipit works of alleged literature produced in the English language. The only way it could have been worse is for it to have been written in German or French or Latin or Sanskrit, or whatever. Then I would have had to go through the torture of translating the thing as the preparation for the horror of actually reading it.
Red Badge of Courage, on the other hand, is a marvelous piece, as is Moby Dick. I hate to think it’s a guy thing, but it may be. The more likely explanation is that both require the reader to cooperate and to accept the protagonist’s viewpoint.
Hmmmm…now I feel strangely compelled to read and enjoy both of those, just on principle… 
Liked/Loved:
Til We Have Faces
Catch-22
The Lord of the Rings
To Kill A Mockingbird
Oedipus trilogy
most of the plays read in middle school (includes Tempest, She Stoops to Conquer, Master Harold and the Boys)
Hated everything else.
standouts among the hated books (in no particular order, but these are the ones that I hated so much, I remember hating them rather than the ones I just disliked and forgot) -
Huckleberry Finn (which i would be more than thrilled to see disappear from required reading lists)
Miss Lonelyhearts
Red Badge of Courage
Great Gatsby
Catcher in the Rye
Ethan Frome
The Scarlet Letter
the plays they ruined in high school which I have since learned to merely dislike (Julius Caesar, R&J)
and poetry. There were weeks in which I was convinced that the only purpose of high school english was to get me to detest reading and/or writing poetry.
Liked
Oedipius Rex, other Greek mythology
Dante’s Inferno
Macbeth
Hamlet
Animal Farm
1984
Brave New World
Hated
Scarlet Letter (the most worthless thing I’ve ever had to read)
The Stranger
I really didn’t like the way we did The Odyssey in class - it dragged on and on and on. Most of the others I had to read I’m relatively indifferent about, or I can’t remember them now.
I was assigned The Hobbit in the 6th grade and liked it a lot. When I tried to read the subsequent books, though, I found them way too slow and tedious. I didn’t actually read the trilogy until last year.
I liked most of the books I was assigned. If you think Metamorphosis was bad, though, just be glad you weren’t assigned The Castle–the novel Kafka didn’t finish. So you follow a guy on a long and incredibly boring quest that literally NEVER ENDS.
**Loved **
Portrait of the Artist as a Young man- I love how each word fits in so perfectly, and carries so many meanings. I always saw this book kind of verbal magic square.
The Crucible-I’m a little biased because I acted in it.
Othello, Hamlet, MacBeth and A Midsummers Night Dream- You gotta give props to the bard.
Of Mice and Men- It made me cry!
The Great Gatsby- Fitzgerald captured an era.
** Hated**
Loved and Hated
For Whom the Bell Tolls- I loved this book like I love a good noir film. At the same time, it harkens back to a time when men were men and women were…ninnys.
Dubliners- I love Joyce, but lord, does he have to devote all his literary talent to proveing that Ireland sucks?
The Grapes of Wrath- The commie in me loves the messege…but did it have to plod along for so long?
I’m hoping to teach High School English someday, so this is actually a kind of helpful thread!
As for my best and worst list:
Liked:
The Crucible
ANY and ALL Shakespeare
Light in August (I LOVE Faulkner)
The Great Gatsby
The Catcher in the Rye
The Bluest Eye
The Awakening
The Age of Innocence
Doll’s House
Frankenstein
Anything Melville
Anything Poe
Anything Vonnegut
Anything Twain
The House of Mirth
Could Have Done Without:
Pride and Prejudice
Crime and Punishment (The in-class talks were DEADLY dull. Made me hate the whole book)
The Bible (Also because of class stuff)
Johnny Tremain
Time Enough for Drums
Across Five Aprils
Pigs in Heaven
The Scarlet Letter
Letters From an American Farmer
That’s all that I can remember. The rest I was rather indifferent to. But if I liked a book, I was PASSIONATE about that like and same for the dislike. When it comes to literature, I tend to have great emotional responses…
Hated : The Scarlet Letter and Heart of Darkness I see I have lots of company on these.
Nobody has mentioned these yet:
Loved : Le Petite Prince and ** Viper’s Tangle**
Since my 30-year HS reunion is a year away, I’ve pretty much forgotten the books I didn’t like.
The ones I’m especially glad I ‘had’ to read were Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men. I’ve loved Steinbeck ever since.
The funky thing about this thread, for me, is the number of ‘required’ books/stories that either hadn’t been written when I was in high school (Watership Down, The Handmaid’s Tale, Abbey’s Road, I Am the Cheese, The Chocolate War), or were still part of the current popular culture (LotR, Cuckoo’s Nest, Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22, Flowers for Algernon) so nobody needed to put them on reading lists.
And Their Eyes Were Watching God was ‘rediscovered’ (and fortunately so, IMO), well after I got out of school.
Just wanted to add Ellison’s Invisible Man to the list of books I loved…
I finished college in1984, so my memory of required reading is a bit hazy.
Loved:
Madame Bovary
ALL Shakespeare
Women in Love
The Great Gatsby
Brave New World
Things Fall Apart
A Good Man Is Hard To Find
The Inferno
The Purgatorio
To Kill A Mockingbird
Martial’s Epigrams
Borges’s Ficciones
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Moby Dick (If you skip all the whaling lore chapters, it’s a rattling good read)
Hated:
The Scarlet Letter (Boring, tendentious, Puritan crap)
The Yellow Wallpaper
The Paradiso (Hell is a lot more interesting than Heaven)
The Aeneid
Don Quixote
In Memoriam A.H.H. (Leave it to Tennyson to make a poem to his dead (presumed) lover duller than a very dull thing indeed)
Utterly loathed:
—A Separate Peace: sucked monkey dick. This is not a novel. It is mental abuse inflicted on the reader. Nearly the worst book ever written. I still bear a grudge against my high school for making us read this sewage. What were they thinking?
—Lord of the Flies: sucks syphilitic monkey dick. Even worse than A Separate Peace.
Liked:
—Anything and everything by Shakespeare is first class. Can’t go wrong with the Bard. The best thing about my high school literature program was plenty of Shakespeare.
—The Tragickall Historie of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. It combines slapstick laffs and horror. Both are somewhat cheezy but I enjoyed it just the same.
—Frankenstein. It was OK.
—The Death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy. I seriously loved this one! It was the perfect read to please an idealistic 17-year-old, with its gentle condemnation of materialist bourgeois life. It made me determine to live my life idealistically so that I would never be in the position of old Ivan looking back on his selfish, useless existence with regret.
—One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn. Actually, only one paragraph in this whole novel impressed me: the image of the old prisoner who didn’t hunch over his food but sat with his back straight up to show that they hadn’t broken his spirit. That formed an indelible image; I’ve forgotten the rest of it.
—Huckleberry Finn. Just a good solid tale well told.
Most of the literature I had to read was neither loved nor hated. The first Hermann Hesse I ever read was for English class: Demian, but I didn’t really “get it.” However, I went on to become a big fan of all of Hesse’s other books. He’s still one of my favorite authors. Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure was hard on me. I admit it’s damn good literature, but God it was the most depressing painful thing I ever read. Brrr.
I tended to like the poetry in English class better than the fiction they assigned: loved all the John Donne and Robert Browning.
In fact, almost all the books I really enjoyed in those years I had to find on my own, outside of English class.
Loved "The Hobbit.
Hated “Shane.” Pretentious piece of crap.
Much of the problem with assigned literature is that it’s being assigned to people at the wrong age. I had an English teacher in 9th grade who tried (vainly) to get us to read Chekhov and Marlowe. It just ain’t gonna work.
I also managed to avoid some books through the simple expedient of moving in the middle of high school. In college the only lit classes I took were in Japanese literature (in translation) and modern poetry, which I already knew I liked. So I have some pretty surprising gaps in my literary knowledge.
What I loved:
Heart of Darkness. I know I’m in the minority here, but god I loved it. I think it helped that I’d already seen Apocalypse Now so had an idea - a metaphor - of the colonial experience and the amorality it engendered.
L’Etranger/The Stranger. Read it in French, loved every minute.
Antigone - Jean Anouilh. Another french assignment. Marvelous retelling of the original.
1984. Chilling. I’d read this on my own - WOW.
The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I mentioned this in the “Books that creeped you out” thread - and this was a doozy assigned by my 10th grade English teacher. Autobiographical stories of a woman who escaped from the PRC in 1976.
Huckleberry Finn. Feh and all of you who hated it - this is one of the great novels, and worth every minute of effort it took.
Gatsby. Double feh on you Gatsby-haters. Did you read the damn thing? <grin>
King Lear, Macbeth and Henry IV, Part I. I’m not among the all-of-Shakespeare-was-wonderful people. But these three are my favorites, given that I never read Othello and read Hamlet on my own.
The Odyssey, Fagles translation. One of the books I kept reading because of the moves, and I loved it every time. Was moved from the reviews to buy the Fitzgerald translation, which is even more wondrous.
The Oedipus Cycle. Loved the rhythm of the language.
A Farewell to Arms, and The Red Badge of Courage. Such easy books to like, really.
All Quiet on the Western Front was devastating.
What I thought overrated:
Tale of Two Cities. A potboiler, and a pretty flimsy one at that. Maudlin.
Farenheit 451. Fun, but kind of obvious and preaching to the converted.
Brave New World. Wait, I’m supposed to be, like, shocked, right? Um, actually a lot of this sounds like a good idea, you know?
What I hated, and never read since:
Eugenie Grandet, Balzac. Eugh eugh eugh. The French version of Dickens, and I never made the slog.
Most romantic-period European fiction, which I found unbearably drippy, but most of all:
Tess of the D’Ubervilles. Goddamnit, Tess, go “hwome” already before I smack your ass so goddamn hard you’ll miscarry on the spot. (Ooops, spoiler…)
and
Madame Bovary. The excerpted version forced on us in French class was enough to kill my interest in the language, especially after the Eugenie Grandet disaster.
Doctor Faustus, by Marlowe. Sludge, indescribably boring and difficult for a 14-year-old.
Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters. I really should give them another chance.
Wuthering Heights I hated somewhat less than Tess, but still found it a terrible waste of time. I never had much sympathy for upper-class women who let themselves become trapped by their gender. It’s why I liked Austen so much better.
Stuff I hated at the time but redeemed itself on rereading:
Emma. I probably would’ve loved it had Clueless been made ten years earlier, but in the meantime I just found Emma irredeemably annoying. It’s now my favorite book to quote - I turned to it after reading (and loving) P & P on my own in college.
Billy Budd. Read this twice in H.S. and the second time grew to like it, although I found the Christ metaphors a bit overbearing. I never have managed to conquer Moby Dick, though - I get about 100 pages in and sorta peter out.
Stuff I never read, and probably should: Willa Cather (everyone read My Antonia, but I’ve heard Death Comes to the Archbishop is better), O’Neill, Faulkner, The Grapes of Wrath.
Stuff I will never read, because no one I know has ever liked it: Hawthorne, (George) Eliot.
And I didn’t even get to poetry! Well, it was pretty simple, really: if it was pre-Whitman, I hated it, it it was post-Whitman, I loved it.
Oh, it is NOT sludge! But yeah, 14 probably isn’t the right age to read Marlowe. Or Chekhov, for that matter.
But since you have good taste in Shakespeare (yay for Henry IV!) I suppose I can forgive your Marlowe-bashing…
And thanks for reminding me of All Quiet on the Western Front – another great one. It was assigned for the WWI unit in History 111, and I was depressed the entire time…
Am I the only person ever who liked A Seperate Peace? I didn’t read it for school, though, maybe that’s why.
Loved
Love in the Time of Cholera, García Márquez
The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood
Pride and Prejudice, Austen
The Innocents Abroad, Twain
Great Expectations, Dickens
Hated
Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey
An American Tragedy, Dreiser
The Decameron of Boccacio
Mostly I was pretty ambivalent about assigned readings. I’m tempted to add my critiques of books I was never assigned but read anyway and have been mentioned in this thread (ie, anyone who doesn’t like Catch-22 is clearly illiterate), but I think I’ll resist the urge. 
Oh, I forgot. I HATE Emily Dickinson! HATE with the burning passion that could only result of a month and a half* of constant depressing poetry from an angry and lonely spinster obsessed with her own death. Emily!, I would say if I knew her, Go outside! Stop worrying about the funerals you feel in your brain! That wasn’t death that stopped for you, it was Fred Jones, asking if you needed a ride into town! They’re having a dance at the college tomorrow, why don’t you go instead of sitting around the house moping and writing poetry that unfortunate high school students will be forced to read for years to come?
*Yes, a month and a half. My high school classes were 90 minutes long, every other day. Can you imagine 90 minutes of Emily Dickinson every other day for a month and a half? It makes me shudder uncontrollably just to think of it.