You’re not alone, Kyla, I liked “A Separate Peace” a lot. The short story it was based on, called “Phineas,” is interesting to read if you ever run across it.
We read the stage rather than the novel version of “Cuckoo’s Nest,” but I wasn’t crazy about it either (if you’ll pardon the expression). It was very much a product of its time, and its author’s gender.
Liked:
Animal Farm
Invisible Man
Lord of the Flies
Of Mice and Men
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To Kill a Mockingbird
Not bad:
Fahrenheit 451
The Odyssey
Hated:
Clan of the Cave Bear
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Gatsby
A Separate Peace
Watership Down
D’oh. I also liked All Quiet on the Western Front, and I wish we’d been assigned 1984 (which I read anyway) or Brave New World, like the neighboring school districts.
Count me in as a Scarlet hater…Yech. Hester Prynne, that wussy Dimmesdale, that non-child like imp Pearl.
A full list of books I rather detested:
Scarlet Letter
Death of a Salesman
A Tale of Two Cities
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Fellowship of the Ring
The Bridge Over San Luis-Rei
We might be reading The Catcher in the Rye in English, though I don’t know. Count that in as a definite hate, as i’ve already read it on my own.
Some other books…meh…
The Great Gatsby- Alright, I sort of liked it but I definitely didn’t love it…
The Tempest
To Kill a Mockingbird
Dracula, sort of a fun read but I don’t see it as a great novel…more like sort of a trashy Victorian read. I mean, I really liked all the stuff that I learned about in class, but it does seem a bit over the top at times. I dunno, I guess I’m a bit ambivalent about this one.
And now onto the really good ones…
Flowers for Algernon (in eighth grade we read the short story, and I read the novel on my own)
Short stories by Edgar Allan Poe (Fall of the House of Usher, Mask of the Red Death, Ligeia, and others)
Ethan Frome (yes I actually liked this one)
A Streetcar Named Desire
The Lottery (again, we read in eighth grade, in class, but I’d already read it on my own so not sure if it counts)
Where the Girls Are (something assigned over the summer for history class, but really fun, IMHO…)
The Outsiders- and anything by S.E. Hinton (they were on the reccomended list one year at school and I read basically everything by her…)
A couple of other books- A Man for All Seasons and MacBeth, I read those in ninth grade but didn’t really like them, at least not then…I may have changed my mind since then, as that does sometimes happen.
Instead of listing books I liked and hated, I’d like to list the books my students (5th grade AP reading) liked and hated. There are two categories: books I read to them, and books they read themselves.
Top 5 books I read to my 5th graders that they loved, in their order of preference.
Holes, by Louis Sachar: This one is far and away the best recieved book I have ever read to a group of students. The local public library was flooded with students who wanted to check it out shortly after I finished it, and several students, in frustration insisted that their parents buy it for them. The great thing about this is that the book is even better the second time through, after you know what all of the big twists are, and there are a bunch. The kids loved it so much I am putting it on the reading list for next year’s students.
Animal Farm by George Orwell: Students saw the book on my desk and asked what it was about, so I explained it to them. Several wanted me to read it, so I did, thinking that they would want to abandon it after the first chapter. To my great surprise and delight, they couldn’t get enough.
Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt: Every time I read the final chapter, I do so with tears streaming down my face. I’ve read it a dozen times, and it never loses its power.
Frindle by Andrew Clements: This one was a student suggestion. It is about a boy who, as an experiment, makes up a new word for “pen”, and the repercussions of his decision.
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. The best book about wordplay ever written for any audience.
After enough time to get to know what’s going on, we take a vote whether to continue the read aloud of a given book. I’ve refined the list enough that this rarely happens, but out of the 18 read alouds I started this year, three managed to annoy students enough to make them want to change books.
The three books students disliked enough to abandon:
Abel’s Island: Robinson Crusoe with a mouse as Crusoe. Just as boring as the original.
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol: I think all of the bad adaptations of the story have ruined it for many readers.
Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes: I love this book enough to keep trying, but only one class in the past five years has not voted to abandon it.
Top five assigned books, in order of student preference:
Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli: What I find most interesting about this is that both the favorite read aloud and the favorite assigned book each have a character who teaches another character how to read.
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH: This one regularly changes places with Maniac Magee as favorite book, although I suspect Holes will be at the top of this list next year.
There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom: An unusual book about school in that it truly captures the flavor of what a modern elementary school is like.
Matilda by Roald Dahl: Yet another book that celebrates reading.
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’ Dell: A long-time favorite of the girls in my classes.
There were only two assigned books that a majority of the students disliked, and they will most likely not be on next year’s list. Hatchet will be replaced by Holes. Any suggestions for the second?
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen: Class concensus–booorrrrrriiiiinnnnnngggggggg!
It’s Like This, Cat: See comment on 1.
Many of the favorite books on my list celebrate reading, or the ability to read being empowering is at least a theme. Four of the top five in each category have reading as a theme. Not quite sure what to make of that.
That book is wonderful! My whole family read it and we all loved it. I recommended it to all of my friends (I doubt any have read it, though).
Well-written!
I cry every time I read it. It’s so sweet.
Number Six: Have you read A Wrinkle in Time to the students? My brother and I really liked that one. Also, Bridge to Terabithia and Walk Two Moons. I remember loving all of those when I was littler.
Bridge to Terabithia is already one of the assigned books. I’ve never read A Wrinkle in Time, so I’ll read it and consider it for next year’s list. Right now, I already have two SF books on my list–The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and The Giver. I’d be reluctant to add a third unless it is really good. But I’ll consider it.
I’d rethink The Giver for 5th graders. It’s required here for our 8th graders, and sometimes they can’t handle some of the subject matter
A book I loved as a kid was * From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler*.
Loved:
1984, The Jungle, The Handmaid’s Tale, Catcher in the Rye, A Canticle for Leibowitz, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Screwtape Letters (which wasn’t for school, but my 11th-grade English teacher recommended it).
Hated:
Faulkner! (bleah!) Mary Barton (just boring).
I liked A Christmas Carol, and I expected and wanted to like the rest of Dickens, but I just couldn’t get into it. Shakespeare either.
You guys had Handmaid’s Tale in school? Cool…Sort of wish I had, I had to pick it out on my own, man…Though i’m actually kind of glad. Usuaully when I read something in school my tendency is to not like it. We don’t seem to read too many modern books, though…nothing from the 1980’s in high school, anyway.
Billy Budd. Biggest piece of crap ever committed to paper, over and over again. Also thought Moby Dick was full of gross thinly disguised sexual references (Ishmael and other sailors squishing out the lumps of whale oil in their hands-yech!)
There were hundreds of others but they were gladly all too forgettable.
On the good side:
Tales from the White Hart(Sir Arthur C. Clarke)
All of Verne
All of Wells
Most of Clemens
Divine Comedy- well, it got tedious but man, what a trip!
Monte Christo- WHat a great story! A guy gets shit on and gets a big chunk of cash so he can live like a king and travel around the civilized world ruining his opressor’s lives- GOD I love that book…
And the best- by far- Jean Shepard. Not least because he writes to my heart, having grown up in the same northwest Indiana, but also because a lot of his stuff was published in Playboy, making me the most popular kid in school for a few months there…
b.
Zoggie, Handmaid’s Tale was in college; its subject matter was too much of a hot potato for high school. (Public school anyway).
although now that I think about it, it wasn’t even published till after I graduated HS. 
Oh. I wish we read sizzlingly controversial books in high school. Though there is always…<cackles evilly> afterschool…
In the sixth-grade my teacher read us a chapter a day of “The Hobbit” I knew I was going to HATE it, and so did the rest of the class. But at some point(which we never would have admitted) we began looking forward to the next chapter, and ended up LOVING it! And this teacher also had us write sci-fi stories, and introduced us to other works of fantasy and sci-fi. THANK TOU MR. BRADBURY!!! It has become a life long interest.
In high school I thought I would hate To Kill a Mockingbird but it is actually on my top 20 list of favorite books ever(so far at least).
I did hate “The Pearl” and “Great Expectations”.
Romeo and Juliet was fun in junior high, but the feeling was spoiled by some of the parents. That year the Franco Zefferelli film of R&J came out and we wanted to go as a class and see it. But I’ll bet you can guess why some of the parents(my own included) objected! I still think it is the best R&J ever filmed though(saw it later on my own(don’t tell the parents) I didn’t like Shakespeare back then because the teachers in my junior high and high school classes squeezed all the juice out and made it so dull. I only read Shakespeare again(and now love it) after seeing a BBC production of “Measure for Measure” All those sex jokes and sneaking around in the dark! If they had taught it that way I would have liked it sooner.
“Death of a Salesman” HATED IT!
First, this is an honors 5th grade class. Students are expected to read more books and more challenging books than in a typical 5th grade. Second, I’ve been teaching The Giver for five years now, and I’ve yet to find any other book that as effectively raises and deals with the same issues in a thoughtful, balanced manner. Students are always given the option of reading an alternate book if they or their parents find any assigned reading objectionable, and only two students have opted for the alternate in the case of The Giver. I get more objections to Maniac Magee.
From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is on the summer reading list for students coming into honors 5th grade. It’s one of my favorites, too.
No, you can’t! I’ve seen the BBC version of the three Henry VI plays and Richard III multiple times at the UCLA media lab. Instilled an interest in the Wars of the Roses.
I tried to buy the BBC versions of these plays, but they don’t license them to sell to private individuals in the U.S.
That’s cool – but I imagine the Henry VI trilogy doesn’t get assigned all that often, except maybe in grad-level English. The only reason I read them for class was because of the RSC visit to Ann Arbor. But they’re really cool plays, I think.
(I haven’t seen the BBC version, though I’ve heard they’re good. I’ll have to check the library when I get to school in the fall…)
I liked Ethan Frome. And Tess of the D’Urbervilles. And almost all of the Shakespeare. I adored To Kill a Mockingbird. And The Princess Bride, and Lord of the Flies…
I didn’t much care for - oh who am I kidding. I detested them enough that I blocked them out.
“Out, bad writing! You shall not clutter up this young impressionable mind! Begone!”
Ginger
I’d like to join Kyla and domina in saying that I also liked A Separate Peace. It was one of the few books assigned in high school that I actually read completely - over a single weekend in fact prior to my English teacher assigning it.
Also liked (in high school and college):
The Great Gatsby
The Crying of Lot 49
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Outcasts of Poker Flat
Did not like:
*The Scarlet Letter
The Pearl
Death in Venice
*
I was assigned parts of Henry VI and Richard III in the one Shakespeare class I took. I wasn’t required to watch the videos for any of the plays–I did that on my own.
**
Highly recommended: though not as good as Othello, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Richard II or the two Henry IV plays.
No big stars in these productions, but a few names who might be recognized: David Burke played Dr. Watson alongside Jeremy Brett in a Sherlock Holmes TV series. Mark Wing Davey played Zaphod Beeblebrox in “Hitchhiker’s Guide”. Bernard Hill (a personal favorite of mine) had a small part in I, Claudius, was Shirley Valentine’s husband, and had a part in Titanic.
Let me know what you think of the screenplays!