# Your favorite book they made you read in school **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [August 17, 2007, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884 "2007-08-17T00:44:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Wonderwall6129](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/57b2e6/32.png) [@Wonderwall6129](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wonderwall6129)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/1 "2007-08-17T00:44:47Z")
I have a few: Catcher in the Rye Lord of the Flies A Separate Peace Macbeth A Midsummer Night’s Dream Of Mice and Men ---
**Author:** ![Zsofia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/7bcc69/32.png) [@Zsofia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zsofia)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/2 "2007-08-17T00:48:51Z")
_Catch-22 The Good Earth Lord of the Flies Bartleby the Scrivener A Separate Peace A Gathering of Old Men_ Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. ---
**Author:** ![Chanteuse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/9de053/32.png) [@Chanteuse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chanteuse)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/3 "2007-08-17T01:34:12Z")
Nothing so intellectual for me: I was in the seventh grade and it was _Cheaper By the Dozen_. I still love that book! ---
**Author:** ![Drain\_Bead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e47774/32.png) [@Drain\_Bead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Drain_Bead)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/4 "2007-08-17T01:40:05Z")
_McTeague_ was always one of my favorites. Nobody else liked it. Edited: Used HTML instead of board code. D’oh! ---
**Author:** ![Cazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cazzle/32/75_2.png) [@Cazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cazzle)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/5 "2007-08-17T01:42:54Z")
I only remember being set two books to read at school. The first was [_Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_NIMH), a book I loved but was furious to be asked to read in high school (aged 13ish) as I’d first read it in primary school (aged 10ish) and thought it was a “kid’s book”. I also thought it was ludicrous to assign a book to read and then show the movie in class - I suspect many of my classmates never bothered to read the book after we watched _The Secret Of NIMH_, since as far as I recall you could answer all the set questions from the movie alone. The second book was [_Pennington’s Seventeenth Summer_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennington%27s_Seventeenth_Summer) when I was 14ish, and which I hated. As a (fairly) well-behaved 14 year old Australian girl, I guess I just couldn’t relate to the adventures of a delinquent 17 year old English boy. We read extracts from _Lord of the Flies_, _The Hobbit_, _All Quiet On The Western Front_, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, and others that escape my memory, but never the full books. I read [_The Wife of Martin Guerre_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wife_of_Martin_Guerre) in an afternoon to help a friend with her book report, but she was a year ahead of me. The book was never assigned to our class. After year 8, our school dropped the pretence of assigning us book reports and started just showing us movies in class - in Year 10 we were supposed to do [_Cry Freedom_](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092804/) and weren’t shown so much as a page from the source material (the film was based on two books - _Biko_ and _Asking For Trouble_, both by Donald Woods). As many of my classmates were functionally illiterate, I thought making us do movie reports instead of book reports compounded the problem rather than solving it. ---
**Author:** ![ErinPuff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dbc845/32.png) [@ErinPuff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ErinPuff)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/6 "2007-08-17T01:46:36Z")
_Sophie’s World_ (Jostein Gaarder) _Demian_ (Hermann Hesse) There were others I’d probably like if I read them now, but studying them took the fun out. ---
**Author:** ![TupeloHoney](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a88e57/32.png) [@TupeloHoney](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TupeloHoney)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/7 "2007-08-17T02:01:38Z")
I really enjoyed The Great Gatsby and Wuthering Heights ---
**Author:** ![Hazle\_Weatherfield](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Hazle\_Weatherfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hazle_Weatherfield)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/8 "2007-08-17T02:03:52Z")
The Great Gatsby The Spoon River Anthology Of Mice and Men The Crucible Mythology by Edith Hamilton Alice in Wonderland The Hobbit ---
**Author:** ![Hazle\_Weatherfield](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Hazle\_Weatherfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hazle_Weatherfield)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 2:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/9 "2007-08-17T02:06:07Z")
The Great Gatsby The Spoon River Anthology Of Mice and Men The Crucible Mythology by Edith Hamilton Alice in Wonderland The Hobbit Tom Sawyer Huckleberry Finn ---
**Author:** ![H3Knuckles](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/ba8739/32.png) [@H3Knuckles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/H3Knuckles)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/10 "2007-08-17T02:41:58Z")
Sadly, off the top of my head there are only two books I was required to read during my school days that I’ve really enjoyed. Quite a few I can appreciate the quality of, but not many that appealed to me personally. Now, if you wanted to open this to short stories, plays, poems, etc, then I couldn’t begin to cover everything. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. Soem might know this better as it’s film incarnation “Gettysburg” It’s a lengthy retelling of the Battle of Gettysburg from the perspectives of the commanders on both sides of the battle. Very well-told war drama. and I believe this is the other (at least, this is the closest I can find online, so I’m hoping it’s the same book) The Harp of Burma by Takeyama Michio. This story (about the experiences of Japanese soldiers during WW2 that wind up being held prisoner in a British camp) is interesting in that it’s mostly about the psychological and emotional effects on the soldiers, with very little depiction of conflict. Apparently there’s 2 movies of this, title’s slightly different though “the burmese harp” Edited to add: Since the OP is including Shakespeare’s works, I’ll add that Macbeth is my favorite of his plays, and I read it in school (during summer school between my freshman and sophomore years). ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/11 "2007-08-17T02:42:43Z")
The collected Sherlock Holmes stories in elementary school. My fifth-grade teacher read them to the class, actually, during break periods - I still distinctly remember hearing “The Speckled Band” and “The Red-Headed League,” and love Holmes to this day. Then _The Illustrated Man, The Left Hand of Darkness_ and _Catcher in the Rye_ in high school. ---
**Author:** ![Alistair\_McCello](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/58956e/32.png) [@Alistair\_McCello](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alistair_McCello)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/12 "2007-08-17T02:42:52Z")
The answer is a bit weird for me, my favorite would be _The Brothers Karamazov_, but in reality they didn’t make me read it. It was assigned, I read about three quarters of it over the weekend (never put it down, except to sleep), then I come in monday and the teacher decided that there wasn’t enough time left to read such a long book so she gave us another one to read. I also loved: _The Great Gatsby_ _Pride and Prejudice_ _The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle_ _Hamlet_ ---
**Author:** ![stucco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e56c9b/32.png) [@stucco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stucco)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 2:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/13 "2007-08-17T02:56:34Z")
_Their Eyes Were Watching God_ - I don’t remember that much about the book except that I loved it. Probably because it wasn’t stuffy or about a boy coming of age or incredibly depressing. ---
**Author:** ![rackensack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e5b9ba/32.png) [@rackensack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rackensack)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/14 "2007-08-17T03:55:23Z")
When I finally got round to _Moby Dick_ in a grad school course, I kicked myself for avoiding it for so long. Then we did Pynchon’s _Crying of Lot 49_, which made me regret every day I’d spent before that without having read Pynchon. I’d never avoided him consciously, just nobody ever told me how fabulous he was – well, one person did, but he was a notorious prankster and I didn’t believe him. Reading _Lot 49_ completely changed my intellectual interests. _Tristram Shandy_, back in college. ---
**Author:** ![Wee\_Bairn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/90db22/32.png) [@Wee\_Bairn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wee_Bairn)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/15 "2007-08-17T04:05:06Z")
Superfudge, A Taste of Blackberries, A Separate Peace- elementary school of course. ---
**Author:** ![MissTake](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/misstake/32/3189_2.png) [@MissTake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MissTake)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/16 "2007-08-17T04:51:12Z")
_1984 The Plague Watership Down_ Are the three I remember most. I still don’t like bunnies. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 9:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/17 "2007-08-17T09:40:30Z")
_To Kill a Mockingbird_. One of my top ten books of all time. When we started it, I knew I was going to hate it, and didn’t want to admit when I started loving it. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 10:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/18 "2007-08-17T10:40:05Z")
**Sons & Lovers** - DH Lawrence **Lord of the Flies** - W Golding **Day of the Triffids** - J Whyndam ---
**Author:** ![Only\_Mostly\_Dead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/f19dbf/32.png) [@Only\_Mostly\_Dead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Only_Mostly_Dead)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 10:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/19 "2007-08-17T10:43:29Z")
One wonderful English teacher assigned us, among others, both _Brave New World_ and _1984_. Another gave us _The Once and Future King_ as summer reading. All three I reread often. I wasn’t made to read them for classes, but for performance in the school’s drama club, but I developed a love for Shakespeare’s comedies when I performed in _Much Ado About Nothing_ (as Don Pedro) and _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ (Oberon). ---
**Author:** ![Jeffr062](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f04885/32.png) [@Jeffr062](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jeffr062)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2007, 10:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884/20 "2007-08-17T10:57:46Z")
Silas Marner 🙂 [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-book-they-made-you-read-in-school/415884.md?page=2)