Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolfe
J.B.: A Play In Verse - Archibald MacLeish
Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen
Native Son - Richard Wright
Surfacing - Margaret Atwood
Only a couple I can remember enjoying. Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and J.B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Animal Farm
A Tale of Two Cities
Lolita- This was assigned to me in college in two different classes
I never liked either Lord of the Flies or Catcher in the Rye – I think I didn’t like Catcher because I didn’t read it until I was in my mid-20’s.
To kill a Mocking Bird. I was sure it would suck and I would not really read it and then fail the tests. We were issued it on a Friday. The next day I was bored and figured I would read the first set of pages we were assigned to read that weekend. To this day it is the only book I have read in one day. I even read it in one sitting.
I guess I’d mention that I reread “Great Expectations” ten years later and loved it. I’m still pretty cold on the rest, even “Hamlet.”
Slaughterhouse Five
The Odyssey
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Great Gatsby
and Watership Down
I’m not sure if this counts, because it was a short story in an anthology. I think it was 10th grade. It hasthis piece of artwork either on the cover or in it, and was an attempt to capitalize on teens’ interest in dark themes.
The story I remember so vividly was a science fiction piece about a girl who had stowed away on a supply ship because she wanted to visit her brother who was stationed on a distant planet. Problem was, the ship had only enough fuel to reach said planet, and her extra weight was a problem. So the pilot explained the problem, and she understood that she needed to be jettisoned in order for the supply ship to get there. And the story ends with her being jettisoned.
A gazillion Doper points (redeemable for wonderful prizes!) and many virtual libations to anyone who can help me identify the name of this short story and its author.
You don’t say! As we learned in another thread, storyteller0910 and I both played Oberon in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Welcome to the club!
That would be “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin, later made into a Twilight Zone episode and a 1996 TV movie. Wiki has a good article on it.
Absolutely. Who wants to read a book about birds, for crying out loud!
I didn’t read many of the books assigned back in high school because I get turned off when I have to read something, but one short story I loved was All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury. I also enjoyed the short story The Monsters are Due on Maple Street. I know that was a Twilight Zone episode, but I don’t know if what I read was based on the episode or if the episode was based on the story. Enjoyable either way.
I also really liked The Good Earth.
My ninth grade English teacher insisted on making us read it out loud, taking turns of one page each, going one at a time up and down the rows of desks. I was so frustrated by this annoyingly slow paced, dull method that I counted the number of kids left before my turn, stuck my finger on the page I would have to read when my turn came, and just put on the autopilot silence detector which meant “they’re probably waiting for you” while I read ahead.
I hated having to waste a few good minutes of reading time to take my turn, so I kind of rushed through it in a “very well, carry on then!” sort of way. I don’t think many people enjoyed the parts that I read aloud. But then again, I seriously doubt many of them enjoyed the reading aloud format at all.
The teacher had nice legs, though. She sort of half leaned, half sat on the top of a desk with her feet still on the floor. When I finished reading the book, I’d pass the time in between my turns reading aloud by sneaking peeks up her skirt, which I realize now (12 years later) was probably the reason she wore it.
Daaaayummm, Elendil’s Heir! Next NEO Dopefest, I’m buyin’!
My faves have been mentioned with the exception of two. Rebecca and And Then There Were None . (At least, I didn’t see them mentioned. Sorry if I missed 'em.)
I think I’ll go along with many of these picks. Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None was good. I liked The Cold Equations.
Loved To Kill A Mockingbird and an abridged The Count of Monte Cristo in middle school.
High school featured 1984, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
And in elementary school, honorable mentions go to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, The House with a Clock in its Walls, and the Hank the Cowdog and Encyclopedia Brown.
My favorite was Equus, which we read in 12th grade AP English. Not only did I absolutely love the play, but I got the only 9 (out of 9) on an essay about it that anybody got in the class all year. I grokked the hell out of that play. 
I first read Rebecca for an 8th-grade English class, and have enjoyed it many times since. I recall a friend in the same class, who had read a few chapters ahead of me, telling me about the ending: “The coroner’s inquest had the strangest verdict.”
Jane Eyre was an assigned summer reading book around the same time. I remember being enthralled with the misery of young, orphaned Jane and the Lowood part of the story, but kind of lost interest once Jane was grown up and having all those long chats with Mr. Rochester.
I also remember reading Vanity Fair in high school; for some reason, I had a hard time with it at the time, but came back to it about 5 years later and loved it.
From college: Gargantua and Pantagruel.
From high school: Candide. Actually, my teacher didn’t “make me” read Candide; she just suggested it as a subject for my paper, based on the fact that I had recently read Steppenwolf on my own. (The idea was that we had to write a “comparative study” of two novels.) The funny part is that this was an American Lit class.
One of my textbooks contained Jack Finney’s The Third Level, which I read, and re-read, on my own.
I failed English my freshman year due to not participating in a required project because I had expected to move in the middle of the school year. Instead, Dad went by himself with Mom & me following in June. I didn’t tell them about failing the class so I ended up retaking Freshman English in the new school. The point of this little story is that my second Freshman English class read The Shining.