My senior year (1971) English class read The Godfather. It was a Roman Catholic High school, and the class was taught by Sister Mary Corinne.
::Blushes shyly::
Well, that description rang a bell. Didn’t take me too long to track down the author and title. Glad to help!
My 2 favs from HS were Candide and Crime and Punishment. Great reads, both of them.
Beatles by Lars Saabye Christensen
Jonas by Jens Bjørneboe (Yes, I’m Norwegian. Why do you ask? 
)
Det forsømte forår (apparently you call it Stolen Spring) by Hans Scherfig
The Great Gatsby
The Sun Also Rises
Love Medicine
Things Fall Apart
Leviathan by Paul Auster (one of my favourite authors)
These are just off the top of my head, I’m sure there were many more I loved as compulsory reading was my favourite time in school.
Least favourite: Cal
and Wuthering Heights. Read it on my own when I was about 13, didn’t like it. Read it again for a university course figuring I must have been too young to appreciate it the first time around. Still didn’t like it. I probably have some issues with Gothic novels because I really don’t appreciate Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein either (big fan of her mother though). The letter within a letter within a letter framework and the way the monster learns to talk and read when he just happens to find himself in listening distance to a house where they just happen to be teaching the language to a foreigner. :smack: (Ok, that’s enough, I’m going to stop now, I know these books have plenty of fans)
As a teacher, by far the most popular book I ever assigned was ** The Princess Bride** by William Goldman–probably 75% of the kids do the summer reading when that is the book, which is about twice what you can normally expect. And they talk about it all year–if I go look at Facebooks, most of my former students have it listed under “favorite books”. I gave it up this year because my course is really a rhetoric class and it didn’t really fit. I am hoping one of the other English teachers will take it.
Kids also, in my experience, like ** Huck Finn** OR Gatsby. but rarely both.
For myself, I was very resistient to books we had to read in High School–I like Nine Stories by Salenger. In college, Paradise Lost. A Hundred Years of Solitude and “Benito Cereno” all rocked my world in different ways.
We were never given reading lists for school, so the only books I remember reading are Emma which we had to study for the Leaving Cert and To Kill a Mocking Bird for the Junior Cert. We did a few plays too, Hamlet and Playboy of the Western World for the LC and Romeo & Juliet for the JC.
Of those, my favourite was probably To Kill A Mocking Bird.
When I read Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade, I thought it was utterly stupid. A couple years and a couple heartaches later, I realized how great it is.
A Tale of Two Cities. Loved it then, love it now.
In 10th grade, the teacher broke the class up into groups, assigned each group a few chapters of Moby Dick, and made each group give an oral report on their chapters. I thought it was an occasionally amusing, but vastly over-rated book. One day, in college, I was browsing in a bookstore, and saw it. On a whim, I bought a copy and read it cover-to-cover. When you don’t have homework and tests on it, it is actually very fun to read.
I loved The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Something Wicked This Way Comes, *Alas Babylon * (I know everyone else on earth hates it but I thought it was superb and continue to reread it every so often because of the awesomeness), and of course all of the required Shakespeare - Hamlet, MacBeth, Midsummer, etc.
Mr. Midshipman Hornblower also The Thirty Nine Steps.
The Martian Chronicles
A few that weren’t required in the classroom, but dictated by peer pressure (if you wanted to be cool): Stranger in a Strange Land, The Catcher in the Rye, and Catch 22.
Dune
It was great. We read it my senior year in Honors Literary Analysis. The teacher hated the book, and we got to pick it apart in great detail. It was an amazing exercise on how to hate “classic” literature.
Sorry for the double post, but the more I think about this I realize that throughout all of my great public education the only non-short children’s books I was required to read were:
Dune
The Hobbit
Brave New World
Gotta love public education.
I’m more tempted to make a list of books I hated that I was forced to read . (I can’t believe people actually LIKED “A Separate Peace”. I had to read it for two different classes, and hated it both times. Pepper Mill had the same experience)
Liked:
The Odyssey, Translated by Robert Fitzgerald (two different classes!)
Gulliver’s Travels
A Christmas Carol
A Tale of Two Cities
HATED:
A Separate Peace
A Death in the Family by James Agree
Hard Times by Dickens
A Turn of the Screw by Henry James (only James can make a ghost story boring)
Pride and Prejudice
The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James (even worse tha a Turn of the Screw)
The Death of Ivan Ilych