What books did they make you read in school?

Post Reply New Topic

What books did they make me read?
All the boring ones that I wasn't half ass interested in.
So what did I do?
Not read them.
Then what happened?
I failed all my classes.
I regret nothing!

How did you pass? I need to learn your trick so I can teach it to my kids!

From what I remember...
12th Grade
A Tale of Two Cities
MacBeth
Beowulf
Brave New World
Oliver Twist
11th Grade
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Great Gatsby
The Scarlet Letter
10th Grade
Julius Caesar
Nectar in a Sieve
Frankenstein
The Last 100 Days
9th Grade
Great Expectations
To Kill a Mockingbird
Lord of the Flies
Romeo and Juliet
8th Grade
As You Like It
Nothing But The Truth
The Red Badge of Courage
7th Grade
The Giver (My parents forbade me to read this, so, as a substitute, I read another book with a name I don't remember.)
6th Grade
Bridge to Terabithia
5th Grade
Number the Stars

Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Girl with a Pearl Earring books like this.

anyway what annoys me is the way they make u analyze every single little detail in the book. eg Griet crossed the threshold. what does this mean? things like that, things that ruin the book. they try to ruin books for students, seems like u can't just read cause u want to. which books have school ruined for you?

Well since I never completed high-school, I didn't really read a lot of books there.

At primary school though, I remember reading lots of school journals. They were books with just various two page stories, poems and articles...very boring as they were mainy filled with pictures and talked about pointless topics.

I remember one good part I read though....it was about a boy who couldn't swallow and he had to be fed through a tube going into his stomach. That was an interesting article although I think I was the only one in the class who liked it.

Lord of the Flies is the only one I recall not wanting to read and forced.

I read everything in the public library they allowed me to checkout including encylopedias. Was not much I don't want to read, but no time nowadays. School was great.

Lord of the Flies and some other ones that I forget. I didn't read any of them as no one can force me to do...anything.

I read Heinlein in class.

Oh, also Le Petit Prince in Francais Langue Maternelle (grade 10 French) in grade 9.

In elementary school French class our teacher read us this kids' book about a naughty boy called Laffreux David or something. Also, in grade 1, our teacher read us a series of books called "Please", "Excuse Me", probably Thank You and I'm Sorry, etc. They also made us read lots of those short stories, including Golden Pants in grade 7 and All Summer In A Day in grade 7 and 10.

84 Charing Cross Road (great book, planning to get the DVD)
Anne Frank's diary (after I returned the copy the school lent us I went to buy a newer and more complete edition)
I'm the King of the Castle (my friends and I were complaining privately about how we had to read about the perverted incidents over and over again to do our homework and study for the O Levels)
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
The Merchant of Venice
Tuesdays with Morrie (Chinese translation)

I went to a school where it was compulsory to take English Lit for O Levels. I enjoy reading prose and doing the analysis, but I never could analyse poetry. (A few years after I finished my O Levels I gave my poetry textbook to a friend who likes poetry.) That's why I barely passed Lit.

Something similar happened to me for reading comprehension at O Levels - I could just grasp what was required for the answer, but never could write it exactly the way the markers wanted.

I remember having to read:

The Gift (a children's book); simple but left an abiding legacy with me as I empathised with the bad guy.
The Grapes of Wrath (the class read abridged and said "rath", I read the real book and said "roth"); it was boring, either way.
Far From the Madding Crowd; my first experience of the idiocy that is literary analysis. Yes, there's a f*****g storm every five minutes, no, that doesn't mean it's a deliberate metaphor, just that TH liked writing storms. Again, I empathised with one of the bad guys and again, it's a pretty boring book. Film's okay.

And that we also looked at:

Romeo and Juliet
Macbeth; well, we watched the Polanski film, at least.
A Midsummer Night's Dream (we performed this as a play, but I don't think that was on the general silly bus.)

Think we were forced to endure some Dickens as well. Still, it doesn't seem that our suffering was bad compared to the lists people have posted here.

I've two abiding memories of English lessons - firstly, an incident where I (thinking of Monopoly) used "Mayfair"* as an example of something high value I'd swap for something; (everyone thought I was referring to the magazine of that name... ) and second, eventually walking out on English classes in disgust.


*"Boardwalk"?

YR 3 - Hating Alison Ashley
YR 8 - Goosebumps books
YR 9 - Playing Beatie Bow
YR 10 - Twelfth Night
YR 11 - A book that we could somehow connect to the Jodi Foster movie Contact
YR 12 - Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Hamlet

Sure there would have been more but don't really remember....

In my HS we had to read mostly European classic literature and a lot of thick and boring as hell books or poetry about patriotic feelings of the nation. The second ones make me sick even today. I hated Literature classes, because I don't understand feelings, metaphores and I just suck in analysis. I'm very good in Grammar stuff. I love reading books, but not about patriotism and the nation.

Books that I most likely wouldn't have read otherwise.