What classics did you read in school?

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Curious as to what classics you had to read in high school. I graduated from high school 5 years ago and we never read any classics. The only classics we read were "Catcher in the Rye", "The Great Gatsby", "Lord of the Flies", and a few Shakespeare plays. That's it! The AP English classes got to read Dickens and the Iliad, and sometimes the English Honors classes read some Austen books too, but the regular classes always read more of the popular novels and short stories instead of classics, which always really got on my nerves. I would always sit in on the honors and AP classes just for fun because I always enjoyed the classics more than the other books we read.

What classics did you read in school?

I transitioned through both AP English and Regular English throughout high school, so I got a taste of some of the classics - even though I didn't read much of them.

Some of the books on our curriculum were:

The Odyssey
Romeo and Juliet
Julius Caesar
The Scarlet Letter
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Of Mice and Men

Of mice and men by John Steinbeck and The metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, among others.

I remember reading Of Mice and Men, 1984, Animal Farm, and Romeo and Juliet. The first three stuck in my head 'cos they are ace, the latter because it caused my a right headache.

Oh wait, I think we read Great Expectations, which didn't really do much for me.

Hmm... not sure. Long time ago. Certainly Far From the Madding Crowd and The Grapes of Wrath. Some Shakspar, Hamlet, Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, yawn. Some of Dahl's Chickens as well I think. Our Day Out. Dunno what else. Nowt I'm in any great hurry to read again.

Animal Farm

Hmm…. Let’s see, one Shakespeare play/year: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and something else…. I can’t recall. It WAS 25 years ago.

In addition, we read lotsa poems and short stories. The ones I remember were mostly by Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe… also, a lot of King Arthur stuff by random limeys and… oh, Canterbury Tales by Chaucer (?) and Paradise Lost by Milton.

In addition, we had to pick 2 novels from a list, read them and give a presentation on them each semester.

I read a lot of Steinbeck because his books are short! I also read a lot of H.G. Wells. I read Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Huck Finn, and a few things by Hemingway…

I'll post as many as I can remember. I went to school in northern Georgia, so a lot of the books on the reading lists were Southern in origin, or dealt with racial issues.

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
Light In August by William Faulkner
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

I also read Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo when I was in high school, but it wasn't for any class-- more because I was a Metallica fan.

I really only enjoyed the stuff we read in the 12th grade: Brave New World, Frankenstein, Out of the Silent Planet. But two years ago I started reading contemporary literary fiction--Pynchon, Wallace, Ellis, McCarthy, Palahniuk, DeLillo.

We hardly did any, and then only token texts for national exams. For SATs, it was The Tempest, which I did like. Then for GCSE, Romeo and Juliet (I don't think I even read the set text, let alone the play...don't know how on earth I got the marks for that) and Of Mice and Men. In Drama, we did bits of Macbeth lots of times (I was always very taken with the witches). I recently took Of Mice and Men down from my bookshelf and stuck it behind a cupboard, that felt great! I just think of being stuck in that horrible class with all those people. Well, anyway. For AS English Lit we're doing Macbeth and a modern classic, Death of a Salesman.
In England the English teaching is horrendous. You're taken through it at a businesslike pace until you've covered all the checklist of the syllabus, there's no discussion, as long as you get a passable result in the exam you're a top student. It's suffocating. You won't get any recognition for going beyond the parameters. You can be an expert on Victorian literature, but if you don't hand in an identical essay full of appropriate provided 'literary vocabulary', you get a fail grade. We are just taught to the test and students just lose all sense of initiative, cliches galore...glad I only have a couple more years to go! I do like this English class though, in spite of it.