Time for a trip down memory lane. Thinking back to high school English class (which might be a challenge for some of us!) which books do you remember being assigned? Were there any you fell in love with? Were there any you hated?
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Going back to tenth grade English, I fell in love with the book, Giants in the Earth by O.E. Rolvaag and The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck. I struggled with Shakespeare and A Tale of Two Cities.
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I read only 2 books with an entire class, and even then it was an elective class, not required to graduate. The books were Lord of the Flies by Golding and Night by Elie Wiesel. The required English courses (9th and 10th grade) had lists of pre-approved books students could choose from and the teacher provided a test when we were done reading. I read To Kill a Mockingbird, The Good Earth, The Great Gatsby, and probably others. I think my education in rural Michigan was lacking in many ways, but this highlights the worst of it. It was possible to get through high school without ever really reading a book. Awful.
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i remember GO DOWN MOSES-William Faulkner- and I have never forgotten it. ANd have read it again and again.
Outside of class- “Forever Amber.” “On The Road”
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The Scarlet Letter always comes to mind first.
To Kill A Mockingbird
Of Mice and Men
Lord of the Flies
Animal Farm
The Great Gatsby
All those lovely reads. 
Can’t think of any others.
This was in the late 60’s. Yikes - I’m old.
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I forgot about The Good Earth and A Tale of Two Cities.
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I was so fortunate to have the option to choose an amazing Literature teacher all four years of my high school. She taught a myriad of classic courses including Russian Lit, Western Lit, Romance Classics, Fantasy Classics and All Things Steinbeck. A few of the books we read included Native Son, The Virginian, The Once and Future King, Madame Bovary, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Hamlet, The Oxbow Incident, Silas Marner, Anna Karenina, Fathers and Sons, Malcolm X, A Separate Peace, and so many more. Thank you, Mrs Paul💕, you were the best. She was lovingly called “The Culture Vulture,” a name she embraced.
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I was terrible in high school. I never read anything that we were assigned. It’s not that I didn’t read. In fact, I spent almost all my free time reading (and I worked at a Waldenbooks, too - still my dream job!). But I just found my teachers’ choice of books uninspiring. I had one who seemed obsessed with death. We read Death of a Salesman, Death Be Not Proud, and a couple of other tragedies over the course of that year. I was super lucky in that I took great notes, tested well, and wrote well enough that I got good grades, but I basically was faking it.
I think the one exception to that was A Tale of Two Cities. I fell in love with Dickens in junior high and willingly read that one.
I forgot about Silas Marner.
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*Wuthering Heights
*The Catcher in the Rye
*Native Son
*Grapes of Wrath
*Catch 22
*Brave New World
*All Quiet on the Western Front
*Great Expectations ions
*Lord of the Flies
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Oddly, I can’t recall high school lit books but do remember 8th grade when we read several Edgar Allan Poe short stories and poems. At that young age his works would leave an impression, wouldn’t they?
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A Clockwork Orange. We read lots of other stuff but this one is memorable because I didn’t understand a word of it.
10th grade (1980) Macbeth…. 11th grade The Iliad….12th grade The Great Gatsby
My favorite was The Great Gatsby. I was not a fan of The Iliad
My high school English Literature and American Literature teacher was incredible. Even with the nonreaders, his classes were their favorite. Sadly, he passed away my freshman year of college at age 42 due to a massive heart attack.
For Eng Literature, I remember reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and the play, Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. In Am Literature, I recall the play, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, Moby Dick by Herman Melville. We had to write a term paper in each class on a book we really liked. I wrote one on A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and the other on Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. We also read a lot of poetry.
The Scarlet Letter
To Kill A Mockingbird
Of Mice and Men
Lord of the Flies
Animal Farm
The Great Gatsby
Catch 22
The Catcher in the Rye
Native Son
Brave New World
All Quiet on the Western Front
1984
I can’t believe that I remembered as many as I did, with a little help from others of you who posted. I was fortunate to have some good English teachers in high school. I’m sorry that I discovered Cliff’s Notes, but I did actually read most of them myself.
We read a lot of books! Many classics and then some books that were less well known but which we (the sgtudents) enjoyed more: Soylent Green**emphasized text, Alas,Babylon (which I love to this day),