Is there any required books from this term or past terms that you ended up enjoying?

Two books that I enjoyed in past terms are:

Things Fall Apart for an English 118 class I took.

My Name is Asher Lev for a Humanities class.

Both of these books are very good.

some of the business books i've had to read have been quite enjoyable..such as Who Moved My Cheese & From Good to Great. In my English comp class we read Death of a Salesmen. I enjoyed that alot. other than that..my required reading has been less than satisfying.

Ashley-- I loved Things Fall Apart! It's one of my favorite books!

Two of my favorite books are actually from required reading lists: Things Fall Apart and The Things They Carried.

i'm reading the things they carried right now!

Are you?? Yay! Well I hope you like it- There are some parts that are really sad (in a good way) but even if you're not that into it, the chapters are fairly short so you can breeze through it

i am enjoying it so far!

Lillith's Brood by Octavia Butler, it was so different from all the other stuff we usually read, (political, historical , classical) and it was also a genre I never thought I would like but it was great.
I probably wouldn't read books like that unless I had to though, but it was a good book either way.

Anastasia..i LOVED it! :)

I really liked Fit To Be Tied by Bill Hybels which was required reading for Marriage and the Family. It was pretty good.
Also, Extreme Devotion by Voice of the Martyrs is really good to and it makes me cry when I read some of the things people went through and how much courage they had in the midst of their trials and torture.

Like, here's the one-a true story-that always makes me almost cry:

In the Cambodian jungle, Haim and his family were given shovels and told to dig their own graves. They were hostages of the Khmer Rouge who considered Christians 'enemies of the glorious revolution'.

The soldiers allowed Haim and his family to kneel, hold hands, and pray. Haim then urged the soldiers to repent and accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. The soldiers were puzzled by the compassion in his voice in the face of death.
As he spoke, one of his sons jumped up and fled into the woods. The soldiers started after him, but Haim stopped them. His calmness convinced the Communists to see what he would do.

While his family knelt with the soldiers' guns trained on them, Haim stepped to the edge of the forest. "Son, can stealing a few more days of life as a fugitive in that forest compare to joining your family here around a grave, but soon free forever in paradise with Christ?" After a moment, there was a rustling of some brush as Haim's son tearfully walked out and knelt down with his father.

Haim looked at the soldiers. "Now we are ready to go."

But none of the soldiers could pull their triggers. Soon, however, an officer came by who had not witnessed the boy's return, scolded the soldiers as cowards, and killed the Christians.


I always feel like bawling my eyes out. I don't think I'd have enough courage to do that were I in their situation.

awl.

Wuthering Heights, Catcher In The Rye, Kindred, The Kite Runner, The Handmaid's Tale, Mists of Avalon, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Red Tent, & I'm sure there's more.

I liked a lot of the things I had to read. <3

wow you got to read some good books!

Em...Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Go-Between, loads of poetry by W.B. Yeats and John Donne.

I've enjoyed:

Catch-22, The Things they Carried, and All Quiet on the Western Front (my summer reading for my senior year of high school; one of 3 groups chose from)

The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Huck Finn were all from my sophomore year of high school and I've had to re-read Gatsby and Huck in college.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Others and Nature and Selected Essays (Emerson) were ones from college that I've enjoyed.

I haven't taken a good lit class where I just loved every bit of reading. My adviser told me that when he went to college, he got a list of books his freshman year (or maybe it was when he declared) and he was supposed to read those books. Any he hadn't finished by his senior year, they did a capstone course to cover them. I would have loved to do this!

I've enjoyed:

Catch-22, The Things they Carried, and All Quiet on the Western Front (my summer reading for my senior year of high school; one of 3 groups chose from)

The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Huck Finn were all from my sophomore year of high school and I've had to re-read Gatsby and Huck in college.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Others and Nature and Selected Essays (Emerson) were ones from college that I've enjoyed.

I haven't taken a good lit class where I just loved every bit of reading. My adviser told me that when he went to college, he got a list of books his freshman year (or maybe it was when he declared) and he was supposed to read those books. Any he hadn't finished by his senior year, they did a capstone course to cover them. I would have loved to do this!

I loved To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tale of Two Cities, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Catcher in the Rye, and Flowers for Algernon. I'm sure there's also more that I can't think of right now...

In my 9th grade (I think) English class we read The Odyssey, which I really loved. After we finished reading it, we watched a film adaptation which was made me appreciate the awesomeness of the book even more.

My friend's English class was reading The Catcher in the Rye, but my class wasn't. So after she was finished with the book I asked if I could borrow it and it's one of my favorite books to this day :)

(this is all high school stuff) I liked the Great Gatsby pretty well.... and The Moon Is Down. I'd really like to read it again b/c I remember really liking it but I'm foggy on a lot of details. We read The Importance of Being Earnest aloud. It was hilarious.. the funniest guys read the girl parts and girls read the boy parts. omg. so funny. Instead of reading it, we watched the Helena Bonham Carter movie version of Twelfth Night (she's the only one I remember being in it). It was good.

In college I've had to read mostly short stories, but as far as novels go.. I really loved Cat's Cradle and One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest was ok.

^^Lynn- I loooove the great gatsby!!!

Two other books that I read in high school that I absolutely love and would totally recomend to everyone would be the trial and the namesake. both amazing!!!

I really need to read The Great Gatsby..I don't recall us every having to read it. I think maybe it was on a summer reading list where you had to choose one of so many books..but I never HAD to read it.

Ooh interesting topic!

Some required reading that I enjoyed (of what I remember)

Catcher in the Rye
To Kill a Mockingbird
Rebecca
The Bean Trees

I loved Rebecca as well!!

I haven't had to read much in college so far, but for high school it is the following:

Wuthering Heights
Any Shakespeare
Sophie's World

I have a hard time trying to remember what I read for fun and what I had to read.

I forget the name of the class, but it was an English class. I hated the professor and she made us read The Joy Luck Club and I loved it.

The Count of Monte Cristo
The Great Gatsby
To Kill a Mockingbird
Macbeth
1984 (I read that one on my own first though)
a bunch of poetry by English people
The Once and Future King
Frankenstein

I'm doing some honors contracts for my history classes this summer and my professor for my Vietnam class assigned A Rumor of War. I'm really enjoying it! Parts of it are a bit graphic (like when he describes some of the KIA causes of death) or make me angry (like the massacring for civilians for the hell of it). But I'm one that believes good books get a reaction out of you.

Okay well as an avid reader, through elementary, middle and high school I read all the required reading before the year we were supposed to read them. I loved them all. :-) I'd always get mad we were reading those books because I had already read them!

In college, I read THINGS FALL APART (which I actually disliked in high school but ended up loving in college). We read a lot of short stories in my college English class & we also read ALL SOULS, which was a book about Boston the 70s and 80s. (My school is located in the area so it made sense)

The only thing I can remember reading and REALLY enjoying was The Things They Carried. We did a circuit on Edgar Allen Poe, which was okay, but only stands out in my mind because of the awesome essays I wrote.

There's a fair number of these. From high school I liked Brave New World, Jane Eyre, Macbeth, 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale. The horrendous symbolism in The Scarlet Letter did make me laugh, but I don't think that really counts.
In college I would have to say Persuasion, The Mill on the Floss, Twelfth Night, Rebecca and Dracula. What can I say, I'm an English major.

John Steinbeck's East of Eden is now my favorite book. It's not one of those books that many people pick up, mostly because of how large it is and because it's written by Steinbeck, but it's a book that changed my life.

All of my college required reading has been political science research and philosophy of religion. I don't really think I have any favorites from there, haha. I have a slew of books about Islam that I like, though.

Oh, East of Eden. That book made Steinbeck my favorite writer for a a good portion of my teenaged years. I liked his other things all right, but there's a passage about fathers and deity... I think it's roughly chapter 3 or so? But it was one of the first times I read something and was convinced it was written for me.

Anybody read any required reading that you've enjoyed lately?

I really liked The Great Gatsby, Sophie's Choice, The Scarlett Letter, To Kill a Mockingbird, Pride and Prejudice, The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, Eugene Onegin, and Hamlet. The Things They Carried was pretty good too, but I don't think I would ever want to reread it.

When I first started college, the freshman class was assigned to read Caucasia by Danzy Senna over the summer. I had never heard of it but I loved it, and the author came to the campus during the second semester and autographed our books.

I also always enjoy the short stories I have to read for my English and Creative Writing classes.

As for poetry...there wasn't much. I liked many of Shakespeare's sonnets and I really loved My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, but that's about it.

We only had to read two books in 10th grade: everyone read The Great Gatsby, and then they assigned us in book groups at random & I got Into the Wild. Both books were great, and I really wish we did more reading, but we spent most of our time sitting around & prepping for the WASL.

I switched to college for 11th & 12th and I took all the English classes I could. I found my love for John Keats, Raymond Carver, and Victorian literature.

I loved The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstein, and The Once and Future King.

I also loved almost all of the poetry we read, which was mostly English and included Elizabeth Barret Browning, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Shakespeare, Petrarch (we did a whole section comparing their sonnets and writing our own), William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
I love poetry, and my teacher taught it very well.

I don't remember liking any of the required reading, but I do remember absolutle hatred for some. Since I have been out of classes that require reading for awhile now (other than text books) I have reread some of those required in high school and enjoyed some, tolerated others. I guess I am not too good with books that we had to disect. I want to read for enjoyment. I don't mind discussing reads but when you pick it apart piece by piece it ruins the book/story for me.

I really enjoyed The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. I most likely wouldn't have read it if it wasn't required, but it turned out to be really good. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich was pretty good, too.

Most of the stuff I have to read for college I really like. For instance Death Without Weeping The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Although I dunno if 'like' is the right word for that book. It's the most horrible thing ever, it'll make you extremely angry at the way things are and extremely upset at the same time...but it's a fantastic book.

Hmm...I didn't read a lot of novels in college. I think my favorite that I was introduced to that I had never read before was The Handmaid's Tale. Love that book!

Required reading I remember liking in high school, or was at least glad someone made me read:The Bean Trees, 1984, Of Mice and Men, and The Joy Luck Club

The Handmaid's Tale is absolutely brilliant!!!

I ended up loving Invisible Man, Catch-22, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Handmaid's Tale last year when I was taking several lit classes. It was a new experience for me because I'm used to just hating all of my required readings. They are now all on my list of favorites :)

To Kill a Mockingbird!

I liked The Crucible, Hatchet, The Giver, Time Machine, and Night.

Oh I loved The Crucible! It has so many great things to say. And his personal history behind why he wrote it is so moving. What a guy.

I loved the way my class read The Crucible. We were all assigned parts and then got up and acted it out. I understood it so much more because I was a part of it. :)

The Crucible was such a great required reading!

I just finished Coming of Age in Mississippi. It was required for my 1950's history class. It's an autobiography from one of the girls that was part of the famous Woolworth's sit-in in Mississippi. It's all about her childhood and growing up to be part of the Civil Rights Movement. It's kinda slow at some points, but overall I really enjoyed it.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison for Humanities class.