Books from Rory's list you read in high school

[Nadja]

Hey everyone,
I scrolled through the classic book requests and noticed that almost everyone had The Great Gatsby and other really well-known classic books on their list. I'm from Germany, and I was just wondering, aren't Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, and Huckleberry Finn obligatory reading in high school (in America)? Or did you read other books? Are there any books from Rory's list you enjoyed when you were in high school?

[Alison]

I read Huck Finn, The Scarlet Letter, and Death of a Salesman in high school, but not The Great Gatsby. Anne Frank and Flowers for Algernon were required reading in middle school (6,7, and 8th grades).

I was also surprised by the number of Huck Finns on the list. Every school is different, but I thought Huck Finn was the universal Twain that was read. Maybe people would like to re-read, though, if it's been awhile?

[Kristen]

I put Great Gatsby and Flowers for Algernon on my list even though I have read these in high school. However that was 15 years ago so I would love to re-read these because I loved the books!

[Michelle, the leader of literature]

I never read The Great Gatsby or Huck Finn in High School, I did read To Kill a Mockingbird, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Emily Dickinson though.
I think every school/ teacher is different and many US high school students read a large variety of books.

[Julie]

I read The Great Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter in HS in Texas but did not read Huck Finn until college. We also had To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet in HS. The teachers have a flexibility the reading lists between levels of classes (honors, AP etc.) at the HS level. In my college, we did most of the classics with the assumption that we had already read most of them once, so the professor expected more detailed analysis when we wrote about them.

[Tara]

From Australia. Did have to read To Kill a MockingBird & Shakespeare. :)

[Montana]

I read Hamlet,Romeo and Juliet,The Great Gatsby,The Chosen, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Stone Diaries, etc all in high school, and that was just class assigned reading, not even the book reports.

[Emily]

Went to high school in NY. Had to read Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, & To Kill a Mockingbird. I also read Death of a Salesman for free reading back then. My favorites were To Kill a Mockingbird and Death of a Salesman of the list. Isn't it interesting how you nearly always enjoy the books you read for fun more than the books you read for school? (:

[Kayla]

I read Anne Frank, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, Night and Shakespeare (Hamlet, R&J, MacBeth) for my middle school and high school English classes. I really enjoyed them all, especially The Great Gatsby, which I've read three times already. I wouldn't mind rereading all of the others as well, except maybe Lord of the Flies, which was one my least favorite books I read for school (though I still rated it 3 stars).

[Bethany]

I didn't read The Great Gatsby until after college. But in high school I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Christmas Carol, The Count of Monte Cristo, David Copperfield, Fahrenheit 451, LotR, Great Expectations, Hamlet, Henry V, Jane Eyre, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Pride and Prejudice, The Raven, Romeo and Juliet, Stuart Little, A Tale of Two Cities, To Kill a Mockingbird, Who Moved My Cheese?, and Uncle Tom's Cabin. I might have read couple of the easier books in middle school instead of high school, I can't quite remember. I read Little Women and some of the children's books (the Oz books and Charlotte's Web) around middle school.

I was homeschooled, so I had some say in my English curriculum, but a number of the books seemed similar to what my public-schooled friends read.

[Bridgette]

Tara wrote: "From Australia. Did have to read To Kill a MockingBird & Shakespeare. :)"

I live in Canada - we read one Shakespeare play a year - and also To Kill a Mockingbird. Grade 9 was Romeo and Juliet, 10 was Taming of the Shrew, 11 was Macbeth, 12 was Hamlet, and OA (University prep year) was King Lear.
Among other books! :)

[Nikoline]

Fede wrote: "I'm from Belgium and I didn't have an obligatory reading list in high school, which is actually pretty sad because it means I have a lot of catching up to do."

I know what you mean. In Denmark we don't have one either and I also find myself getting furious about it. In my English class my teacher luckily decided to work with James Joyce, Jane Austen and Shakespeare and I cannot tell you how thrilled I was when it happened.

[Reija]

In Finland, we hadn't any list either. I tried to ask somekind of list must-read-books from teacher but I got any. We talk some classics in teams, I remembered I read Frankestein and some others read Idiot but nothing what we all could read together and talk about it, except few Finnish classics. I really wish that we would concentrate world classics more.

[Becca]

Bridgette wrote: "Tara wrote: "From Australia. Did have to read To Kill a MockingBird & Shakespeare. :)"

I live in Canada - we read one Shakespeare play a year - and also To Kill a Mockingbird. Grade 9 was Romeo a..."

I'm from Georgia in the southern US and we also read one Shakespeare play a year. They were the same as the ones you list with the exception of Taming of the Shrew. I can't recall what we read that year, but I know it wasn't that. And no University Prep year. :)


To the OP, I did read Huckleberry Finn in high school, but sadly, there are a lot of places in the US where this book is censored or banned. Some people are very vocal about not wanting it in schools. And that issue isn't as one sided as you'd think, either. There are even states where they want to remove mention of slavery from US History textbooks. It's weird.

I read The Scarlet Letter in high school, too, but it was in AP US History(advanced placement) rather than English, so I don't think that was required reading for most in my own school district.

As far as other books from Rory's list, I know we read A Separate Peace, 1984, Of Mice and Men, and Lord of the Flies. Though 1984 could have been in middle school for Program Challenge, now that I think of it. There was no sort of summer reading list or anything like that when I was in school. At least not in my district.

[Ryna]

I am from Belarus. We had a course of foreign literature, which was somehow combined with the main Russian and Belarussian Literature courses. We had to read Shakespeare, Cervantes, Twain, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Dante, Andersen, Hugo, Poe, Bradbury, Walter Scott, Dreiser, Austen, Jack London, Balzac, etc etc. And, of course, there were Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov. Thinking of it made me realize I actually had a very strong literature programm in school, despite the fact that it was a school in a small provincial town.

[Abby]

Well I live in Maryland, USA (public school) and we have to read so many books. We have to read three classics (whichever ones they assign us) over the summer plus however many they give us during the year. I am not finished school but I know what we will have to read. Many of the books on the list are ones I have or will have to read. Right now though we are reading A Separate Peace.

[QNPoohBear]

I was in the advanced program in Junior High, so we read a lot of classics. In Junior High we read classics, in the first year of high school we read a lot of different stuff, the second year we read American Lit and the last year, world lit. In between during the summer there was always a required list. I majored in literature in college, so between Junior High, High school and college:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (High school and college)
The Awakening by Kate Chopin (college)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (college)
Beowulf (selections)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Candide by Voltaire (In French, French class)
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer (selections)
The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman (college)
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (Junior High)
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (college, I thinki)
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (Junior High?)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (Junior High)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (college)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (Junior High)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Iliad by Homer (selections)
Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (Junior High English, History and Science classes. We also acted the play)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (college)
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (required summer reading)
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Lord of the Flies by William Golding (Junior High)
The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (in French, French class)
New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson (Junior High?)
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Night by Elie Wiesel (Junior High, I think)
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (Junior High)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Junior High)
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Edgar Allan Poe
William Shakespeare

[Lauren]

I'm from England and we didn't really have a reading list but we did study some books, which most of the students didn't read anyway, and which consisted of mostly Shakespeare. We did study Wuthering Heights and In Cold Blood in college though.

[Gwen|| Bookish Blondie]

I went to a college preparatory academy from 7th-12th grade.
These were all read from those time periods. I ended up reading far more classical literature in college, where I studied to become an English teacher and minored in English.

1984
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevski
Candide by Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Emma by Jane Austen
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
The Iliad by Homer
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Lady Chatterleys’ Lover by D. H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
A Midsummer’s Night Dream by William Shakespeare
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
Night by Elie Wiesel
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
The Odyssey by Homer
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Othello by William Shakespeare
Out of Africa by Isac Dineson
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Phantom of The Opera by Gaston Leroux
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Richard III by William Shakespeare
The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L. Baum
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
The Shining by Stephen King
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
A Streetcar Named Desiree by Tennessee Williams
Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thoughts from Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Ulysses by James Joyce
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee
The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

[Jackie]

If we're only talking which of her books I read in High School: both Twain books, Catcher in the Rye, possibly Anne Frank, The Crucible, The Great Gatsby, Fahrenheit 451, Julius Caesar, Romeo & Juliet, The Little Match Girl, Night, Of Mice & Men, The Outsiders, Metaphorsis. I have read some of reading list in college and on my own.

[Adriana]

I have read To kill a mocking bird, Romeo and Juliet, Little Women, The Catcher in the Rye, The Tell-Tale Heart, A Midsummers Night dream, Lord of the Flies, Night, and Anne Frank!