What books were required in HS/MS in your generation? (Lord of the flies?)

[Taz]

Katie.dorny wrote: "I remember Romeo and Juliet,
An Inspector calls
Of mice and men
Luckily I loved all 3 and it got me into classics :)"

Nope Renee. I grew up in a small city in Virginia.

Katie.dorny wrote: "I remember Romeo and Juliet,
An Inspector calls
Of mice and men
Luckily I loved all 3 and it got me into classics :)"

Katie, how did you enjoy Of Mice and Men? That is a genuine question. Did I miss something?

[Shelley]

My 15-year-old daughter just started the Lord of the Flies. Appearantly, it is required reading at our high school. Her opinion so far is, "They're all stupid." My 18-year-old son, who must have read it 2 years ago, agreed.

When I asked what else they had to read this year, the only thing she could remember was "Ceasar" (I believe this was Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar) and "a bunch of Greek tragedies." She is an avid reader, but prefers adventure and fantasy to traditional classics. She is clearly unimpressed with the required curriculum.

[Jacqueline]

We usually did 2 Shakespeare plays a year for the 6 years we were in HS. We also read at least one book a term (3 terms in the year) and a normal play along with a different poet a couple of times a year. The ones I can remember are:
Pride and Prejudice
Sons and Lovers
1984
The Crucible
Animal Farm
Jane Eyre
Canterbury Tales
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe
Under Milkwood
Brave New World
Z for Zachariah
Huckleberry Finn
Tom Sawyer
King Lear
Henry IV Pt 1
Twelfth Night
Midsummer Night’s Dream
Hamlet
Macbeth
Julius Caesar
Merchant of Venice
Much Ado About Nothing
As You Like It
Keats
Yeats
TS Eliot
Shakespeare’s sonnets

There were so many more that I can’t remember. It was over 40 years ago and my memory is a little crappy lately. Basically there were around 18 different novels over the 6 years and a heap more plays and lots of boring poets. The only ones I liked were the Australian ones like Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson. I did enjoy TS Eliot too. Hated Keats and Yeats. With a passion. Probably why I remember them. We never had to read Lord of the Flies or the Great Gatsby or most of the others mentioned.

My kids were in school from 1994 to 2012 and read
Emma (and watched Clueless)
Hating Alison Ashley
Tomorrow When the War Began
Looking for Alibrandi
And a heap of other Australian novels.
When they went through they had to read books that were about Belonging or Journeys or some other silly thing so a lot of their reading/watching was to do with the theme of the year. They didn’t only have to read books but they also incorporated movies and other media into their learning.

[Catie]

Taz wrote: "Katie.dorny wrote: "I remember Romeo and Juliet,
An Inspector calls
Of mice and men
Luckily I loved all 3 and it got me into classics :)"

Nope Renee. I grew up in a small city in Virginia.

Katie..."

Different (C)atie here :P but I loved Of Mice and Men. It was the first book I legitimately read for school in high school, up to that point I fiercely refused to read school books (I was stubborn lol). It might just have been good because I was expecting it to be horrible (bc I had a very low opinion of classics and required reading in general) and it turned out to be very technically good (writing, etc.). Also, I'm a sucker for plots that punch you in the gut....

[Jerome]

I graduated in 1980 from a high school in North Carolina. I recall reading:
Animal Farm and 1984 by Orwell
and
Brave New World by Huxley.

I recently found an excellent podcast from Intelligence Squared debating whether we are closer to the hedonism of Huxley's BNW or the authoritarianism of Orwell's 1984

[carpe]

Jerome wrote: "I graduated in 1980 from a high school in North Carolina. I recall reading:
Animal Farm and 1984 by Orwell
and
Brave New World by Huxley.

I recently found an excellent podcast from Intelligence Sq..."
This might be a bit off-topic, but can you link me this podcast? I'm really interested in these in these kind of things, so I'd love to listen to it, but I just can't seem to find it :(

[STEPHEN]

Of Mice and Men
To Kill A Mockingbird

[Jerome]

carpe wrote: "Jerome wrote: "I graduated in 1980 from a high school in North Carolina. I recall reading:
Animal Farm and 1984 by Orwell
and
Brave New World by Huxley.

I recently found an excellent podcast from ..."

Sure, here's the link for the video and podcast:
https://www.intelligencesquared.com/e...

[Becko]

One class I took was called modern classics and I remember reading Jaws and Firestarter.

[carpe]

Jerome wrote: "carpe wrote: "Jerome wrote: "I graduated in 1980 from a high school in North Carolina. I recall reading:
Animal Farm and 1984 by Orwell
and
Brave New World by Huxley.

I recently found an excellent..."
Thanks a lot!!

[John]

Fahrenheit 451 and Grapes of Wrath

[Kirsten]

Freshman year -

Julius Caesar
Romeo & Juliet
Great Expectations

Junior Year -

Macbeth
Huck Kinn
A Separate Peace

Senior Year -

Grapes of Wrath
Hamlet

[Mariah]

I graduated HS in 2010. Here's what I can recall...

Lord of The Flies
1984
Anthem
Brave New World
Dante's Inferno
The Jungle
The Great Gatsby
The Pearl
The Scarlet Letter
Romeo and Juliet
The Raven
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Cask of Amontillado
The Canterbury Tales
Huckleberry Fin
Holes
Animal Farm

[NancyJ]

It looks like The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird were two of the most popular, along with Shakespeare's plays, 1984, and Brave New World.

Steinbeck, Twain, and Dickens are all well represented. Pride and Prejudice beat out Wuthering Heights.

I wonder if The Outsiders has replaced Catcher in the Rye for some teachers. Moby Dick seems to have lost some popularity.

It's nice to see Their Eyes were Watching God and Things Fall Apart, Curious Incident of the Dog... and Frankenstein.

[Kirsten]

Another thing I didn't write before.

Many of the people in high school had to read The Great Gatsby and I didn't.

I didn't have to read the Outsiders. But in middle school we had to read Rumble Fish by the same author. (THat's why I'm not looking forward to reading The Outsiders.)

[Jess]

I'm in the UK but these were mine:

Year 8 - Holes
Year 9 - Macbeth

GCSE -
Frankenstein
Spies
Of Mice and Men
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Poetry of Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy

AS Level
Othello
The School for Scandal
Jane Eyre
Poetry of Philip Larkin

A Level
Hamlet
The Great Gatsby
Death of a Salesman
Birdsong
The poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A wide range of WWI literature, poetry, prose and drama

[Kirsten]

Kirsty wrote: "I remember reading To Kill A Mockingbird, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar. A friend of mine in a different class read Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies which sounded much more interesting to me..."

Hi, Kirsty! I'm a Kirsti (with an I!)

[NancyJ]

Kirsten wrote: "Another thing I didn't write before.

Many of the people in high school had to read The Great Gatsby and I didn't.

I didn't have to read the Outsiders. But in middle school we had to read Rumble..."

I don't know if I'll ever get around to reading The Outsiders. I liked the movie though, despite the cheesy 1980's music that took all the edginess out of it.

[NancyJ]

Kirsty wrote: "I remember reading To Kill A Mockingbird, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar. A friend of mine in a different class read Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies which sounded much more interesting to me..."

That's an interesting observation. I suspect it has a lot to do with the comfort level of the teacher. Talking about race is difficult for many teachers, and our political climate doesn't help.

[NancyJ]

I find it interesting that a lot of the books people read in school are the books that people list as their best loved books. There is a lot of overlap between these books and the favorites people listed for the BBC Big Read project, and for the Great American Read project that is going on now.

I don't know if that's a good thing (schools are picking good books), , or a bad thing (some people never read anything good after leaving high school!

I saw something on facebook yesterday that said about a third of people surveyed never read another book after they left high school. I know a lot of people don't read full books anymore, but I found those statistics hard to believe. You can't believe everything you read on the Internet.

I feel bad for the people who don't get to experience the joy of a great book.

[Idontknow]

We moved around a lot growing up, and one of the HS's I went to had a decent library. Read all the Grisham, Tolkein, Rowling, and a few other series (Salvatore and other DnD/Lost Realms stuff) there... plus miscellaneous stuff that caught my teenage eye. But as for mandatory assigned books? Can list them on one hand (Class 2006).

- Lord of the Flies
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- The Old Man and the Sea
- A book about a black child that lives with his aunt/grandmother, can't remember the name.
- Maybe one other book I vaguely recall, but have since forgotten.

And tbh I think that was all. One of the schools I went to was supposed to read "The Giver" but I never was personally assigned it. Nothing by Shakespeare (or I didn't pay attention to it or care at the time). I read a bit as a teenager since we never had a TV and moved a lot. I distinctly remember the palpable lack of assigned books to read growing up (we had that thing where you have to get X amount of points every month for books read - so it was obligatory to read at least one a month - but we were only ever outright assigned a book 3-5 times all through highschool, and that was generally for summer vacation).

[hanh]

We did the Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, Shakespeare’s MacBeth & Romeo and Juliet, Robert Burns, poems by Carol Ann Duffy and Wordworth I think a book by Benjamin Zephaniah as well this was about 2006 - 2010

[hanh]

Oh I forgot but we did the Roald Dahl story where the woman cooked a dead body and fed it to the police (how did I forget that)

[Renn]

In my MS the ones I remember are Yellow Fever by Laurie Halse Anderson, Roll of Thunder, Here My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor, Iqbal, and Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie

In HS the ones I remember are: The Hobbit, Ender’s Game, Hiroshima, Black Like Me, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Romeo and Juliet, To Kill A Mockingbird, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Of Mice and Men, and Julius Caesar by Shakespeare.

I think we had a decent book selection overall. I also appreciate now that my teachers didn’t just stick to the obvious classics. You know, the ones everyone seems to think kids need to read before they graduate.

[Lena]

I graduated 2011 in Germany. As far as I remember HS we read the following books ( some in German and some in English):

English:
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Tortilla Curtain
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Brave New World
City of Glass

German:
Das siebte Kreuz
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Faust
Kabale und Liebe
Effi Briest
Die Physiker
Woyzeck

[Jaylyn]

so far Ive done

The Egypt Game
The Giver

and right now Im reading Anthem I do know next year I will do animal farm though

[Anna Renee]

My school's list included:

The Outsiders
To Kill A Mockingbird
Flowers for Algernon
The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night Time
Lord of the Flies
Wild Swans

[Luvtoread (Trying to catch up)]

The

[Luvtoread (Trying to catch up)]

Scratch above (error)

[Alaina]

I graduated high school in 2014 and here are the books I remember reading:

Romeo and Juliet
Night
The Things They Carried
1984
The Poisonwood Bible
Julius Caesar
The Great Gatsby
Frankenstein
Siddhartha
Things Fall Apart
The Awakening
Heart of Darkness
Othello

[E.R.]

Great Expectations by Chales Dickens

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Romeo and Julet.....many more....just too long ago

[Monique]

Coming from Slovenia, our literature classes throughout our schooling are split evenly across Slovenian and foreign/European (translated) literature, and for our A levels we also have to read some books in English.

My high school was quite flexible in terms of reading lists and book reports. I only really read a lot in the first two years, later on I was too busy with my other courses. Generally speaking, there was very little that was light-hearted or recent, it was mostly about getting to know "the canon". Among foreign authors I remember reading the following:
Antigone
The Odyssey
Hamlet
Don Quixote
Père Goriot
The Overcoat
Quo Vadis
The Metamorphosis
Ghosts
Salomé

And for my English class:
Pygmalion
The Catcher in the Rye

Oh and we did lots of poetry, I think that's more popular in my country than in most other places.

[Amanda]

Here are the ones I remember:
Grade 5:
My Brother Sam Is Dead
Grade 6:
Wonder
Hoot
The Breadwinner
Grade 7:
Beowulf
an English, prose version of The Aeneid
Catherine, Called Birdy
Grade 8:
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Giver
The Tempest
Grade 9:
Great Expectations
Romeo and Juliet
Animal Farm

[Irina]

in grade 6, i read maniac macgee (i forget the author), in grade 9, john wyndham's the chrysalids, george orwell's animal farm, and shakespeare's julius caesar. in grade 10, we read harper lee's to kill a mockingbird and shakespeare's romeo and juliet

[Betty]

HS we read Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Catcher in the Rye. 8th grade I remember a lot of poetry, Evangeline.

[˚.🎀༘⋆ Jasmine]

Grade 6- Bud Not Buddy
Grade 8- Ashes of Roses
Grade 9- To Kill a Mockingbird
Grade 10- Huckleberry Finn

[Marcus]

Catcher in the Rye
King Lear
Henry IV, part 1
The Sword in the Stone
The Great Gatsby
Waiting for Godot
Huckleberry Finn

[Tyler_zakiyareadsbooks_]

Lower Years:

To Kill a Mockingbird
Holes
Small Steps
Frankenstein
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Middle Years:

Lord of the Flies
Animal Farm
Of Mice and Men
The Crucible
Macbeth

Upper Years:

The Great Gatsby
A Thousand Splendid Suns
The Handmaid's Tale
Othello

And we would always do a collection of poems as well, I remember one collection was focused on love, the other on war and then an anthology of poems.

[Megan]

Lower Years:
We did a lot of poems, short stories, mythology and excerpts. I remember an intriguing short story by Ray Bradbury about a colony on Venus where it always rained, and having to memorize the first stanza of William Blake’s Tiger Tiger Burning Bright.

We had silent reading time after lunch recess, and there were lots of classics available. At eleven, I attempted reading Lord of the Flies and hated it. I thought it was unrealistically pessimistic, but having read more about boys’ lives in British boarding schools since then, it makes more sense that the author would expect boys to devolve into savages when left on their own. I also read Huckleberry Finn and Diary of Anne Frank, but I’m not sure whether it was by choice or was assigned. The one book I remember HAVING to read was The Red Pony by Steinbeck, which ended up being a terribly depressing tearjerker.

Middle Year’s:
Again, poetry, short stories, plays and mythology.
Things Fall Apart
The Black Pearl, by Steinbeck (I really hated Steinbeck after this as it’s even more depressing and bleak than The Red Pony)
The Metamorphosis by Kafka
A Midsummer Nights Dream by Shakespeare
A play by George Bernard Shaw that I really enjoyed, but it’s name escapes me.
Stuff in Latin. Latin was one of my favorite classes. Our teacher was in a folk-rock band and played the banjo. We watched Monty Pythons The Life of Brian in class because of the scene where the Roman soldier corrects his Latin grammar when he’s painting rebellious graffiti on the wall.

Upper Years:
The Odyssey by Homer
As You Like It by Shakespeare
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Something with a woman’s name for the title by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Short stories by Tolstoy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper, Faulkner, etc.
Excerpts from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman and Walden Pond by Thoreau

[Manny]

My sister and I went to the same highschool two years apart, and we read vastly different books in our classes. So, I believe it is up to the teacher to decide what their students read, but it could vary depending on where you live.

From the ones I remember in HS, we read:
To Kill a Mockingbird
R.U.R.
Night
Robbie
The island of doctor Moreau
Frankenstein
Of Mice and Men
War of the Worlds
1984
Monster
Julius Caesar
A Midsummers Night Dream
20000 Leagues Under the Sea
Anthem
The Haunting of Hill House

The ones I remember my sister reading in HS:
Emma
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Lord of the Flies
The Great Gatsby
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
To Kill a Mockingbird
Old Man and the Sea
All Quiet on the Western Front

[Amber]

The only one I still remember that wasn't already mentioned was The Cay.