The best book your school made you read?

[Dead Seerius]

So yesterday I finished reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, just one of many novels assigned over the course of a decade of Literature classes. And I loved it. It dawned on me, however, that I probably would have never given the book any mind if I hadn't had to read it for school.

I actually owe it to those classes for helping me discover some other great novels I might have never tried. And Then There Were None and A Tale of Two Cities are my runner-ups.

So Escapists, what is your favorite book that you were assigned in school?
Note: This isn't just limited to literature classes.

 

[Khinjarsi]

I got to read Dracula and Frankenstein in my English classes (The latter was for part of the exam) and I've since been given a Barnes and Noble Leatherbound edition of Dracula and bought my own copy of Frankenstein. They were probably the best two.

 

[Marter]

The only one I can really remember was To Kill a Mockingbird. That was a good book. I think I read it twice over the assigned period because I liked it that much (and because we had to read it during class, and we were given way more time than we needed to do so).

 

[SlaveNumber23]

Mine was definitely A Fine Balance, a fantastic book even if it is very depressing.

Also while technically not a 'book', Shakespeare's Othello was very entertaining for me. Iago is an awesome character.

 

[Sixcess]

Othello. Yes, it's a play rather than a novel, but the novels we were made to study at school were either parochial scottish rubbish by Cliff Hanley, Brave New World, which in retrospect seems like a bit of an odd choice, and Of Mice and Men. The other class got 1984. Yeah, English classes in 80s Scotland were pretty damn depressing. Probably some lingering Calvinist anti-fun tendencies showing through.

And the only reason we got Othello was that we were given a choice between that and Death of a Salesman, and the entire class had been bored out of their minds by another Arthur Miller play the year before, so Shakespeare won by a landslide.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Primary School- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Well ok it was this other book I liked more but I have competely forggoten the name of it.

High School- An Inspector Calls. Heck the book even got me to watch the film version of it!

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

"Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo.

At the time I was really into Metallica, so I thought it was pretty cool that I was reading the book that inspired the song "One" off the "...and Justice for All" album. Turns out though it was actually a pretty good book, too. Disturbing as all hell.

 

[Rawne1980]

Tim and the hidden people.

It was pure gold....

The writing was like angels speaking to me.

Granted I was 4 and it was primary school but still....

 

[Esotera]

Probably our GCSE Poetry anthology. It was a really varied bunch of literature and some of it was actually good. We never really read that many novels though, so possibly Animal Farm, but that's out of about 5 choices.

 

[Nouw]

The Chocolate War. Looking back on it now, it's a damn fine book with really interesting themes and characters.

 

[ohnoitsabear]

Well this is an easy one. 1984, followed closely by Animal Farm. Both books really are timeless. Although I'll be honest, I did like most of the stuff I've had to read for school. Of course, I'm sure that if I went back and read some of them, I wouldn't like them nearly as much (with a few that I might like more, thanks to a shitty teacher skipping large and important parts of a couple books).

 

[SckizoBoy]

Oddly enough, my fav book from school was not from English literature, it was from freakin' physics: Mr Tompkins in Paperback. Great introduction to advanced physics, recommend it to anyone, written for a lay audience and it's quite accessible.

 

[BrotherRool]

To Kill a Mockingbird. That is a stunning book, Harper Lee was write when she said she wasn't going to write another book because how do you beat perfection? Also all the nameslip ups it caused Tequila Mockingbird, How To Kill a Mockingbird... okay they aren't particularly funny but it's a hard title to get right and school children don't have the most sophisticated humour...

I'm pretty sure the only other book of note I read was Romeo and Juliet which wasn't that good (Where did Benvolio go??). We read Animal Farm, but I'd already done that one and it's not as good as TKaM. It did have the best bit of teaching I've experienced though, because one day the teacher came in and started yelling at us and handing out punishments for incredibly trivial things. It was complete silence or nothing and naturally we all shut up pretty fast and kept our heads down when he was ripping into someone else...and then at the end he told us that's why the animals seem to put up with these extraordinarily bad things and how Napoleon isn't challenged

 

[janjotat]

I believe it was called something like "the apple" It was about a Utopian society in the future, but it had serious drawbacks to the societies structure

 

[StriderShinryu]

1984 for me. Great book there and something I almost definitely would have read at some point anyway.

 

[sextus the crazy]

The best ones were the ones I got to pick from the summer reading list (Catch-22, flags of our fathers).

Mandatory ones were: Macbeth, Hamlet, 1984, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and their eyes were watching God.

 

[tippy2k2]

The book that got me into sci-fi was introduced me thanks to my English class in high school.

Ender's Game

I loved my English class, there are so many great books that our teacher had us read but Ender's Game wins. For fun, here are a few other gems:

The Adventure of Tom Sawyer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (it was terribly awkward in class though due to the profuse use of "******" in the book)
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tomorrow when the war began

 

[Wadders]

I dont think I enjoyed a single book my school set, apart from Hamlet perhaps - but I count that as a play.

The only proper booked they made us read that I enjoyed was The Catcher in the Rye, but only because hating Holden Caulfield was the most enjoyable thing about it. I never had that teenage rebellion phase, so identifying with him was hard, but even so - he's an utter gimp.

 

[Owlslayer]

Most of the stuff we had to read was okay, but one book I really liked.
It was called All Quiet on the Western Front. Not really sure what i liked about it, but i enjoyed it. Maybe because it showed that solders were human beings, not just some things that shoot. And that there isn`t really a good or an evi side, just the one you end up in. And how horrible war is, and how it effects humans. Or maybe i misunderstood the whole book, who knows. But i really liked it nonetheless.

 

[Spaghetti]

My favourite was an anthology of Philip Larkin's poems called "High Windows". (Ok, not a work of fiction, but it was still a "book").
Most of the other books, poetry, plays etc. we analysed to death and so it was impossible to get any enjoyment out of a book whle re-reading the same paragraph over and over in order to find every simile and metaphor.

Larkin was different, mostly because I felt I could relate to some of his work. He was a fragile guy terrified about the future and didn't need to use 700 metaphors to talk about his fear of death.

Spoiler: As a sarcastic, cynical 17 year old, how can you not love "This Be The Verse?

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.