The best book your school made you read?

[razor343]

Uhh...Stone Cold probably. We read a lot of rather boring stuff like Of Mice and Men and your obligatory Shakespeare stuff but Stone Cold was probably the best of the lot due to the fact that it had a wonderfully insane villain.

Oh, and Groosham Grange. It's basically a dark-yet-funny version of Harry Potter, although it came nearly a decade before Harry Potter.

 

[Diddy_Mao]

There are a lot of really great books that I see on some school's required reading lists so I don't for a moment wish to decry the entire notion of required reading.

That said every book I was given as required reading in grade and middle school was shit of toast.

 

[TwoSidesOneCoin]

Not sure if it's been posted, and I'm being too lazy to check. Best book I read during school was called Hatchet. No idea who the author is, but it's about a boy who is flying over the wooden areas of colorado(not sure where it's set now, it's been so long) and his plan crashes. Well, our hero makes a living in the wilderness with his only possession, the hatchet he'd received from his father (again not sure if it was his father or his mother who gave it to him).

They even made a sequel where a reality tv show wants to have him show them how he survived all alone. This is after a couple of years in civilization and having forgotten his survival skills. He ends up being the only survivor of a rafting accident on the way to the site where he was to survive.

Going to have to go look it up and re-read them.

 

[Dangit2019]

Either Tom Sawyer or To Kill A Mockingbird.

 

[klaynexas3]

Ender's Game hands down.

The other books we've had to read have been dreadfully dull or just crap in general. For one, I cannot fathom how To Kill A Mockingbird is actually seen as a good book. The same I can probably say for the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While Huck Finn started off rather well with decent characters that were actual characters, it ended in a way where Huck lost all since of what once made him a real character, and just fell in under Tom, while the rest of the characters just became two deminsional. And beyond that, there was no plot anyway, so if the characters we kind of bad, the ending was lazily written, and the only settings were small towns and the Mississippi, where in that formula do we get a good book?

As for To Kill A Mockingbird, my major complaint with that is the lack of plot also for it. Nothing really happens, it just sits there, and the only things that do happen are the trial which is only a few chapters, and then the random attack from Bob, but I don't see how those few things in themselves can carry the whole of the book.

Maybe it's just because I'm still a teenager, so I don't fully get it, but I really would like someone to tell me what was so great about these books.

Though I suppose this thread is for books we liked, not disliked, so I'll add to my list, but most will probably be short stories instead of full books.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Metamorphesis
Things Fall Apart(This was my favorite last year)
A Farewell to Arms
The Great Gatsby(only barely does it make my list though)

 

[CrimsonBlaze]

It's a strong tie between A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving and The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. They are both great books and I recommend them to anyone interested in great themes, strong symbolism, great characterization, and memorable imagery.

 

[emeraldrafael]

I raelly enjoyed The Illustrated Man when I read it. THough i think my favorite was called Outcast of Redwall. It wasnt required reading perse, but it was something a teacher did that we could pick any book off a shelf she had and do a paper at the end of the year for an extra 40 points (a third of the total grade) that was optional. GOt me into the rest of the series.

 

[Moth_Monk]

American Psycho and A Clockwork Orange

I had to compare the books in English Lit. coursework

 

[Wolf In A Bear Suit]

I started To Kill A Mockingbird thinking I would hate it, but it was brilliant. Always loved reading which made writing essays on the book easy. Hated 1984 though..

 

[The Funslinger]

The Great Gatsby.

I hope the new film adaptation doesn't change around a bunch of things - Particularly the ending.

I don't think it will work, how do you portray a character that has been pretty well excised from the book. The absence of any description of Jay is what makes the book for me.

As for me? Well my daughter's name is Scout...need I say more?

A friend of mine was given the middle name, Scout for precisely that same reason.

OT: Either Of Mice and Men, or Treasure Island. Leaning towards Mice because my then teacher decided we'd skip huge sections of Treasure Island, so I never really got to fully enjoy it.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

The only books I recall being forced to read were Animal Farm, 1984, and a few Shakespeare plays. There are others that I can come up with given sufficient time but I'd say that fact alone tells you what I thought of them. A separate peace for example - I remember vaguely what the plot was but that's it.

So, I'd say that of the things I was forced to read, Animal Farm was my favorite. Of all the books I read at the polite request of the school (My school had a program to encourage reading that required a certain number of points be acquired per grading period and I routinely ended up with the most), Les Miserables was probably my favorite. Jane Eyre is, far and away, the most hated book I ever read from cover to cover.

 

[RADIALTHRONE1]

Id have to say The Giver by Lois Lowry.
I still dont see whats so special about To Kill a Mockingbird. Maybe im just not a philosophical person.

 

[Kotaro]

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. It became my all-time favorite novel, and I've read it at least a dozen times since then.

 

[evenest]

Lord of the Flies is the only one I really remember. I always found studying literature at school, be it novels, plays or poetry, always takes something away from it. We spent so long analysing and read the book in stages, so I can't really say I enjoyed reading it.

That said, I'm definitely aware that it's an outstanding book, and keep meaning to read it again for pleasure. I have such a backlog of books to read, especially now I'm starting a university module that requires me to read a few books. I can't stop buying new ones either.

I just wish I was a faster reader.

You've got my second for _Lord of the Flies_. I loved that book, even though I had to read it over Christmas vacation during my Sophomore year. It also didn't hurt that I had a fantastic English teacher for the last three years of High School--thanks a bunch, Mr. Buhtanic!

My appreciation of that story was reinforced during a class on Twentieth-British Novels as we looked at the narrative through various literary critical lenses. Great fun and creepy as...

 

[hurfdurp]

A Separate Peace, definitely. Awh mannnn, I made sure to get my own copy, and I read it still.

 

[FrioJenkins]

Definitely To Kill a Mockingbird and/or The Iliad! Although the Iliad does sometimes repeat themes a few too many times, still was exciting to read!

 

[Tryforlive]

I have been told to read the hobbit in like 9 classes so far in high school, but in grade 6 I had to read lord of the rings. I think i got off pretty easy

 

[Mossberg Shotty]

The Kite Runner.

I only read it about a year ago, but it still sticks with me.I loved the redemption aspect of it especially. It had some hauntingly dark themes to it.