School Books

[Longinus]

So, I have a question for everyone. What works of literature did you read in school? I think it's very helpful to know what people read as part of their education, since if you're trying to learn another language and culture, it's great to know what cultural foundations most educated people will have in common. To start things off, I will list the works I remember reading in school growing up, and I will omit works that we read in English translation. To assign this to a time and a place, these were school reading in a public (i.e., government-run) school the American South in the 1970s.

Shakespeare. Specifically, I remember reading Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet, along with parts of others.
Robinson Crusoe
Huckleberry Finn
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
1984 and Animal Farm
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Paradise Lost
The Scarlet Letter
Moby-Dick
Little Women
Catch-22

I know I'm forgetting some. I think I have a lot of them in a box somewhere. Other extremely common books that Americans read (or used to read) in school include Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies, but I did not read these in school.

Anyway, please share!

[Steve]

HS in Wisconsin in the 70s. Here's what I can remember.

Romeo and Juliet,
Julius Caesar (had to memorize parts, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears..." is still with me),
Macbeth,
Huckleberry Finn,
Animal Farm,
Rip Van Winkle,
Red Badge of Courage,
and a few other lesser known ones I cannot recall the names of.

I have vague recollections of early American literature like Last of the Mohicans but I can't remember if that was school or just me reading them. We also had collections of excerpts and short stories from a range of American authors spanning revolutionary to civil war to WWI eras. I vaguely recall some O. Henry, EA Poe, and Brett Harte (sp?) stories. Maybe Call of the Wild as well.

[MamaPata]

What an interesting question! I have included foreign works we read in translation (and have only included books we studied in my English classes). I went to school in London in the last decade.

Shakespeare: Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Othello, Richard III
Lord of the Flies (Golding)
Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
Tartuffe (Moliere)
Pride and Prejudice (Austen)
L'Etranger (Camus)
Therese Raquin (Zola)
Eugenie Grandet (de Balzac)
Some poetry (Heaney, Clark, Neruda, assorted)

I've definitely forgotten a bunch of stuff so I will come back and edit if it occurs to me.

[DaveBee]

The Mayor of Casterbridge
To Kill a Mocking Bird
Grapes of Wrath
Sons and Lovers
Doctor Faustus
Madame Bovary
Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar
Paradise Lost
Pardoner's Tale
Tom Sawyer
An Inspector Calls
Kidnapped
Lord of the Flies
My Family and other Animals
Typhoon
Lord Jim
Walkabout
All Quiet on the Western Front

[Teango]

It's been quite a while to say the least, but off the top of my head, here are some of the texts I recall being assigned in English classes (and this was a pretty rough UK comprehensive school back in the 80s/90s; certainly nothing fancy):

Blake, James - Songs of Innocence and Experience
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Bunyan, John - Pilgrim's Progress
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales (in the original). Note: I had a genius English teacher...seriously...she graduated from Oxford in her teens, and was one of the most intelligent (and eccentric) people I ever met. Hence I probably got lucky (although it felt unlucky at the time) with all these assigned readings. How she ended up teaching at my old school-heap beats me?!)
Dylan Thomas - Collected Poems, Under Milk Wood
Fowles, John - The French Lieutenant's Woman
Frank, Anne - Diary of a Young Girl
Friel, Brian - Translations
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Wessex Tales, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd
Hill, Susan - I'm the King of the Castle
Keneally, Thomas - Schindler's Ark
Lawrence, D. H. - The Rainbow, Collected Short Stories and Novellas
Marlowe - Doctor Faustus
McGough, Roger, Patten, Brian, & Henry, Adrian - The Mersey Sound (Penguin Modern Poets 10)
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pearl Poet - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in the original)
Pinter, Harold - The Caretaker
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Priestley, J. B. - An Inspector Calls
Russell, Willy - Educating Rita
Shakespeare, William - Antony and Cleopatra, Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Henry V, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night. Note: My aforementioned English teacher had quite a thing for Shakespeare, and as there were free tickets for high school students to see Shakespeare's plays back then (which was a great idea by the Royal Shakespeare Company), she bundled anyone who was interested into a minivan after school, and we split the cost of gas to get to the theatre and back home. The plays I've listed here are only those we read or acted out in class; those of us who jumped on this opportunity, ended up seeing many more plays at the RSC Theatre or Swan in Stratford-Upon-Avon or theatres like the Barbican down in London.
Steinbeck, John - Of Mice and Men
Sterne, Lawrence - Tristram Shandy
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels

There were other books we had to write essays on or read and discuss in class no doubt, and if they suddenly come to mind whilst I'm in the shower or warming up bottles of milk, I'll add them later to the list.

[blaurebell]

Yay, this question has been in the back of my mind for ages!

I picked Literature for my German A-Levels and did the first year of A-Level class twice, so I've read more than most, but I can't remember all of them, especially those in earlier years. I went to school in East Germany, specifically Saxony, but finished my A-Levels in the Düsseldorf region. The school system was different - a year longer in the West, which is why I spent 3 years in A-Level classes instead of 2. There were two A-Level literature classes in the West, one German literature, the other was literature in general. I didn't pick the latter because it couldn't be chosen for the A-Level exam. Strangely enough we did read an Italo Calvino translation in German literature class though, weird! I never really understood how all of that worked. In general the literature class in the West was better, because the teacher could make up his own curriculum - there were centralised exams in the East. That's probably why I had to read Faust for A-Level class in the East, but not in the West.

Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (Eichendorff)
Das Marmorbild (Eichendorff)
Faust 1 and 2 (Goethe) - Faust 1 is good, Faust 2 is
Die Leiden des jungen Werther (Goethe)
Die neuen Leiden des jungen W (Plenzdorf)
Lenz (Büchner)
Der Zauberberg (Thomas Mann)
Frau Jenny Treibel (Fontane)
Unterm Rad (Hesse)
Die Verwandlung (Kafka)
Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Brecht)

I marked for you those that I finished but hated. I loved Werther, Lenz, Mann's Magic Mountain, Hesse and Kafka. I also had a somewhat masochistic love for Faust 1. Faust 2 is unbearable though. They also made us read Shakespeare - once in German translation in Literature class in year 8 (Romeo and Juliet) and once in A-Level English class (Macbeth). For Faust they dragged us to an adaptation called Faust 2000. Contemporary theatre crap with moving slanted stage in a provincial theatre - Faust fell right on his nose during a monologue And when we read Macbeth we also saw a contemporary adaptation with video projections of worms and Lady Macbeth was played by a man, it was so bad The only contemporary adaptation I actually enjoyed was a Macbeth I saw in Düsseldorf some 10+ years ago. The actors played naked and there was so much theatre blood that the actors called it "a safety problem"

As for more school literature: There was also poetry - mostly German romantics (boring) and expressionism (great). I also remember a bunch of Sophocles plays and very rotten translations of The Old Man and the Sea and Catcher in the Rye which I both enjoyed in the original, but hated when I was supposed to read them in school. I think we also read Educating Rita in English class once.

And of course I didn't finish a bunch of others and instead cheated my way through the exam - too boring, can't remember those at all. That said I've read a very very long list of German classics just for fun because I could pick them up for 2-3€ in the little yellow Reclam editions. I bought those when I was too broke to buy proper paperbacks. The too broke condition usually kicked in *because* I bought too many paperbacks Sometimes I bought a Reclam book instead of lunch ... I'm weird like that. Most of these I don't have anymore because I kept them in coat pockets and I just lost them or left them somewhere. Those editions are cheap throwaway books that I doodled on in class and for me a pack of cigarettes sometimes lasted longer than one of those books. Reclam usually covers all the books assigned in literature class somewhere in Germany, so looking at their catalogue is a good overview of classics that are covered in school.

[Chung]

I'm not counting the books that I read for the hell of it (e.g. Tolkien's stuff, "Animal Farm", "Musashi") in my youth or picked for book reports. Of course there are also assigned works that just didn't do anything for me, and have forgotten. I also had to plow through short stories and poems in these languages but I won't bother trying to recall those.

For English classes
- The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis - I got so into it that I read all of the Chronicles of Narnia starting from the "first" volume, "The Magician's Nephew")
- A Wrinkle in Time (L'Engle)
- 1984 (Orwell)
- Romeo and Juliet
- Macbeth
- Lord of the Flies (Golding)
- Twelve Angry Men (Rose)
- The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood)
- Hamlet
- King Lear

For French classes
- Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (Molière)
- Les Misérables (Hugo)

For German classes
- Der Besuch der alten Dame (Dürrenmatt)
- Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (Brecht)
- Ein Kriegsende (Lenz)

Now that I look at the preceding, it's a bit telling that the English list is the longest one given my native language, despite French and German literature not being obscure. I suspect that my current interest in attending the theater started in my adolescence because of what I had to read. Hell, two out of the three memorable German works and one of the French works are plays.

[luke]

A Day No Pigs Would Die.
The Cay.
Lord of the Flies.
The Grapes of Wrath.
Of Mice and Men.
The Stranger.
Huck Finn.
Return of the Native.
The Good Earth.
The Sun also Rises.
Catch 22.
Heart of Darkness.
1984
Animal Farm
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Scarlet Letter

[aokoye]

This is really hard because I blocked out a good chunk of my childhood but I'll give it a go (cherry picking off of what I remember when I look at others' lists)

A Day No Pigs Would Die
Of Mice and Men
Various Shakespeare plays
Death be not Proud (I loved this book - very very sad but I loved it)
Various chapters from A People's History of the United States
1984
Fahrenheit 451
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Frankenstein
Lord of the Flies
Animal Farm (yes in the same class that I read 1984, Lord of the Flies and Fahrenheit 451. I think that was also the class where we read A Day No Pigs Would Die)
The House on Mango Street
The Canterbury Tales
The Outsiders
The Hound of the Baskervilles
And Then There Were None (and I think a few other books by Agatha Christie)
Go Ask Alice
Twelve Angry Men

So that was way longer than expected. Turns out Goodreads has a very long listof books people often read in high school. I'd say five or six of the things in this list I read in middle school. I also read two, if not three, Shakespeare plays in middle school.

Other books that I read on my own in high school:
Almost everything that bell hooks wrote
Kindred
Zami
Everything that Leslie Feinberg wrote and published before I graduated high school (so all but two of their books)

[reineke]

Required Reading In High School
534 books — This list was created and voted on by Goodreads members.
A list of books that you were required to read in high school.

http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/478. ... igh_School