School Books

[Arnaud]

That's so long ago, but I remember a few titles that were assigned in french literature (at that time, I was exclusively reading sci-fi and detective stories, so no need to say that all that was not terribly appealing to me)

- Le rouge et le noir
- Le père Goriot (the most boring thing I ever read)
- Germinal
- L'oeuvre au noir
- Le bourgeois gentilhomme (I studied several pieces of Molière but don't remember which ones exactly)
- Les fables de La Fontaine
- L'écume des jours
- Antigone (Anouilh)
- Ainsi parlait Zaratoustra (in philosophy class)
- A book of Sartre but I don't remember the title (perhaps, les mains sales)
- Sa majesté les mouches (Golding)
- Fahrenheit 451 (in french)
- Candide
- Les confessions (Rousseau)
- A lot of poems, that I've completly forgotten...I like poetry but analysing poems was really not my cup of tea.
- I also remember having studied a few songs of Georges Brassens, like Chanson pour l'auvergnat.

You can find lists of books on internet, like that one or that one.

[jeff_lindqvist]

I didn't keep a reading log the early nineties (the high school years), but these are some titles I remember (some of which are on the lists above as well):

In English:
Shane (Jack Schaefer)
And then there Were None (Agatha Christie)
Death on the Nile (Agatha Christie)
Sunshine (Norma Klein)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Secret Diary of Adrian Mole (Sue Townsend)

In Swedish:
Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
Hamlet (Shakespeare)
Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)

We usually got one (per language) per semester, so there should probably be one or two more, but I can't remember which ones.

[reineke]

What's the total number of books US studemts are required to read through grade 8 and in HS?

[aokoye]

What's the total number of books US studemts are required to read through grade 8 and in HS?

There isn't one. The US doesn't have a national curriculum in the same way many (most?) European countries do. Common core is aiming towards that direction but even within common core there isn't a set list of materials that must be utilized.

[reineke]

In my county's schools, the only required reading is class reading ( around 4 books per year). Summer reading lists are "suggested reading".

[Ani]

Death be not Proud (I loved this book - very very sad but I loved it)

Oh dear. This book is almost a family joke for us. I went to a small school for middle school (6th, 7th, 8th grade -- ages 11-13ish) We switched classes for subjects so had the same teacher. She made us read this in 6th grade, and again in 7th and again in 8th. My brother also so, 6 years in a row for the family. It is a good book (my mother HATES it, so she was especially tortured though

What's the total number of books US studemts are required to read through grade 8 and in HS?

In my parochial school, I was required to read a book and do a book report on it 2x/month or every other week from 5th grade (10-11 years old) through 8th grade. That would have been 15+ books a year. Summer reading varied by teacher but was probably 1-3 books per summer that were required from entering 4th grade and up.

I used to balance longer books with shorter reads in between to keep up with the schedule, but sometimes had to choose a random "age appropriate" book the night before the book report was due, read the whole thing and write the report in one shot because I wasn't on track to finish whatever else I was reading at the time.

In HS we slowed down a little and probably read just one book per month, while discussing and analyzing it in class the entire month and writing a paper on a theme at the end. Some classes had more. 8-15 per year I'd say. I don't believe I had required summer reading at my highschool. I had required community service hours instead with journaling/logging that had to be turned in.

For the sake of this thread, most of the books I can remember from HS are listed here. The few that are not are near the top of the GoodReads list, although the GR list includes a LOT of books we read in middle school. Pretty weak education if you are reading The Giver and The Red Badge of Courage as HS material. Those were both required reading in 5th or 6th for me.

[Fortheo]

I'll only list a few since the majority of them have already been listed by others. Also, a few of these are from as early as third grade—I'm surprised I still remember them.

Where the red ferns grow by Wilson Rawls
Number the stars by Lois Lowry
The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen
The diary of anne Frank
Holes by louis sachar
Hellen Keller by Margaret Davidson (Don't ask me why we didn't read the actual autobiography)
The chocolate war by robert cormier
The Outsiders by S.E Hinton
Kitchen by banana yoshimoto (I need to thank my 9th grade teacher for introducing me to Japanese literature. I love this book)
The odyssey
The Iliad
Gilgamesh
Beowulf


Most of those books were from middle school and a few of them were even from elementary school, with the exception of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Kitchen which I read in high school. Besides that, everyone else basically listed my exact high school reading curriculum, which is a little sad because I was hoping we'd have some more variety in here. I hope we have some Japanese members on this forum, because I'd love to know what books they read in school as children/young adults.

[vonPeterhof]

Only listing the books that were both required/suggested reading (whether according to the national curriculum or to an individual teacher's preferences) and that I remember actually having finished. First, the books I read at my 11-year Russian-medium private school in Kazakhstan.

by Pushkin:
Ruslan and Ludmila
The Belkin Tales
Eugene Onegin
The Captain's Daughter
The Little Tragedies

by Lermontov:
Borodino
The Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov
A Hero of Our Time

By Gogol:
Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka
Taras Bulba
The Government Inspector
Dead Souls

By Turgenev:
Mumu
Fathers and Sons

By Bulgakov:
Heart of a Dog
White Guard
The Master and Margarita

Woe from Wit by Griboyedov
The Minor by Fonvizin
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Peter I by Aleksey Tolstoy
We by Zamyatin
Time, Forward! by Kataev
The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov
The Dawns Here Are Quiet by Vasilyev
Volume 1 of The Nomads by Yesenberlin
Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Hugo
The Three Musketeers by Dumas
Oliver Twist by Dickens
Jane Eyre by Bronté
Ivanhoe by Scott
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Twain


The books I was required to read at my IB school in the UK:

Cry, the Beloved Country by Paton
The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
Tsotsi by Fugard
Lies of Silence by Moore
The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro
The Ship of Widows by Grekova
Three Sisters by Chekhov
The Red Snowball Tree by Shukshin
A Doll's House by Ibsen
The Father by Strindberg
The Moon and Sixpence by Maugham

[reineke]

What's the total number of books US studemts are required to read through grade 8 and in HS?

In my parochial school, I was required to read a book and do a book report on it 2x/month or every other week from 5th grade (10-11 years old) through 8th grade. That would have been 15+ books a year. Summer reading varied by teacher but was probably 1-3 books per summer that were required from entering 4th grade and up.

I used to balance longer books with shorter reads in between to keep up with the schedule, but sometimes had to choose a random "age appropriate" book the night before the book report was due, read the whole thing and write the report in one shot because I wasn't on track to finish whatever else I was reading at the time.

In HS we slowed down a little and probably read just one book per month, while discussing and analyzing it in class the entire month and writing a paper on a theme at the end. Some classes had more. 8-15 per year I'd say. I don't believe I had required summer reading at my highschool. I had required community service hours instead with journaling/logging that had to be turned in.

For the sake of this thread, most of the books I can remember from HS are listed here. The few that are not are near the top of the GoodReads list, although the GR list includes a LOT of books we read in middle school. Pretty weak education if you are reading The Giver and The Red Badge of Courage as HS material. Those were both required reading in 5th or 6th for me.

I came up with a list of 50-60 titles for grades 1-8 and around 100 titles in HS. To compare, I also looked up what kids are required to read these days. For works like the Iliad and the Odyssey, we were only required to read a number of cantos and some "titles" were short collections of poetry or several short stories from the same author. We were also required to read around a dozen books for the high-school exit exam.

[Ani]

I came up with a list of 50-60 titles for grades 1-8 and around 100 titles in HS. To compare, I also looked up what kids are required to read these days. For works like the Iliad and the Odyssey, we were only required to read a number of cantos and some "titles" were short collections of poetry or several short stories from the same author. We were also required to read around a dozen books for the high-school exit exam.

After looking at the GR list, I might have underestimated high school. Anyway by contrast my nephew in "honors English" read 0 books last year. His whole class was composed of essays, short stories and excerpts read on a tablet from an app through the school.