What's some required reading in high school that you actually appreciated then?

what's some required reading in high school that you actually appreciated then?

also required reading that you're still convinced is not worth reading

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Gatsby, for sure. I honestly couldn't put it down after reading the first page. Even though it's pretty short, I only think half of my class actually read it at all. Such a shame.

THE SUN ALSO RISES
Catcher in the Rye
Moby Dick
Shakespeare tragedies

The only patrician selections are Beowulf, and Shakespeare.

>Hunger Games
>Khaled Hosseini
>winter is coming

The Old Man and the Sea. I resonated with the sea.

grapes of wrath

I really really liked the Odyssey. I can't say I fully appreciated it because I was young and hadn't really experienced much of life, so it didn't have the same significance it does now that I'm older, but I loved that book.

Othello and of Mice and Men. We did Frankenstein too though I didn't fall in love with that.

Then in Sixth Form College we did Property (which I barely remember. It was about slavery), Handmaids Tale (I was an anti feminist edgy teen at the time so didn't appreciate it, I really need to reread it now I've grown up), Othello again and A Streetcar Named Desire, which I immediately fell in love with.

Also a shit ton of Carol Anne Duffy poetry which, while I can appreciate as good, I never want to hear again.

Hamlet, TS Eliot's poetry, Waiting for Godot, Ted Hughes poetry and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for sure
Though I didn't appreciate Hamlet or TS in as much depth as I do now, I'm super grateful I was exposed to them at that formative period in my life

We also did Blade Runner at some point which is obviously not in the same league but nonetheless a great movie and a great one to study, especially at that age.

In Italy they make you read the entire Divine Commedy (every week a canto is studied, alongside some eminent interpretation). During the 10th grade I Promessi Sposi by Manzoni is read and discussed. During the 5 years poems are costantly studied, although never in anthologies (it's always 3-4 poems for author, which should be the standard pretty much everywhere I guess).
Also in 8th grade we did read integrally Il Deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe) by Dino Buzzati.

Depending on which high school you choose, you might end up studying slso Greek and Latin (I've only studied the latter). This includes costantly translating ancient texts, and lots of analysis of Latin poems, which are usually studied in parallel with the Roman historical context in which they took place.
For what concerns the English language, the only required readings are usually 2 or 3 Shakespeare plays over the span of 5-6 years (in my case it was Hamlet, Julius Caesar and The Tempest) and lots of excerpts from novels and very few (when compared to Latin and Italian) selected poems.. As usual they are analyzed thoroughly in class, but in a less serious manner.

That's it I think.

I thought MacBeth was pretty cool. I also liked the Keats and Byron poems we studied

Oh yeah, I loved the Odyssey. I studied it in Classics when I was 16 and pretty much started my love of all things Greek

No theban plays?

As a fellow Italian I must say our country's narcissistic self-glorifying nationalism is probably the reason I even started reading books. Leopardi was definitely the first one I really loved and from there on, all of Italy's twentieth century authors were great reads.

As a liceo classico student I was also forced to read the Iliad and the Odyssey (which I didn't and later on regretted not reading) so I thought I'd add that to your list

As a fellow Italian I must say our country's narcissistic self-glorifying nationalism is probably the reason I even started reading books. Leopardi was definitely the first one I really loved and from there on, all of Italy's twentieth century authors were great reads.

As a liceo classico student I was also forced to read the Iliad and the Odyssey (which I didn't and later on regretted not reading) so I thought I'd add that to your list

>what's some required reading in high school that you actually appreciated then?
A larger part of it. I can't really list all of them because the lit curriculum in my country is absurdly extensive, but thanks to my prof I fell in love with reading and greatly enjoyed many of the books. However, the extensive curriculum also means reading a lot of national lit whose main value is historical rather than artistic, so I'd gladly skip some of the worse renaissance and realist writers. (Who gives a flying fuck about our first secular drama, for example?)

Macbeth and Of Mice and Men
>Fuck reading Romeo and Juliet like every other year

Fahrenheit 451...opened my eyes to the god that is Bradbury...of mice and men was great same with great Gatsby

The Jungle was pretty fun. I've read it three times.

It was all plebtier.

Any essay that wasn't full of ham-fisted Mexploitation content.

A lot of the essays in that level were generally compelling to a pleb's mind (like myself), but the heavily ethnic ones just didn't do it for most of the classroom. Those who weren't Mexican or South American couldn't identify with the author enough to find it interesting or relatable, and those who were actually from that region didn't care about the course as a whole to begin with.

Can you explain your love of The Odyssey to me?

why does the marker start in long hand but then switch to cursive for demo-something

I had to read East of Eden. I loved it, really spurred me into the 19th century and all its patriotic spirituality whence America became a glorious identity from its previous colonial shell.

Listen to this for the full effect
youtube.com/watch?v=hOX15agZ3-0

>Teacher offended by homework that actually does what it was asked of it.

This is what's educating our future leaders and schol- Erm... future women's studies majors.


Hey, who am I to complain about shitty modern schools when my school sucked pretty bad. My REQUIRED READING in school consisted of around 5 books. Notice I said school and not highschool or elemetary, just SCHOOL in general. Five. Cinco. More than four but less than six.

So in high school? The Tempest. I also read The Beekeeper's Apprentice and had my first taste of a truly awful and worthless book. It had this weird tendency of flying straight into the wall of my bedroom every few pages. In my report I basically called it a piece of shit for two pages, but my English teacher was a cool guy. He gave me an A and congratulated me for expressing my opinion so thoroughly.

100 Years of Solitude is required reading in most schools where I live, but my school didn't have it on the curriculum. A real shame, really. That thing would have activated my almonds so hard in high school and would have turned me into a Veeky Forumstard.

No I'm doing all the 'required reading' on my own. Missed out on great stuff like The Grapes of Wrath, Moby Dick, Brave New World. Really pissed off that I got into reading so late.

>Game of Thrones
>Hunger Games
>The Kite Runner

Those are just popular bestsellers though. Students can read that garbage in their spare time, why is it on a school syllabus?

>THE Game of Thrones, not A Game of Thrones

They can't even get the fucking title of their fucking shit right. Goddamn.

Also "LE WINTER IS CUMMING XDDDD" meme.

>Hunger Games

You know how leftists are always bitching about the supposed "School to prison pipeline"? They have these fucking kids on a "School to reddit" pipeline. Holy shit.

I'm offended by the fact that this person writes all the way to the end of the page instead of staying in between the two red lines.

It's been awhile since high school. I really enjoyed most of our required reading, but I hated the The Great Gatsby (my teacher loved it and we spent far too much time on it in class). Offhand, some books I really liked were:
>The Importance of Being Earnest (it's hilarious; you should give it a shot if you haven't yet)
>The Chosen by Chaim Potok
>The Handmaid's Tale
>Slaughterhouse Five
>Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
>Othello (we had great class discussions on this one in my Shakespeare in Lit & Film class)
>Their Eyes Were Watching God
>The Color Purple
>The Things They Carried
>All Quiet on the Western Front
>Grendel
>selected Canterbury Tales; I want to read the rest of them eventually

I appreciated the following, but I'll probably never read them again:
>1984
>Fahrenheit 451
>The Pearl
>The Awakening
>Grapes of Wrath
>Song of Solomon
>The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
>Animal Farm
>Lord of the Flies
>The Crucible
>Siddhartha
>The Metamorphosis (I should probably revisit these last two as an adult)
>Poisonwood Bible
These had interesting ideas, styles, or historical significance, but I wouldn't consider then fun reads.

I know we read so many more, but that's all I can think of.