ITT: High school English curriculum reading that was actually good

This was my choice. I hated it at the time but after a while for some reason it grew on me. Really wanna reread it.

Fitzgerald is trash and so are you

Beowulf, Grendel, The Things They Carried, Brave New World, Things Fall Apart would be my pics.

i also went to school in a shitty small town (replace coons with fetal alcohol syndrome babies) and we didnt do any books. just movies.

My English teacher had me read Animal Farm instead of choosing between Brave New World or 1984. I liked it a lot and intend to re-read it soon.

Heart of Darkness
Crime and Punishment
Hamlet
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Moby Dick

>read C&P and Moby Dick in highschool
Not sure whether to call you a liar, or feel bad for you.

They would have been hell, but I had two really great AP English teachers for my junior and senior years. Going through those books with that level of intensity and something like 5 papers each gave me a level of respect and understanding for literature I probably never would have had otherwise.

Not that guy, but AP english 4 read C&P at my high school.
>tfw was in regular english since 10th grade
I am kind of glad. I would have had too many opportunities to share my edgy teenage boy beliefs during the discussions.

I never had to read this for high school. I think I got so annoyed at the fact that I didn't have to read it that I picked it as my summer reading homework so that I could finally read it.

oh shit, that name was left over from another thread.

Wow, is that true though? I wanna find out.

Damn, it is. About fucking time. Wonder when that changed.

Hamlet
Great Gatsby
Charlotte's Web
Death of a Salesman

I didn't really like BNW. I'm not sure why.

The only book I enjoyed at school was The Crucible, and that's a play not even a novel.

>tfw spic and read Cortázar's Hopscotch in 9th grade and didn't enjoy it one bit

am I just retarded or regular teens probably aren't supposed to read this at that age?

Odyssey and Emily Dickinson.

I didn't really like 1984. It's fine and I agree with the point, but it just came off pretty boring all around to me.

BNW had too little character development in my opinion. Everyone was really one-dimensional and I guess that would be okay if the book was more obviously satirical, but it took itself pretty seriously especially the ending. I haven't finished 1984 yet.
>inb4 pleb because I haven't already read it

BNW is a prolonged thought experiment, not so much a narrative or character study (which 1984 is). Huxley builds up the negative and positive elements of both the savage lands and the utopian society, and then asks you to choose one with full knowledge of the outcome.

>Some of the world's greatest minds come together to build a monument in celebration of human progress
>serial killer subplot
>(ostensibly) nonfiction

Fun read

In that case interesting characters aren't necessary. I never thought of it like that.

>two nigger books

>>/pol/

On close observation, 1984 has no interesting characters either. It is a character study, but only of the most middlebrow average person Orwell could invent, and the observation of his reactions inside a political, crowbarred-together dystopia.
Orwell was, I believe, unconfident that people would understand the horror of his world had he not injected a living anachronism into it for them to relate to. More interesting a narrative would be to take a true denizen of that society, follow their lives and let the audience draw its conclusions organically (which Huxley attempted, albeit with limp wrists, in BNW).
1984 loses its bite when you're already familiar with the horror.

It's been quite a few years since I read through BNW, but I remember hating the middle section/final conversation. Made it seem like Huxley gave up and said "ok, here is the point" But then again it has been a while, so my opinion might have changed.

Everyone hated that in my class, not sure why. It was short, easy to understand, had controversial stuff, all great for slackers. But you'd probably have to at least attempt to read it to figure that out

>That seems amazingly advanced
Pfffft, we had to read the Summa Theologica untranslated in 7th grade over Christmas break.

>>>/reddit/

A Streetcar Named Desire
Macbeth
A Doll's House
Woman at Point Zero
Beowulf
Of Mice and Men

Most books read in high school are really good, the problem is that the "analysis" we are taught is mostly shitty and gets in the way of actual enjoyment. When you actually read the books on your own, different things pop out at you.

>1984 in class: this is a book about surveillance!
>when reading 1984 on my own: this book is really about the inversion of truth...winston's internal monologue is fascinating.....I love how the scene where he and Julia are in the woods is so much more colorful by contrast to the rest of the story

>great gatsby in class: this book is about the roarin' 20s and the american dream
>reading it on my own: almost every line is just breathtakingly beautiful prose..this book is about nostalgia, endless longing, and desiring something that is always just out of reach...favorite scenes are when nick is walking among the "lonely metropolitan twilight" or when gatsby and daisy kiss "during the strange excitement that comes from the two changes of the year"....

etc....The messages that our teachers drill into us, tend to be the most bland official interpretations imaginable.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

...

...

Portrait
Crime and Punishment
Heart of Darkness
Wuthering Heights
Grapes of Wrath
The Odyssey

>Fitzgerald is trash and so are you
>Brave New World
>The Things They Carried
>Things Fall Apart
is that way

my teacher focused more on what you are talking about for the gatsby when he taught it.

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>it's not literature

If you don't think BNW is an example of literature, what would you define as literature? Because apparently from what you're saying Oxford's "Written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit" is all kinds of wrong.

On the thread's topic: Brave New World, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Macbeth, Hamlet, Beowulf, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Paradise Lost, and The Canterbury tales are the ones that stick out as far as high school goes.

Most of the usual high school books we didn't read in my classes because my profs didn't like them and chose alternatives. Did Julius Caesar instead of Romeo and Juliet for example.

Shout out to one of my crazy elementary school teachers that was a poet that read us the Wrinkle in Time series in grade 3 or 4. Most of the class didn't listen but for the few of us that listened and understood bits here or there had our minds blown. I remember her trying to explain what a tesseract was by drawing it on the board. It was so strange.

Honestly imo most of high-school-english-core is actually pretty good. It's just that the education varies from "eh" to "god fucking awful", and what genuinely awful books are included in the curriculum are enough to kill interest in reading books, especially when having to read them on tight schedules (for the average teenager).

>ctrl-f The Jungle
>no results
I've unironically read it three times.

My history teacher took a fetishistic pleasure in describing every detail of this book, his eyes were always red and bulging with excitement as he saw the class recoil in disgust.

He also replayed the Kennedy assassination 12 times in class With close ups and slow mos with equal excitement, so take that as you will

>the sound and the fury
>A portrait of the artist as a young man
>The grapes of wrath
>Their eyes were watching good
>Moby dick

High school AP English was lit

Is this copypasta or new

A Wrinkle in Time was required reading for me in 4th grade. The tesseract concept in the book had nothing to do with the square in a square tesseract desu.

Brand new

Were all of you in my highschool english class?
Who decided we were all going to read these books and are they guilty of social engineering?

The Stranger
Siddhartha
Brave New World
The Jungle
Animal Farm
Fahrenheit 451

Books I didn't like much but I can see their merit
Their eyes were watching God
Grapes of Wrath
Shakespeare
The Crucible

>watching my classmates defend the world of BNW
wew lad

Animal Farm
Night
Old Man and the Sea
To Kill a Mocking Bird
Catcher in the Rye
Great Gatsby
Lord of the Flies
Hamlet
The Crucible

We did Frankenstein, Of Mice and Men, Othello, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, as well as McBeth in my after school drama class. Also did Holes as part of a unit on children's books, which wasn't to bad for what it was.

my teacher wouldn't let us read to kill a mocking bird because it was her favourite book and didn't want any of us to dislike it. Got to read Great Expectations instead tho and that was dope.

the things they carried was good. also the remains of the day and catcher in the rye

The Metamorphosis. Most people kept asking why poor Gregor was turned into a bug but I liked it.

We had to read books written by islanders in my school.

As a German, the English works we got to read were mostly interesting (although not very advanced) while the German works were absolutely uninspiring colour-by-numbers garbage (Emilia Galotti; Irrungen, Wirrungen etc.)
Pretty jealous of the posts here.

Why did all of you also read non-english literature in English class?
Didn't they teach you other languages or something?

Are you referring to Beowulf?

Pretty much everyone studies that in school here in Britain. It's written in English, just an older form of English

Federal education bureaucrats. Yes, but honestly a lot of the material picked is great when you consider what most teens want to read.

No, I mean stuff like metamorphosis, Crime and Punishment, the stranger.
We read Beowulf too for English, just transliterated with the old text next to it.

>I don't like it so therefore it's not literature

I felt like my experience with The Crucible was totally ruined because despite being in an AP class, my English course was full of people who could not fucking read out loud.

Freshman Year: Romeo and Juliet
Sophomore Year: Lord of the Memes for the 3rd time and To Kill Mockingbird, which we didn't even get to finish and had the ending spoiled to us so the teacher could show us the movie
Junior Year: Read the textbook
Senior Year and AP Lit/English: Lord of the Memes again, Hamlet for the 6th fucking time, and Frankenstein
tell me Veeky Forums, my high school was fucking trash, wasn't it?

BMW had some interesting ideas but overall I think it lacked in plot development. I remember losing interest because the story was all over the place.

>To Kill Mockingbird, which we didn't even get to finish and had the ending spoiled to us so the teacher could show us the movie
What school did you go to?

This, BNW's ideas will also be more and more important as the age of UBI approaches, but the characters were poorly written, the prose was average at best, and the world-building isn't anything to write home about.

I hated this in high school. Reading plays was always such a fucking chore, especially for the students that regularly took part in plays.

I did drugs through high school. There was one teacher who had a doctorate in poetry and taught British Literature as a way to study the history of civilization through the literary record. His was the only class I took seriously, I loved the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and translating the Lord's Prayer from Old English was fun exercise.

I feel like over-analysis before you even begin reading can ruin the experience. Before we even STARTED reading Animal Farm, for instance, we had to learn all about the allusions to Soviet Russia and who each animal represented. Why not just let us read the story, have our own conclusions, then tell us more about the symbolism?

Centennial, Las Vegas

In High School we had to read The Fountainhead AND Atlas Shrugged (the former junior year, the latter senior).

fuckin Texas man.

How about highschool Veeky Forums you HATED?

>The Turn of the Screw
>Their Eyes Were Watching God
>The Awakening
>The Glass Castle
>The Unvanquished (definitely need to re-read though, didn't have an appreciation for Faulkner)
>A Movable Feast (also need to re-read, they had us read this before any other Hemingway)
>The Scarlet Letter
>The Great Gatsby
>Great Expectations

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Fucking awful

>The Turn of the Screw
reevaluate yourself.

>Great Gatsby
>Great Expectations
>bad

Neck yourself.

HOLES

bitch please, when i was 12 our Veeky Forums teacher made us read El Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha in the original ancient Spanish(even today is a pain in the ass to read such a mess even being antive speaker and reading everyday)

>BNW
>Reveal the entire plot on the 1st chapter
>literature

k

Does the US reading curriculum actually get people to read after High School?

I had to read that in High School, as well as Sarah's Key. They were okay but Sarah's Key ending was fucking bullshit.

>all these good books anons read in highschool
My high school curriculum was pretty much just Orwell's stuff and a bunch of civil rights books. They weren't bad but it's just a slog to go through the same civil rights period every year for English class

>hated The Awakening
baka desu senpai

I had a literal heroin addict teacher for AP Lit during my senior year. She got fired after a semester, but analyzing poetry and talking about music with her was the bomb.

I don't even remember what we had to read.

High school just went past in a flash, and I wasn't even there for the most part.

My sophomore English teacher was a pill popper and got fired the year after I had her for stealing money from the cheerleading fund. She had us read a bunch supernatural/weird fiction type stuff like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, The Monkey's Paw, The Lottery, etc. Total milf and now I'm kind of sad thinking about it.

War and Peace and Fahrenheit 451 were both good. Also grapes of wrath.

>and half my school were aboriginal

I'm not trying to /pol/-up this thread, but how was this?

Robinson Crusoe

bitch please, when i was a fetus in my mothers womb i listened to the audiobook of Thus spoke Zarathustra, that shit was dope

>indian voodoo shit
You're a fucking retard, I hope you know

L'Etranger, Anna Karenina and 1984 were all pretty comfy.

Went through something kind of similar here in Scandinavia. Only after High School did I start to become interested in lit and philosophy.

I don't think anybody in my classes enjoyed either Steinbeck or Miller novels yet our teachers all fucking loved them.

What the fuck man. In Canada we read The Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird, so much for making fun of Burger education.