With thanks to Scarecrow for starting a thread about Homer, I'd like to put this related question to the Book Forum. We both seem to be wondering what variation there is in "standard" high school reading lists by school and time. So, what were the main books that you had to read in 9th through 12th grade (or are reading, or will read)? What were you surprised to get out of high school without reading? Don't forget to add (approximately) when you were there.

I was in high school in the late 80's early 90's in suburban New York.
We read:
Jude the Obscure (only book I've read and hated)
Iliad and the Odyssey
Shakespeare (various)
The Great Gatsby
Grapes of Wrath
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Book of Job
Chaucer (Cantebury Tales)
Canticle for Leibowitz
Of Mice and Men
Death of a Salesman
All Quiet on the Western Front
Heart of Darkness
Scarlett Letter
Moby Dick

Surprised we did not read:
Cather in the Rye
any Twain
any Dickens
any Orwell
Farenheit 451



[Edited by MrKen on 05-01-01 at 09:34 AM]

High school is mostly a blur to me, but I remember having 1984, The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness assigned to me. Since they were school assignments, I did not read them. I regret that now. I'll have to get around to them some day.

Wow, I graduated in '95 and we didn't read any of that, well maybe the Iliad. I can't really remember what we did read, but I think we were given a list to choose from most of the time. Oh, its coming back to me now! I think we also read To Kill A Mockingbird. 6-9 years ago is just too far away for me to remember, sorry. :)

-CM-

Amidst the usual famous authors, there were some gems that we studied. One of these was the non-fiction book Working by Studs Terkel. It was an insightful book and the teacher was an exceptionally inspired doctorate who anticipated problems and dealth with them. One of our assignments related to the book was to obtain our own interview and write up our findings in the same way as the chapters in the book. I learned a lot about taking interviews then because the teacher spent some time in class explaining and having some students give mock interviews with our teacher.

My 9th grade honours English class had 1984 as one of the numerous books we cycled through. Each book in that class had a oral summary of a point from the book (everybody had to summarize some points out loud), an exam, and a report or project. For "1984", she had us build, construct, model, or otherwise create some sort of physical object from the book. I think she intended for everyone to just make big charts or dioramas. Most people made big charts showing interrelationships between certain subjects from the book. A few people made some really weird salt+sugar 3D relief maps (must not have been a random idea since some students ran out of ideas on what to do and just copied each others style which was okay as long as the content was different). Ron build the lighthouse tower in which one of the book's famous protagonists hanged himself. The lighthouse was motorized and the light actually moved. He made the tower from several steel cans soldered together end on end and the motor and light asssembly was in the top. He also constructed a rough paper diorama at the base for the house next to the lighthouse tower. I built a working non-scale model of what I thought was the Centrifugal Bumble Puppy machine that the young children were taught to play with. You could actually toss a mockup ball into the top of the machine and it would spit out at the bottom at a random location. I thought it was pretty clever. To accommodate the random tossing of the custom-made fiber ball mockup, I constructed from scratch using point-to-point wiring on a bakelite perfboard a transitorized speed controller for the main motor in the Centrifugal Bumble Puppy rotor assembly. To make the mockup ball, I used a lightweight slurry (very little elmers glue, a lot of alcohol, and Crown Marina bathroom tissue fiber) and made a bunch of balls that dried in the sun. After they dried, I then used elmers glue more liberally and coated the outsides until they were fairly round and slick. After that dried, I scuffed them with sandpaper so that the rotor could build up enough friction with them to toss them out of the machine as described in the book. Ach, those were the days.

This is what I can remember right now. I'm sure I'll be adding to it as others post. I went to High School from '88-'91. Some of these I remember only a little bit of and should really re-read some day. Some of these may have been Jr. High too. It's hard to remember.

The Iliad
The Odessey
Diary of Anne Frank
Farenheight 451
To Kill A Mocking Bird
All Quiet On The Western Front
Hamlet
MacBeth
Gulliver's Travels
The Scarlet Letter
Romeo & Juliet
The Martain Chronicles
For Whom The Bell Tolls
The Old Man And The Sea
Moby Dick
The Last of the Mohicans
Red Badge of Courage
A Christmas Carol
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Great Expectations
The Crucible


Surprised We Never Read;
1984 or Animal Farm
The Catcher In The Rye
The Grapes of Wrath

[Edited by Scarecrow on 04-30-01 at 11:35 PM]

Not a lot at my school, actually.

A Seperate Peace
Great Gatsby
Farenheit 451
To Kill a Mockingbird
Assorted Shakespeare

That's about all I can remember. Lots of short stories, more so than novels. I hate A Seperate Peace, really do. Love the Simpson's episode where Lisa and her new found grandmother make fun of it.

All I can really remember is:

Night
Farenheit 451
Animal Farm
various Shakespeare
A Christmas Carol

Mostly we read short stories though.

7

We read Farenheit 451, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, The Crucible, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Julius Caesar, MacBeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Odessey, The Canterbury Tales...a few others...not too bad

We read Farenheit 451, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, The Crucible, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Julius Caesar, MacBeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales, Iliad, To Kill a Mocking Bird...a few others...not too bad

A few that I remember:

Silas Marner
The Great Gatsby
Return of the Native
Hamlet
Romeo and Juliet
A Tale of Two Cities

Wow, I guess I should be surprised that I didn't read any Orwell. I've also never had to read Farenheit 451, I guess I should do that one day. That one seemed to be on everyone's list but mine.

Startide: Studs Terkel is a bit of a local hero around here from what I see, I guess perhaps I should read something. Oh, and your English class sounds crazy. I don't think we progressed much past reading and writing in mine.

MacBeth
Romeo & Juliet
watched the movie of mobie dick
maybe one or two more Shakespeare plays

Do read it when you have time. It's a short book,under 200 pages, so it wouldn't even take all that long.

This book, along with All Quiet on the Western Front, Romeo & Juliet, To Kill A Mocking Bird & The Martain Chronicles we had to read and then compare to the movie.

Romeo & Juliet we had to compare to both Romeo & Juliet (w/ Olivia Hussey) and West Side Story and then also compare the two films. We also had to watch both versions of All Quiet on the Western Front and compare them to the book and each other. Those got to be pretty big projects.


[Edited by Scarecrow on 04-30-01 at 11:28 PM]

I'm not sure I can remember back that far...early 1980s Texas, rural and then suburban HS:
Shakespeare, of course, the usual suspects
The Jungle
The Scarlet Letter
Metamorphosis
Fahrenheit 451
some Moliere, I forget which
Candide
The Prince
A Separate Peace
1984
Brave New World
The Time Machine
Gulliver's Travels
A Christmas Carol
Lord of the Flies
The Stranger
Catcher in the Rye
The Old Man and the Sea
and that short story analysed by teens everywhere: 'The Most Dangerous Game'

(Wow, I remembered more than I thought)

Stuff I read on my own that *should* have been assigned for study in HS:
Catch-22
To Kill a Mockingbird
Naked Lunch (yeah, like that would happen)
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (ditto)
Don Quixote
Nausea
Steppenwolf
Siddhartha
Canterbury Tales

It looks like we've all read more or less the same selections. I was in high school during late 80s/early 90s in Honolulu. And these are the titles I recall being assigned.

9th grade:
A Tale of Two Cities: never got past the 1st chapter, literally put me to sleep everytime I tried reading it
Chocolate War: probably the favorite that year along with Catcher in the Rye.
Romeo et Juliet: surprisingly dissapointing
Catcher in the Rye
Lord of the Flies
Ordinary People
Farewell to Manzanar: poignant, but disorienting at the time.

10th grade:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: loved it, a real page turner, couldn't believe the school allowed it! I went to a conservative Catholic school.
Martian Chronicles
Tunnelvision
Wuthering Heights or was it Jane Eyre?
Farenheit 451: left me puzzled, couldn't make sense of it.

11th grade:
Killer Angels: never read it, don't know how I survived the quizes.
Grapes of Wrath
Moby Dick: never read past 1st chapter, don't know how I survived the in-class discussions.
Red Badge of Courage
The Sound and the Fury
The Crucible
Great Gatsby: loved the book, hated the movie.
The Scarlet Letter: our ap history/lit teacher had a thing for Nathaniel Hawthorne, even dressed up as Hester Prynne that Halloween!
The Sun Also Rises

12th grade:
Hamlet: truth be told, I've only ever read the soliloquy, we each had to memorize it and perform it in front of the class!
Two Gentlemen of Verona
Brave New World: couldn't read it enough times.
Turn of the Screw: wished we had more like this.
Candide: didn't truly understand or appreciate it until college.
The Canterbury Tales
I also recall a bunch of short stories and excerpts by Asian American authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan.

There were also a host of religious (Catholic) themed books assigned each summer, most of them went unread by all and strangely enough the nuns who taught the religion classes didn't seem to mind.

There were more, but the few I can remember are:

Just remembered "Of Mice and Men" and didn't see it anyone elses list so thought I'd throw it in here.

7

7: good call, actually I bet a lot of people did read that, but completely forgot about it for some reason. I think I read that in 10th grade. I guess it didn't make too much of an impact.

Now that I see them on other people's lists, I also remember reading All Quiet on the Western Front, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick (didn't read it), Metamorphosis, and one or two others listed by other people.

I also just remembered reading Death of a Salesman, and the Sartre book about killing an Arab.

My 9th grade honours English class had 1984 as one of the numerous books we cycled through. Each book in that class had a oral summary of a point from the book (everybody had to summarize some points out loud), an exam, and a report or project. For "1984", she had us build, construct, model, or otherwise create some sort of physical object from the book. I think she intended for everyone to just make big charts or dioramas. Most people made big charts showing interrelationships between certain subjects from the book. A few people made some really weird salt+sugar 3D relief maps (must not have been a random idea since some students ran out of ideas on what to do and just copied each others style which was okay as long as the content was different). Ron build the lighthouse tower in which one of the book's famous protagonists hanged himself... [/B][/QUOTE]

Ah, you're confusing "1984" with "Brave New World" in which the Protagonist hangs himself.

I read them both and considered 1984 far more superior. I was VERY depressed with 1984 as the "negative utopia" but thought that Huxley's new world to be somewhat better than this one.

Poll: Which did you like better, 1984 or Brave New World

-sky

I graduated last year, so its pretty much fresh in my mind.

Freshman Year -
All Quiet on the Western Front, A Separate Peace, Romeo and Juliet, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, And Then There Were None..

Sophomore Year -
The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, Julius Caesar, The Member of the Wedding, Catcher in the Rye, Great Gatsby

Junior Year -
Frankenstein, Doctor Faustus, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Sons and Lovers, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Senior Year -
Jane Eyre, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Heart of Darkness (EVIL EVIL BOOK), Billy Budd, Hamlet, King Lear, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (GREATEST BOOK EVER)

Graduated in '95.

I remember reading:
Tragedy of Julius Caesar
MacBeth
Much Ado About Nothing
Lord of the Flies
Brave New World
Of Mice and Men
The Great Gatsby
Huckleberry Finn

I remember reading Julius Ceasar, Great Expectations, Christmas Carol, The Pearl, Romeo and Juliet, April Morning, The Red Pony, MacBeth, Hamlet, Metamorphosis, Waiting for Godot, Brave New World, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, My Antonia, The Scarlett Letter, Siddhartha, The Time Machine, Tale of Two Cities, Grapes of Wrath, Beowolf, Of Mice and Men, A Separate Peace, Raisin in the Sun, Death of a Salesman, Animal Farm, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, Lord of the Flies, and An American Tragedy.

You're right! That's what I get for typing while lying in bed at 1:37AM *blush*

I am a junior in high school. We read:

Freshman year
Antigone
Inherit the Wind
To kill a Mockingbird
Romeo and Juliet

Soph year
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Good Earth
The Pearl
Cyrano de Bergerac
Julius Caesar
To Kill a Mockingbird(again!,I changed schools after my frosh year)

Junior Year
The Great Gatsby
The Grapes of Wrath
The Crucible
A bunch of Edgar Allen Poe's poems including The Fall of the House of Usher and... The Raven

Best books I've read in high school: Great Gatsby and All quiet on the western Front
Worst: Antigone



[Edited by evenflowddt on 05-01-01 at 04:09 PM]

Well, it looks like if you went to High School in the United States you read The Great Gatsby. And yet, Men still screw around with married women. When will we ever learn? :)