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starsmtsu12's "asked to read for school at whatever age"

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From dim memories to parchments stolen from a burning building(s), I have put together this very comprehensive list of books that I was asked to read, be it grade school to high school and several years in college.

Textbooks will be omitted; poems will not be counted either. Whatsmore, if we read a snipet of something, that’s also out of bounds. I have included one or two movies that we watched in high school that were treated as literature—you get it.

I haven’t read several of these although I might have purchased them at one point.

I am interested in the selection of books that people, especially in high school english classes, are assigned to read, so PLEASE feel free to share your own experience.

For instance, my 6th grade reading teacher added a few novels into her lesson plan and borrowed from our textbook. My 7th grade teacher, to contrast, did nothing of the sort—and it was rumored that she couldn’t tell the difference between numbers and letters anyway. (legend has it that she gave one kid an A on his MATH folder, which he handed in by mistake . . . )

High school English classes were almost perfectly thematic:

Freshman year was for grammar, after which grammar was never again practiced.

Sophomore year was an assortment, based on teacher’s discretion, I would think. My teacher seemed to live in a world ruled by mechanics—she taught us how to look for conventions in poems but not read them. She class had no text but was based in novels. I suppose she was comfortable with her station, didn’t want to challenge anyone with anything other than a vocabulary test; she retired upon the end of the semester.

Junior and Senior year classes were trained on American and British Lit respectively.

In college I majored in English (just plain English), and I also took a lot of history classes. I sought the "hardest" teachers and performed for them when I felt up to it, for I took ill in my fifth semester. Later I signed up for a lot of classes that I never finished, but I still have those syllabi and quite a few texts that I bought and never opened.

  1. 2.
    The Miracle Worker
    by William Gibson

    Drag me to re-order


  2. 3.
    That Was Then, This Is Now
    by S. E. Hinton

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  3. 4.
    ?
    Where the Red Fern Grows
    by WILSON RAWLS

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  4. 6.
    Great Expectations (Penguin Classics)
    by Charles Dickens

    Drag me to re-order


  5. 7.
    A Midsummer Night's Dream (Folger Shakespeare Library)
    by William Shakespeare

    Drag me to re-order


  6. 8.
    The Giver
    by Lois Lowry

    Drag me to re-order


  7. 9.
    Romeo and Juliet (Folger Shakespeare Library)
    by William Shakespeare

    Drag me to re-order


  8. 10.
    Our Town: A Play in Three Acts (Perennial Classics)
    by Thornton Wilder

    Drag me to re-order


  9. 11.
    A Separate Peace
    by John Knowles

    Drag me to re-order


  10. 12.
    Silas Marner (Penguin Classics)
    by George Eliot

    Drag me to re-order


  11. 13.
    Wuthering Heights (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Emily Bronte

    Drag me to re-order


  12. 14.
    Jonathan Livingston Seagull
    by Richard Bach

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  13. 16.
    Julius Caesar (Folger Shakespeare Library)
    by William Shakespeare

    Drag me to re-order


  14. 17.
    Dante's Inferno
    by Marcus Sanders

    Drag me to re-order


  15. 18.
    What Dreams May Come
    by Vincent Ward

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  16. 19.
    The Scarlet Letter (Enriched Classics)
    by Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Drag me to re-order


  17. 20.
    The Crucible
    by Nicholas Hytner

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  18. 21.
    The Great Gatsby
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  19. 22.
    The Age of Innocence

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  20. 23.
    All About Eve
    by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

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  21. 24.

  22. 25.
    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
    by Maya Angelou

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  23. 26.
    A Raisin in the Sun
    by Kenny Leon

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  24. 27.
    Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (Broadway Theatre Archive)
    by Anthony Harvey (II)

    Drag me to re-order


  25. 28.
    A Streetcar Named Desire (Two-Disc Special Edition)
    by Elia Kazan

    Drag me to re-order


  26. 29.
    Macbeth (Folger Shakespeare Library)
    by William Shakespeare

    Drag me to re-order


  27. 30.
    The Good Earth (Oprah's Book Club)
    by Pearl S. Buck

    Drag me to re-order


  28. 31.
    Oedipus Rex (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by Sophocles

    Drag me to re-order


  29. 32.
    Frankenstein (Enriched Classics)
    by Mary Shelley

    Drag me to re-order


  30. 33.
    King Lear (New Folger Library Shakespeare)
    by William Shakespeare

    Drag me to re-order


  31. 34.
    A Thousand Acres: A Novel
    by Jane Smiley

    Drag me to re-order


  32. 35.
    Mrs. Dalloway
    by Virginia Woolf

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  33. 36.
    The Hours
    by Michael Cunningham

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  34. 37.
    Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics)
    by Charlotte Brontë

    Drag me to re-order


  35. 38.
    Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin Student Editions)
    by Jean Rhys

    Drag me to re-order


  36. 39.
    Childhood's End (Del Rey Impact)
    by Arthur C. Clarke

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  37. 40.
    The Martian Chronicles
    by Ray Bradbury

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  38. 41.
    The Man in the High Castle
    by Philip K. Dick

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  39. 42.
    ?

  40. 43.
    ?
    2001 - A Space Odyssey [Blu-ray]

    Drag me to re-order


  41. 44.
    Beowulf: A New Verse Translation

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  42. 46.
    The Importance of Being Ernest
    by Ernest Cline

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  43. 50.
    Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry
    by Isabell Rivers

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  44. 51.
    Sappho: A New Translation
    by Sappho

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  45. 53.
    Gaspara Stampa: Selected Poems
    by Gaspara Stampa

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  46. 54.
    The Tragedy of Mariam (Broadview Literary Texts)
    by Elizabeth Cary

    Drag me to re-order


  47. 55.
    ?
    Madame De Lafayette: the Princess De Cleves
    by Nancy Mitford

    Drag me to re-order


  48. 56.
    La Princesse De Cleves (The Princess of Cleves)
    by madame de lafayette

    Drag me to re-order


  49. 57.
    The Autumn of the Middle Ages
    by Johan Huizinga

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  50. 59.

  51. 60.
    The Return of Martin Guerre
    by Natalie Zemon Davis

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  52. 63.
    The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
    by Jonathan D. Spence

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  53. 66.
    The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
    by Samuel P. Huntington

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  54. 67.
    Heart of Darkness (Broadview Literary Texts)
    by Joseph Conrad

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  55. 68.
    The Prince (Penguin Classics)
    by Niccolo Machiavelli

    Drag me to re-order


  56. 69.
    Mandragola
    by Niccolo Machiavelli

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  57. 70.
    Gargantua and Pantagruel (Penguin Classics)
    by Francois Rabelais

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  58. 71.
    Don Quixote (P.S.)
    by Miguel de Cervantes

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  59. 72.
    The Miser and Other Plays: A New Selection (Penguin Classics)
    by Jean-Baptiste Moliere

    Drag me to re-order


  60. 73.
    Phaedra, by Racine
    by Richard Wilbur

    Drag me to re-order


  61. 74.
    Candide (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by Voltaire

    Drag me to re-order


  62. 75.
    Father and Son (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Edmund Gosse

    Drag me to re-order


  63. 76.
    The Waste Land and Other Poems (Penguin Classics)
    by T. S. Eliot

    Drag me to re-order


  64. 77.
    Dubliners
    by James Joyce

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  65. 78.
    To the Lighthouse
    by Virginia Woolf

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  66. 79.
    Lady Chatterley's Lover
    by D. H. Lawrence

    Drag me to re-order


  67. 80.
    Animal Farm: Centennial Edition
    by George Orwell

    Drag me to re-order


  68. 81.

  69. 82.

  70. 83.
    Room and the Dumb Waiter (Pinter Plays)
    by Harold Pinter

    Drag me to re-order


  71. 84.
    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

    Drag me to re-order


  72. 85.
    The Canterbury Tales (Norton Critical Editions)
    by Geoffrey Chaucer

    Drag me to re-order


  73. 86.
    For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War
    by James M. McPherson

    Drag me to re-order


  74. 87.
    Amistad
    by Steven Spielberg

    Drag me to re-order


  75. 89.
    The Turn of the Screw - Literary Touchstone Classic
    by Henry James

    Drag me to re-order


  76. 90.
    Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic
    by Paul Fussell

    Drag me to re-order


  77. 91.

  78. 92.

  79. 94.
    Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (Focus on Performance)
    by Christopher Marlowe

    Drag me to re-order


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Created by starsmtsu12 on May 19, 2008.