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

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.

Pages: Pages: 1

1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia)
by C. S. Lewis
 
2. The Miracle Worker
by William Gibson
 
3. That Was Then, This Is Now
by S. E. Hinton
 
4.
?
Where the Red Fern Grows
by WILSON RAWLS
 
5. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Puffin Modern Classics) (Puffin Modern Classics)
by Mildred D. Taylor
 
6. Great Expectations (Penguin Classics)
by Charles Dickens
 
7. A Midsummer Night's Dream (Folger Shakespeare Library)
by William Shakespeare
 
8. The Giver
by Lois Lowry
 
9. Romeo and Juliet (Folger Shakespeare Library)
by William Shakespeare
 
10. Our Town: A Play in Three Acts (Perennial Classics)
by Thornton Wilder
 
11. A Separate Peace
by John Knowles
 
12. Silas Marner (Penguin Classics)
by George Eliot
 
13. Wuthering Heights (Oxford World's Classics)
by Emily Bronte
 
14. Jonathan Livingston Seagull
by Richard Bach
 
15. Lord of the Flies : (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
by William Golding
 
16. Julius Caesar (Folger Shakespeare Library)
by William Shakespeare
 
17. Dante's Inferno
by Marcus Sanders
 
18. What Dreams May Come
by Vincent Ward
 
19. The Scarlet Letter (Enriched Classics)
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
 
20. The Crucible
by Nicholas Hytner
 
21. The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
 
22. The Age of Innocence  
23. All About Eve
by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
 
24. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales (Signet Classics)
by Edgar Allan Poe
 
25. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
 
26.
?
A Raisin in the Sun
by Kenny Leon
 
27. Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (Broadway Theatre Archive)
by Anthony Harvey (II)
 
28. A Streetcar Named Desire (Two-Disc Special Edition)
by Elia Kazan
 
29. Macbeth (Folger Shakespeare Library)
by William Shakespeare
 
30. The Good Earth (Oprah's Book Club)
by Pearl S. Buck
 
31. Oedipus Rex (Dover Thrift Editions)
by Sophocles
 
32. Frankenstein (Enriched Classics)
by Mary Shelley
 
33. King Lear (New Folger Library Shakespeare)
by William Shakespeare
 
34. A Thousand Acres: A Novel
by Jane Smiley
 
35. Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
 
36. The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
 
37. Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics)
by Charlotte Brontë
 
38. Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin Student Editions)
by Jean Rhys
 
39. Childhood's End (Del Rey Impact)
by Arthur C. Clarke
 
40. The Martian Chronicles
by Ray Bradbury
 
41. The Man in the High Castle
by Philip K. Dick
 
42.
?
Blade Runner (Five-Disc Complete Collector's Edition) [Blu-ray]
by Ridley Scott
 
43.
?
2001 - A Space Odyssey [Blu-ray]  
44. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation  
45. Sir Gawain and The Green Knight (Oxford World's Classics)  
46. The Importance of Being Ernest
by Ernest Cline
 
47. Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays (Everyman's Library (Paper))  
50. Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry
by Isabell Rivers
 
51. Sappho: A New Translation
by Sappho
 
52. The Book of Margery Kempe: The Autobiography of the Madwoman of God (Triumph Classic)
by Margery Kempe
 
This is starsmtsu12's list. Only starsmtsu12 can edit it. You can make your own version of this list.
Created by starsmtsu12 on May 19, 2008.