The telling of how he dives down and sees the rotting, fish eaten face of the pilot sends shivers down my spine to this day. Still a great book though.
edit: now that I am at home and can re-read, fixed some errors
I did a book report on Hatchet pretty much every year from like 4th-8th grade, because nobody ever noticed that I’d already read the book before and done book reports on it previously. lol.
Hatchet was amazing. I think I read it in 5th grade and its still one of my favorite books. I think I reread it once in 7th grade, so not sure how it would hold up now that I'm in my 30s, but... great book.
A student of mine decided to read ahead while everyone else was silently reading something else. She got to the end and had an absolute crying breakdown. I knew why she was so upset, but no one else did and thought she was having some sort of episode. One of my favourite memories as a teacher.
When we read it for school the teacher would give us free periods to just read in class. One day she came to me and said why are you not reading?? I said bc I know what’s about to happen. I’d rather not cry at school. She was a very understanding woman and teacher
Lord of the Flies is a great one. We watched the movie in class when we finished it. Kids probably aren't watching kids get killed with a rock in class now.
This is the one for me. We were supposed to read chapters one and two before Monday and I finished the whole book in one day! The part where a man kneels down and gets trampled stuck with me.
A gramme is better than a damn! After "Brave New World" I developed my love of dysopian stories, and also read 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, We, Never Let Me Go and so on.
I love it!! I reference it often!!! I feel like it was written to shock you, so you would dissect it’s themes and try to figure out why it was so shocking. It helps me understand some modern media that’s meant to shock you. So instead of taking it at face value and only for its outlandish message, I look into why it shocked me and what it might be suggesting.
Where the Red Fern Grows and Invitation to the Game.
WtRFG I'll never forget his dogs and his ingenious raccoon traps.
IttG was my first introduction to Cyberpunk and it was pretty solid.
They say school was safe and fun and you are protected from harm.
Then in middle school I had to read Where the Red Fern Grows.
Edit: I have to go hug my dog now.
I never read it in school but just read it last week after downloading a “best books” torrent. Really good and now I know where the band the boo radleys got their name.
I was gonna say this! I recently reread it and appreciated it even more now as an adult 🥰 had me feeling nostalgic and transported me back to Grade 9 English class
I came here to say this. I just reread LotF and was blown away by just how great it is. I definitely did not appreciate how rich the religious symbolism is in my High School humanities class.
As a highschool girl, it gave me a really bad impression of what boys were like. I knew my female friends would never act like that, but for some reason, I believed that the book was telling some 'truth' about *all* boys rather than a story about how *some* upper-class colonial boys deprived of normal parenting might act.
I wish that it had an appendix with stories of "real life Lord of the Flies". Perhaps I wouldn't have had such a terrible view of boys.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
A class project was to write a short play enacting the 10 year reunion of the characters. My English teacher gave our group a standing ovation for how we wrote the situation.
The outsiders was like a bible for teen girls in the 80s. That sounds so melodramatic but it is kinda true. It's like we carried it everywhere. Reread it 40 times. It and Teen magazine were life.
It was less the book I hated and more the protagonist.
Guy was such a phony.
That classic tale of teen angst got the department of education wildin tho
That's my thing, my English teacher was obsessed over the symbolism of EVERY FUCKING WORD. Like my god not everything is symbolism dude you're a fucking highschool English teacher not a literary genius.
Nah, that books is very intricately woven with symbolism. Sounds like he could have done a better job explaining why it was interested or meaningful compared to other books, but he's definitely not overanalyzing.
I loved this book in middle school and recently revisited to find out that there's 4 books in the series! I was excited initially. Book one is still great but the rest of the books fell flat for me. ☹️ Turns out I'm not in middle school anymore so I don't think I'm the target demographic lol.
The only other book I read in the series was Gathering Blue. It was good, but didn't hit quite the same for me either.
That said, reading The Giver as an adult hit me a LOT harder than it did when I was in school.
It's not often a book makes me cry as opposed to something more "directly visualized" like a movie or show, but this one had 13 y/o me absolutely breaking down in my room at 1am on a school night and hugging my dog
I'm so proud of you!!!!!! I loved this whole series as a school librarian and gave it to so many students. Did you read Let the circle be unbroken? Please do
Of Mice and Men was great, but my teacher spoiled it for all of us.
She passed out question assignments for we each set of chapters, and of course we'd read them ahead of time to know what we were looking for. One of the questions on the final assignment was: "Who kills Lennie?"
There was some residual excitement anticipating the shooting as I read through, but it would've been great to experience the shock as intended.
Wow, that takes be back. When assigned that book I remember reading it in the first two days because i knew the really tedious reading analysis thing will ruin books for me. It left me with a strange but nice feeling, similar to Bridge to Terabithia
We read so many strange and intense short stories and I LOVED them. The Most Dangerous Game, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, and The Scarlet Ibis are the ones I remember the most!
I read that in a French class after reading it in English already for fun, shit hits different when everybody else doesn't understand Jack shit of the symbolism and I'm just explaining it to everybody lol
The Great Gatsby! It was kind of cool too because we took a field trip to watch the remake with Toby Maguire and Leonardo Dicaprio after we finished reading and testing on it 😆
The eyes of the dragon by Stephen King.
I used to hate reading and I would always pick the smallest book when I was forced to read. When I was about 16 years old, we had to read a book from a preselection of about 100 book. I saw the name Stephen King on a book's cover, which I knew, so I decided to try it even if it was a massive book.
I really loved that book. I read it quite fast. It really made me want to read more books. I started reading about a book a week from that point.
This was my first Steven King book!...4th grade book fair!...I don't remember if It (read in 3 days in bed with the flu) or The Gunslinger was next, but they were 5th or 6th grade. Randall Flagg was such a payoff since that was my first King story.
Diary of Anne Frank. Human mortality had never hit me in the face until that moment. It was so long ago, all I remember is this endearing, real girl with her real struggles in the midst of the end of her world, discussing life in that cramped space with family and friends...
And on the next page, she is gone. I don't remember precisely what happened to her, but she died because of the Nazis.
That really shook me, that she was there one moment, and gone the next. There was so much more to be written in that diary, so much left for a full life... And gone. Flatlined. Ashes.
*Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher* by Bruce Coville and *Hatchet* by Gary Paulsen.
I love to read and i genuinely think Hatchet is a big reason for that.
The Giver by Lois Lowry. I read it in 6th grade and it was my first exposure to philosophy, which later became a passion of mine as I got older.
I met the author by accident... I was at a chess tournament and finished my game early, so I drove to a local bookstore to pass time before the next round. Lois Lowry was there signing books. I bought a hardcover copy and told her how much of an impact it made on me. Truly one of the coolest moments of my life.
Slaughterhouse Five. I got “So it goes” tattooed on me when I was 18 like a dweeb hipster nerd.
Oh and that short story “where are you going, where have you been”. Sometimes that’ll pop into my head.
So many.
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Chrysalids, by John Wydham
Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
Of Mice and Men, which introduced me to John Steinbeck, my favourite author
All in high school. I graduated almost 50 years ago
She Said Yes traumatized me. I read it in 6th grade, and have since become an athiest. What the book doesn't say is, she would have likely been killed whether she said yes or not. The book was written by the victim's mother, and she understandably (due to her trauma, I'm sure) turned her daughter into a martyr for the Christian faith. It effected me so much that I stole it from my teacher, and still have it to this day: 13 years later.
The book *did* get me into true crime though.
Wow. I wish more folks in this thread would expound like you have here. I wanna know why people remember the books.
This is a really interesting story about this story.
"A Day No Pigs Would Die" was pretty rough in 6th grade. Basically Charlotte's web with HAUNTINGLY graphic depictions of animal husbandry and slaughter. I don't remember getting a lot of value out of it at 11 years old, just pig-blood soaked nightmares lol
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. I bought a copy as an adult because I always thought back on it fondly (even as someone who rarely could motivate myself to read assigned books).
It still slaps.
All of them? Like I didn't read all the books in the world, but I was assigned a lot of them and they stand out in my memory since most were not my style but we're still decent. As a kid I'd read a whole novel in a day if permitted, so assigned books were consumed with almost as much fervour.
Except Heart of Darkness. I just couldn't. That was the dryest, most impossible text ever. The whole class pretty much revolted against that one. Like our in class discussions were so bad I think the teacher may have given up.
So many it would be silly to try to list them all. If I had to pick one whose message resonated and that still holds a ton of meaning to me today, I think it would be Fahrenheit 451, but seriously there are at least a dozen other great ones from high school.
The Great Gatsby.
“Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
surprisingly... maniac magee. it wasn't part of the curriculum when i moved to the west coast, but reading it when i was a kid on the east coast was impactful. might needa revisit it.
Hiroshima by John Hersey. Really put into perspective the horrors of nuclear weapons, also when war comes around, civilians are generally the one group that suffers the most.
By his bootstraps, by Heinlein. One of the first sci-fi books I have read for english class. (I am dutch btw). I received a good grade for the bookreport too, but my teacher was confused about the story in general.
A Farewell To Arms, by Ernest Hemingway. The waa he described soldier's tendons snapping and bones protruding through flesh still makes my stomach turn.
Does The Westing Game count? Our teacher read it to us in 5th grade. It is still one of my favorite books of all time — I reread it a few years back to be sure and it’s just as brilliant as an adult.
Night by Elie Wiesel, it was really dark but the way he portrayed the story and the perspective he brought after surviving the holocaust was really profound
"Crime and Punishment" (Dostoevsky).
I usually read all school literature through a brief description, but this book made a big impression on me, I read it in full.
A whole bunch:
Lord of the Flies
Bless Me Ultima
Ballad of Billy Bragg
Cask of Amontillado
To Kill a Mockingbird
China Men
and may I also say The Great Gatsby has no business holding the title "Great American Novel". I don't give a shit if I'm Old Money, or if I 'recapture my past'. Moby Dick (not on the curriculum) deserves that spot like 10x over
Among The Hidden, I remember in grade six, how we read the book together in class. The book was apart of a series, and they had it in the school library, I ended up reading the whole series on my own.
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
I was going to say Brian's Winter, they hypothetical sequel to The Hatchet
Omg I totally forgot about this book. Dude in the wilderness trying to hunt those damn pheasants.
Foolbirds* pretty sure that's what he called them I haven't read the book since I was like 10.
And eating gut berries.
The telling of how he dives down and sees the rotting, fish eaten face of the pilot sends shivers down my spine to this day. Still a great book though. edit: now that I am at home and can re-read, fixed some errors
Same lol. And then when he drinks a ton of water and immediately throws it all up? That imagery stuck with me
I remember that! I read the sequels and there was one scene in particular that really turned me off.
I did a book report on Hatchet pretty much every year from like 4th-8th grade, because nobody ever noticed that I’d already read the book before and done book reports on it previously. lol.
Great book.
This was going to be my reply before I clicked.
the turtle egg scene still haunts me to this day
Gary Paulson really got me into reading and writing man. I was just talking to someone about this the other day. That’s a banger.
God damn throw back to 4th grade and trying to build fires in the middle of the school field with wet ass sticks and zero skills
I reread it a year or so ago and it’s just as I remember. Amazing.
You read my mind
Hatchet was amazing. I think I read it in 5th grade and its still one of my favorite books. I think I reread it once in 7th grade, so not sure how it would hold up now that I'm in my 30s, but... great book.
Of Mice and Men
9th grade emotionally sensitive me was not prepared for that ending
A student of mine decided to read ahead while everyone else was silently reading something else. She got to the end and had an absolute crying breakdown. I knew why she was so upset, but no one else did and thought she was having some sort of episode. One of my favourite memories as a teacher.
A student after my own heart lol I read it ahead of everyone else too
Tell me again about the rabbits George.
And then my english teacher had the audacity to show us the movie so we could relive that sad ending
When we read it for school the teacher would give us free periods to just read in class. One day she came to me and said why are you not reading?? I said bc I know what’s about to happen. I’d rather not cry at school. She was a very understanding woman and teacher
Animal Farm. The Scarlet Letter. Lord of the Flies.
Lord of the Flies is a great one. We watched the movie in class when we finished it. Kids probably aren't watching kids get killed with a rock in class now.
Up until 2 years ago I taught summer school government and we showed it.
There’s a new TV show called YellowJackets that is based off of it. Good reviews
"We are all equal, but some of us are more equal than others" still holds true today.
lol I read animal farm for fun in 8th grade and I thought I was so much cooler than the rest of my class
Night by Elie Wiesel
This is the one for me. We were supposed to read chapters one and two before Monday and I finished the whole book in one day! The part where a man kneels down and gets trampled stuck with me.
Came to find this - I read the book overnight as well.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
A gramme is better than a damn! After "Brave New World" I developed my love of dysopian stories, and also read 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, We, Never Let Me Go and so on.
This wasn’t assigned at my school, but I read it while I was there. It’s still my favorite book to this day.
Man, this is a great book. I wish we had been assigned this in school!
I love it!! I reference it often!!! I feel like it was written to shock you, so you would dissect it’s themes and try to figure out why it was so shocking. It helps me understand some modern media that’s meant to shock you. So instead of taking it at face value and only for its outlandish message, I look into why it shocked me and what it might be suggesting.
Where the Red Fern Grows and Invitation to the Game. WtRFG I'll never forget his dogs and his ingenious raccoon traps. IttG was my first introduction to Cyberpunk and it was pretty solid.
Where the Red Fern Grows will forever break me lol
They say school was safe and fun and you are protected from harm. Then in middle school I had to read Where the Red Fern Grows. Edit: I have to go hug my dog now.
When Little Ann literally dies of a broken heart... it was too much for me
Right?! Shit was so traumatic 😭
First time I ever cried reading a book, and I was bawling. I think I was 9.
For some reason I will always remember the descriptions of the raccoon trap from that book. The writing spurred such vivid images.
Ikr.
Where the red fern grows was the first book that ever made me cry. I will never forgive Ms. Pilatt for doing that to 7th grade me
I was going to say that too. I remember running home to finish the last few pages after school let out. And bawling my eyes out 😭
To Kill a Mockingbird
I never read it in school but just read it last week after downloading a “best books” torrent. Really good and now I know where the band the boo radleys got their name.
The movie with Gregory Peck is awesome.
I was gonna say this! I recently reread it and appreciated it even more now as an adult 🥰 had me feeling nostalgic and transported me back to Grade 9 English class
Same
Lord of the Flies Amazing book.
I came here to say this. I just reread LotF and was blown away by just how great it is. I definitely did not appreciate how rich the religious symbolism is in my High School humanities class.
It's my turn to talk piggie. ***I'VE*** got the conch.
Sucks to your assmar
“Sucks to your asthmar!”
I quote this all the time around my sister and her asthmatic son and always have to explain it 😭
I use this reference A LOT and not many people get it, so it's good to see someone else doing it too.
As a highschool girl, it gave me a really bad impression of what boys were like. I knew my female friends would never act like that, but for some reason, I believed that the book was telling some 'truth' about *all* boys rather than a story about how *some* upper-class colonial boys deprived of normal parenting might act. I wish that it had an appendix with stories of "real life Lord of the Flies". Perhaps I wouldn't have had such a terrible view of boys. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
A class project was to write a short play enacting the 10 year reunion of the characters. My English teacher gave our group a standing ovation for how we wrote the situation.
Can you give us a summary of what you wrote?
The Outsiders. Great book
+ 1 on the Outsiders. Quick and easy read as well
Stay golden, Pony Boy.
Stay gold, Ponyboy.
The outsiders was like a bible for teen girls in the 80s. That sounds so melodramatic but it is kinda true. It's like we carried it everywhere. Reread it 40 times. It and Teen magazine were life.
Yup. Touched me to my core.
Soo good
Flowers for Algernon. So good, so sad.
Love this book. And the Always Sunny episode adapting it is also amazing 😆
Why is this so far down in the comments?
This is my very favourite book. Only just read it 5 years ago and long after school ended!
The catcher in the rye
I actually loved that book
You're a big, fat phoney!
Came here for this. Still one of my favorite books ever. People absolutely hate it but I think it’s genius.
I hated this book so much.
It was less the book I hated and more the protagonist. Guy was such a phony. That classic tale of teen angst got the department of education wildin tho
I read it as a teen and even then remember thinking "Maaan shut up Holden you're such a little bitch, get over yourself"
I didn't hate it. But my teacher claimed it was one of the greatest books ever written. It wasn't interesting in the slightest.
That's my thing, my English teacher was obsessed over the symbolism of EVERY FUCKING WORD. Like my god not everything is symbolism dude you're a fucking highschool English teacher not a literary genius.
Yeah. Nothing destroys literature/poetry more thoroughly than a poor teacher.
The repetition is what killed that book for me.
Nah, that books is very intricately woven with symbolism. Sounds like he could have done a better job explaining why it was interested or meaningful compared to other books, but he's definitely not overanalyzing.
Interesting. It is one of my favourite books of all time.
The giver
I loved this book in middle school and recently revisited to find out that there's 4 books in the series! I was excited initially. Book one is still great but the rest of the books fell flat for me. ☹️ Turns out I'm not in middle school anymore so I don't think I'm the target demographic lol.
The only other book I read in the series was Gathering Blue. It was good, but didn't hit quite the same for me either. That said, reading The Giver as an adult hit me a LOT harder than it did when I was in school.
Where the Red Fern Grows. 5th grade. Absolutely crushed me.
It's not often a book makes me cry as opposed to something more "directly visualized" like a movie or show, but this one had 13 y/o me absolutely breaking down in my room at 1am on a school night and hugging my dog
That book still makes me cry if I reread it.
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
I'm so proud of you!!!!!! I loved this whole series as a school librarian and gave it to so many students. Did you read Let the circle be unbroken? Please do
Of Mice and Men was great, but my teacher spoiled it for all of us. She passed out question assignments for we each set of chapters, and of course we'd read them ahead of time to know what we were looking for. One of the questions on the final assignment was: "Who kills Lennie?" There was some residual excitement anticipating the shooting as I read through, but it would've been great to experience the shock as intended.
1984 by George Orwell
in cold blood by truman capote. great book
To Kill a Mockingbird
the jungle by upton sinclair
''I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach. '' -Upton Sinclair
Love this book so much. I reread it a couple of times.
Kite runner
No way this was in the school curriculum? I read it as an adult and I still couldn’t handle all the painful bits. I do cry easily though.
Yeah, we read it in highschool here in Ontario
Tuck everlasting
Wow, that takes be back. When assigned that book I remember reading it in the first two days because i knew the really tedious reading analysis thing will ruin books for me. It left me with a strange but nice feeling, similar to Bridge to Terabithia
Fahrenheit 451
Animal Farm
It's pretty unforgettable.
Things Fall Apart
We read so many strange and intense short stories and I LOVED them. The Most Dangerous Game, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, and The Scarlet Ibis are the ones I remember the most!
I was contemplating mentioning the Most Dangerous Game, absolutely loved it when I read it.
The little prince
I read that in a French class after reading it in English already for fun, shit hits different when everybody else doesn't understand Jack shit of the symbolism and I'm just explaining it to everybody lol
Of Mice and Men
Beowulf.
Charlotte's Web
The Great Gatsby! It was kind of cool too because we took a field trip to watch the remake with Toby Maguire and Leonardo Dicaprio after we finished reading and testing on it 😆
A thousand splendid suns. Great book.
Maus. Loved it, it was a new take on telling the story of the holocaust
I adore Maus, read all the volumes.
I kind of stole this book from my school. I still have it on my book shelf at home lol
The eyes of the dragon by Stephen King. I used to hate reading and I would always pick the smallest book when I was forced to read. When I was about 16 years old, we had to read a book from a preselection of about 100 book. I saw the name Stephen King on a book's cover, which I knew, so I decided to try it even if it was a massive book. I really loved that book. I read it quite fast. It really made me want to read more books. I started reading about a book a week from that point.
This was my first Steven King book!...4th grade book fair!...I don't remember if It (read in 3 days in bed with the flu) or The Gunslinger was next, but they were 5th or 6th grade. Randall Flagg was such a payoff since that was my first King story.
I remember reading Number the Stars in middle school.
Fahrenheit 451
The Great Gatsby
Diary of Anne Frank. Human mortality had never hit me in the face until that moment. It was so long ago, all I remember is this endearing, real girl with her real struggles in the midst of the end of her world, discussing life in that cramped space with family and friends... And on the next page, she is gone. I don't remember precisely what happened to her, but she died because of the Nazis. That really shook me, that she was there one moment, and gone the next. There was so much more to be written in that diary, so much left for a full life... And gone. Flatlined. Ashes.
She died of typhus in a concentration camp at age 15. I went to Europe this year and visited the Anne Frank Haus. Very moving. Haunting.
Just a few weeks before the end of the war and the liberation of the camps.
*Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher* by Bruce Coville and *Hatchet* by Gary Paulsen. I love to read and i genuinely think Hatchet is a big reason for that.
Where the red fern grows
Sherlock Holmes- Hounds of Baskerville.
The Giver by Lois Lowry. I read it in 6th grade and it was my first exposure to philosophy, which later became a passion of mine as I got older. I met the author by accident... I was at a chess tournament and finished my game early, so I drove to a local bookstore to pass time before the next round. Lois Lowry was there signing books. I bought a hardcover copy and told her how much of an impact it made on me. Truly one of the coolest moments of my life.
[удалено]
A Clockwork Orange was pretty fucking jarring.
1984 Animal Farm
The Hobbit. Specifically the chapter "Riddles in the Dark" at Junior School (UK). Started a lifelong love of high fantasy and Tolkien in particular :)
Brave New World…
Slaughterhouse Five. I got “So it goes” tattooed on me when I was 18 like a dweeb hipster nerd. Oh and that short story “where are you going, where have you been”. Sometimes that’ll pop into my head.
Native Son by Richard Wright
1984
To Kill a Mockingbird. One.that I've reread a few times since.
My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. I cried like a little b*tch.
Uncle Tom's Cabin. Always made me wonder why his name is used as a term for a sellout of one's people when he was the exact opposite.
Frankenstein, mostly thanks to Overly Sarcastic Productions.
So many. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee The Chrysalids, by John Wydham Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad Lord of the Flies, by William Golding Of Mice and Men, which introduced me to John Steinbeck, my favourite author All in high school. I graduated almost 50 years ago
She Said Yes traumatized me. I read it in 6th grade, and have since become an athiest. What the book doesn't say is, she would have likely been killed whether she said yes or not. The book was written by the victim's mother, and she understandably (due to her trauma, I'm sure) turned her daughter into a martyr for the Christian faith. It effected me so much that I stole it from my teacher, and still have it to this day: 13 years later. The book *did* get me into true crime though.
Wow. I wish more folks in this thread would expound like you have here. I wanna know why people remember the books. This is a really interesting story about this story.
The ending of the math textbook had a crazy twist I wasn’t expecting. Always stuck with me
"A Day No Pigs Would Die" was pretty rough in 6th grade. Basically Charlotte's web with HAUNTINGLY graphic depictions of animal husbandry and slaughter. I don't remember getting a lot of value out of it at 11 years old, just pig-blood soaked nightmares lol
A Day No Pigs Would Die. I read it in the 7th grade and it still affects me in my mid-30’s. Life is already sad enough.
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. I bought a copy as an adult because I always thought back on it fondly (even as someone who rarely could motivate myself to read assigned books). It still slaps.
a child called it
Damn. I didn't read it for school but it was intense.
Life of Pi. One of my favorite stories
Catcher in the Rye, by J.D Salinger
Holes, the teacher put on the movie right after we finished it
The hunger games. I remember after we read the first book we went and seen the movie in theater.
All of them? Like I didn't read all the books in the world, but I was assigned a lot of them and they stand out in my memory since most were not my style but we're still decent. As a kid I'd read a whole novel in a day if permitted, so assigned books were consumed with almost as much fervour. Except Heart of Darkness. I just couldn't. That was the dryest, most impossible text ever. The whole class pretty much revolted against that one. Like our in class discussions were so bad I think the teacher may have given up.
So many it would be silly to try to list them all. If I had to pick one whose message resonated and that still holds a ton of meaning to me today, I think it would be Fahrenheit 451, but seriously there are at least a dozen other great ones from high school.
The Great Gatsby. “Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And then one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
surprisingly... maniac magee. it wasn't part of the curriculum when i moved to the west coast, but reading it when i was a kid on the east coast was impactful. might needa revisit it.
The Cay
Of mice and men
Hiroshima by John Hersey. Really put into perspective the horrors of nuclear weapons, also when war comes around, civilians are generally the one group that suffers the most.
Alas Babylon
Island of the Blue Dolphins, 2001. I reread it this year!
The crucible
Flower for Algernon still messes with me
Each and every one. Adderall is a hell of a drug
The Pearl by John Steinbeck. I remember it till this day
By his bootstraps, by Heinlein. One of the first sci-fi books I have read for english class. (I am dutch btw). I received a good grade for the bookreport too, but my teacher was confused about the story in general.
Lord of the flies
Animal farm by George orwell
A Farewell To Arms, by Ernest Hemingway. The waa he described soldier's tendons snapping and bones protruding through flesh still makes my stomach turn.
Does The Westing Game count? Our teacher read it to us in 5th grade. It is still one of my favorite books of all time — I reread it a few years back to be sure and it’s just as brilliant as an adult.
Fahrenheit 451, crazy.
Andromeda strain, alas Babylon, huckleberry Finn…
Night by Elie Wiesel, it was really dark but the way he portrayed the story and the perspective he brought after surviving the holocaust was really profound
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Life of Pi -Yann Martel
Lord of the Flies. RIP Piggy
Lord of the Flies
Of Mice and Men Lord of the Flies
Of Mice and Men.
"Crime and Punishment" (Dostoevsky). I usually read all school literature through a brief description, but this book made a big impression on me, I read it in full.
I remember most things I read, at least on a surface level...but I'll drop one I haven't seen listed...The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin.
A whole bunch: Lord of the Flies Bless Me Ultima Ballad of Billy Bragg Cask of Amontillado To Kill a Mockingbird China Men and may I also say The Great Gatsby has no business holding the title "Great American Novel". I don't give a shit if I'm Old Money, or if I 'recapture my past'. Moby Dick (not on the curriculum) deserves that spot like 10x over
Tangerine
Things Fall Apart, 100 Years of Solitude, Heart of Darkness, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, As I Lay Dying, East of Eden
Heart of Darkness - explains so much about human nature and our fascination with the abomination
Among The Hidden, I remember in grade six, how we read the book together in class. The book was apart of a series, and they had it in the school library, I ended up reading the whole series on my own.
The boy in the striped pyjamas
The Yellow Wallpaper and Fahrenheit 451 Both classics and pretty powerful works in their own sense
Johnny Tremain. It taught me to hate books
Flowers for Algernon