What books do we usually have to read in high school?
I’m asking this because I’ve never read in school
Whatever country you are from share with me what you studied in school
You’ll probably encounter The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird and some sort of Shakespeare (likely Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet) if you haven’t already gotten to those.
Fahrenheit 451, Catcher in the Rye and anything by Orwell are fairly common as well.
OkapiAlloy on
At least in my region of the U.S., it’s pretty typical to read:
* _The Odyssey_
* Two to four Shakespeare plays, usually some subset of the “big five” tragedies.
* _A Raisin in the Sun_
* _Things Fall Apart_
* _To Kill a Mockingbird_
* _The Great Gatsby_
* _Huck Finn_
* _Heart of Darkness_
* _Animal Farm_
* _1984_
* _Les Miserables_, usually abridged
There are a lot more, and many will vary school to school or class to class, but those all seem to come up quite a lot.
rastab1023 on
I went to high school in the 90s so my memory is a bit spotty but the ones I remember are:
Lord of the Flies
Pride and Prejudice
A Farewell to Arms
Siddhartha
Catcher in the Rye
Romeo and Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Things Fall Apart
To Kill a Mockingbird
Beowulf
Of Mice and Men
Sisu4864 on
This is a partial list because there’s no way I remember all of them that far back:
Johnny Tremain (only remember this because everyone in my 9th grade English class was annoyed we had to read an elementary school level book)
Romeo and Juliet
Into the Wild
Scarlet Letter
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Great Gatsby
As I Lay Dying
To Kill a Mockingbird
Catch-22
Catcher in the Rye
The Raven
Pygmalion
Pride and Prejudice
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Of Mice and Men
The Devil’s Dictionary (and not so much read it cover to cover, but had to create our own versions of it with our own unique definitions)
I also remember reading The Jungle and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court but I think it was required by different social studies teachers instead of English teachers
tragicsandwichblogs on
Here are the novels, short stories, and plays I remember from high school in the first half of the 80s:
* Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear
* Beagle: The Last Unicorn
* Orwell: 1984, Animal Farm
* Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
* Sheridan: The Rivals
* Golding: Lord of the Flies
* Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
* Tolstoy: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
* Shaw: Pygmalion
* Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Dead
* Hemingway: Hills Like White Elephants, The Old Man and the Sea
* Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
* Miller: The Crucible
* Edwards: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
* Wharton: Ethan Frome
* Stoppard: Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead
* Lawrence and Lee: The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail
* Melville: Billy Budd
* Ibsen: A Doll’s House
* Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
* Jackson: The Lottery
* Crane: The Red Badge of Courage
* Knowles: A Separate Peace
* Williams: The Glass Menagerie
* Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
* O’Connor: Greenleaf
* Hardy: Far From the Madding Crowd
nobodyspecial767r on
I had to read The Glass Menagerie, and it was so boring.
I had a great teacher who used to read Of Mice and Men to us and she did voices for the main characters and it was very entertaining. That being said, if she was teaching today and did the same thing, I have a feeling it would not have been as well received.
leomonster on
I’m from Argentina. In my school we had to read Edgar Allan Poe in English and attempt to translate it. I loved his poems, but my English was pretty basic at the moment, and my translation attempts were… not great.
We also had to read a lot of Latin American authors, of course. Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sábato, Gabriel Garcia Marquez… I actually see them mentioned in this sub pretty often.
7 Comments
You’ll probably encounter The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird and some sort of Shakespeare (likely Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet) if you haven’t already gotten to those.
Fahrenheit 451, Catcher in the Rye and anything by Orwell are fairly common as well.
At least in my region of the U.S., it’s pretty typical to read:
* _The Odyssey_
* Two to four Shakespeare plays, usually some subset of the “big five” tragedies.
* _A Raisin in the Sun_
* _Things Fall Apart_
* _To Kill a Mockingbird_
* _The Great Gatsby_
* _Huck Finn_
* _Heart of Darkness_
* _Animal Farm_
* _1984_
* _Les Miserables_, usually abridged
There are a lot more, and many will vary school to school or class to class, but those all seem to come up quite a lot.
I went to high school in the 90s so my memory is a bit spotty but the ones I remember are:
Lord of the Flies
Pride and Prejudice
A Farewell to Arms
Siddhartha
Catcher in the Rye
Romeo and Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Things Fall Apart
To Kill a Mockingbird
Beowulf
Of Mice and Men
This is a partial list because there’s no way I remember all of them that far back:
Johnny Tremain (only remember this because everyone in my 9th grade English class was annoyed we had to read an elementary school level book)
Romeo and Juliet
Into the Wild
Scarlet Letter
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Great Gatsby
As I Lay Dying
To Kill a Mockingbird
Catch-22
Catcher in the Rye
The Raven
Pygmalion
Pride and Prejudice
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Of Mice and Men
The Devil’s Dictionary (and not so much read it cover to cover, but had to create our own versions of it with our own unique definitions)
I also remember reading The Jungle and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court but I think it was required by different social studies teachers instead of English teachers
Here are the novels, short stories, and plays I remember from high school in the first half of the 80s:
* Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear
* Beagle: The Last Unicorn
* Orwell: 1984, Animal Farm
* Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
* Sheridan: The Rivals
* Golding: Lord of the Flies
* Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
* Tolstoy: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
* Shaw: Pygmalion
* Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Dead
* Hemingway: Hills Like White Elephants, The Old Man and the Sea
* Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
* Miller: The Crucible
* Edwards: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
* Wharton: Ethan Frome
* Stoppard: Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead
* Lawrence and Lee: The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail
* Melville: Billy Budd
* Ibsen: A Doll’s House
* Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
* Jackson: The Lottery
* Crane: The Red Badge of Courage
* Knowles: A Separate Peace
* Williams: The Glass Menagerie
* Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
* O’Connor: Greenleaf
* Hardy: Far From the Madding Crowd
I had to read The Glass Menagerie, and it was so boring.
I had a great teacher who used to read Of Mice and Men to us and she did voices for the main characters and it was very entertaining. That being said, if she was teaching today and did the same thing, I have a feeling it would not have been as well received.
I’m from Argentina. In my school we had to read Edgar Allan Poe in English and attempt to translate it. I loved his poems, but my English was pretty basic at the moment, and my translation attempts were… not great.
We also had to read a lot of Latin American authors, of course. Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sábato, Gabriel Garcia Marquez… I actually see them mentioned in this sub pretty often.