Nobody yet for Brave New World? Buncha squares in here.
Also Stranger in a Strange Land, which no doubt holds up poorly as it was near-peak Heinlein Sex Cult stuff (oh, yes, he gets worse), but living that sex cult life had non-zero appeal to High School Adam.
That Was Then, This is Now.
I don’t know about anyone else, but it wasn’t something I was ever assigned in school. Same with Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye (which I hated when I did read it, mind you), Crime and Punishment or a bunch of the other staples.
We should start assigning the JD Salinger arc of BoJack instead of the book.
I dug this a too despite thinking I would hate it. I also remember being deeply affected by Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour.” Beyond prose, I got really into Oscar Wilde based on how much The Importance of Being Earnest owns. Also, Emily Dickinson and assorted young English romantics (Byron, Shelley, etc.).
I was one of the many that hated this in high school but reread it last year and, yeah, turns out it’s great. I get why Melville had such a crush on him.
I read it but wasn’t forced to.
I was assigned several (maybe 3?) Toni Morrison books in high school, and every time I dreaded it and every it was fantastic. I don’t know why I couldn’t figure out that she’s a great author.
See these are nearly the only ones mentioned so far that I was assigned to read and had to read for school. These, plus Lord of the Flies.
And, yeah, I hated Catcher in the Rye. The others were fine.
I did read a fair number of the other books mentioned, but almost entirely on my own. I had a Jack London phase in like 5th grade, so read White Fang and all his stuff then. Plus basically every tangentially sci fi book mentioned when I read through the classics of the genre.
As for one I remember reading and, liking is probably the wrong word given the subject matter, appreciating was The Things They Carried. A memoir of sorts about a Vietnam soldier. It carries a sense of trauma, horror, and mundane insanity of combat in a way that to high school me had yet to explore.
Animal Farm and To Kill a Mockingbird
I was also forced to read Great Expectations and David Copperfield, but never enjoyed those.
Animal Farm is one of those rare cases where we actually read it out loud in class, with the teacher explaining the parallels to real history after every chapter that he read out loud. I re-read Animal Farm myself years later, and it’s just a story about a bunch of animals. Well, it’s not, but you know what I mean. If I hadn’t experienced it in class the way I did, it would have been a much reduced experience.
To Kill a Mockingbird didn’t need any explanation. It was all right there on the page, and it was riveting.
I’ve never felt “forced” to read anything, though there were many books I was required to read for a class that I wouldn’t have otherwise read. My favorites:
A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings by Marquez. Yeah, it’s a short story not a novel, but having read that I delved deep into Marquez and a whole bunch of other magical realism, which is a favorite genre to this day a couple of decades hence.
Paradise Lost by Milton. Shakespeare can suck it. This is where it’s at for epic English literature written in meter. Satan is one of the greatest villains of all time in this poem. Really fun to read aloud.
A Tale of Two CIties by Dickens. Just a rip-roaring tale. Dickens is always fun.
I had to read Pride and Prejudice three times for three different classes.
It’s probably in my all time top 5 novels.
Yeah. I chose to do an English literature degree, and studied various languages mainly to be able to read books in the original, so it would be a bit weird if I didn’t like most books I was “forced” to read. But in terms of books I probably would not have read if they weren’t assigned, I’d have to go with a non-fiction book, The Great Cat Massacre, which is just a really fascinating piece of cultural history.
Funny thing. After White Fang I wanted to read more so I got Call of the Wild. So I wanted more Jack London wolf stories. The next one I got was Sea Wolf, which I assumed was a wolf dog on a boat.
But it blew me away.
Oddly enough, The Sea Wolf is the only Jack London novel I’ve read, at least partly because it’s not about dogs. Not that I have anything against dogs, I just don’t particularly want to read a story about them. But I do agree, The Sea Wolf is very much worth reading.
Well, I was quite young at the time. To put it another way, I have re-read Sea Wolf several times. But not the others. :)
Catch 22. Funny thing is I haven’t read it again since high school over 20 years ago, but I think about scenes from it all the time. Just this morning on the train to work I remembered the part where Yossarian was naked up a tree at the funeral and had a quiet chuckle to myself.
“It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”
For me it was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. AP English, senior year.
And I finally made it through Ulysses a few years ago. Hmm, I think we just passed Bloomsday; I should read that one again.
The only London I’ve read is the short story “To Build A Fire,” which I love.
Thanks to both. I’ll get them soon.