I first read AK in college and quickly fell in love with it. I find something new each time I reread it.
Grew up without TV and only forced to read once. Dad over-heard my joyful cry...."WOO HOO! We don't have to do the chapter on evolution in biology!" The teacher was a Baptist Preacher and felt it was just to controversial. Hmmm.....Imagine that. Praise Jesus! He wanted dad to over-hear me. Of course I didn't feel that way at the time. Outline and test, the whole nine-yards, but it was the beginning of a life-long study of science.
For me it was 1984, The Time Machine and Lord of the Flies. Still like them well enough. But the one book I hated being force-read above all else was Austen's Persuasion. Couldn't bear it. Who would have thought, then, I'd grow so devoted to Austen that I did several univesity modules on 19th C literature and spent a whole semester on Austen's works and her world? I then chose to write my final dissertation on 19th c marriages customs as evidenced through Austen's six novels. 15,000 words in all. I really should let my school English teacher know all his breathing down my neck paid off...
Maybe because it's so damn hefty I love the way it begins. Tolstoy's words just nail the essence of families. Of course I love my family and my husband's family, but sometimes they can be so darn dysfunctional.
Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, 1984 by George Orwell (One of my all time favorites), Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and Passages from The Odyssey
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. I studied it in my last year of school and then again two years later in college. I disliked it on the first read but loved it on the second. It's one of my favourite books.
I never did any of the required readings in high school. But I was "forced to read" The Monkey Wrench Gang at university. I had never read anything like it before, and found it amazing.
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee An Enemy of the People - Henrik Ibsen Those were the works I most enjoyed at the time. When I was about 40, I decided to go back and reread the books I was supposed to have read but either didn't read or read and hated. My list included: The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane Great Expectations - Charles Dickens A Separate Peace - John Knowles The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Silas Marner - George Eliot Moby Dick - Herman Melville Silas Marner was actually not assigned reading for us in high school but I thought I should read it, anyway, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. A Canticle for Leibowitz was not assigned to our class but was assigned to other classes, and the title always stuck with me. Great Expectations, which I struggled through at 14, was a delight at 40, when the understated humor came through loud and clear. And then there was Red Badge of Courage, with which I'd had a long and difficult association. I was first assigned it as summer reading prior to my freshman year. Couldn't get through it. Neither could any of my classmates, so they made us read it again during our sophomore year. I battled it out for 25 pages, then opted for the Monarch notes. In my second year of college, I ran into it again. Still couldn't get through it. But now, in my 40s, fairly widely read, an aspiring writer - now, surely, I could take on the dry-as-dust prose of Mr. Crane. Nope. Bailed after 15 pages. My 60th birthday approaches. Maybe I'll give it another shot.
The best book I was forced to read in high school was easily Holes by Louis Sachar. I found it so much more interesting than To Kill a Mockingbird or any Shakespearian stuff.
Sadly, we were not forced to read any poems, literature, books of any kind. The English language syllabus in the 1980's focused on comprehension from short book extracts and punctuating basic sentences. Hence the struggle with reading and writing later on.
"Death Be Not Proud" by Donne and an excerpt from Beowulf are what comes to mind. I really enjoyed a lot of the poetry from AP Brit Lit too.
You, sir, have excellent taste. I would have put TKM, but I had to read it in 8th grade. Though I was technically supposed to read it in high school, I didn't because I had reread it on my own.
The Sound and the Fury. We spent a long time going through that book, purposefully. Almost everyone in the class kept their copy, even to this day.
Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Milley. Poetry was utterly opaque to me until I ingested this piece. The concept and importance of imagery in all modes of literature suddenly came into being for me.
Cold Equations. Granted I HATED it when I first read it. I cried. I hated the teacher for making me read it. I thought, "God, its my first day of high school, my first class, and I had to read that?" Then, I went back and read it the next day. I cried again. I have never read it since and DO NOT want to, but for a short story in a shitty one-horse town highschool textbook, it was a powerful piece of literature for me. That and Young Goodman Brown.
The Giver might be one of the deepest books I've ever read in my life, and I only realized that five years after I read it. The idea of living in a world without color, where everyone is expected to fulfill only a single role for the rest of their lives... it makes me shudder to be honest. And the ending got me asking lots of questions. There was that sense of silent fulfillment that mingled with a fear that the protagonist might freeze to death outside the cold. And up until today I still don't know which one is more prevalent.
Did you find that dissecting that book in an English class ruined it for you? It is an excellent book but I don't think I'd pick it up again in a hurry... I can just hear the dull voices of 16y/o's reading it out-loud whilst people unzipped school bags and scratched their names into the desks. The same goes for: Junk - by Melvin Burgess Lord of the Flies -by William Golding I enjoyed English classes later in school, but, I still keep my annotated copies of all the above and my brain switches into analysis mode instead of enjoying them!