Best piece of literature you were forced to read in high school?

Also one of my favorite novels ever. I can't write enough ebullient praise about it. But unlike you, I wasn't forced to read it; I borrowed it from a friend the summer after freshman year. The early college years are probably the best time to consume that work.

 

I wasn't forced to read many novels when I was in high school... I was forced to read a book by an English Nobel laureate in my final English course, and I selected Lord of the Flies. I suppose it was the best piece of literature I've been "forced" in high school. I enjoyed it. I remember my final assignment on that course being to do one of three things. I don't remeber what the other two were, but I went with rewriting the ending. I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed writing the ending; I was also quite satisfied with the end result. I felt that I had captured the writing style, the voice and the tone of the book. Unlike the book's ending that depicted how something barbarian so easily reverted to something civilized in the face of the authority of civilization, my ending went the opposite way and allwed the children to descend fully into barbarism. Sadly, I lost that piece of writing, but I will read that book again one day and write that ending of mine again.

 

Well it is a journey through hell, quite literally. I know what you mean though, as soon as I first reached Canto 5 I knew that I was in for a very emotionally bumpy ride. The circle that really got to me most was, for some reason, the wood of the suicides. That bit where Dante-the-narrator snaps a twig off a tree and then it appears to run with blood like a wound, that got to me in a big way.

 

Never knew that he intended to have different colored fonts. I think I'll buy another copy and go through it with a few highlighters when I have a lot of free time.

 

One of the pieces of literature that I've found to be most memorable (and also therefor one of my favourites) was a poem we had to study in school called "The Child Who Walks Backwards" by Lorna Crozier. It is a very powerful poem, and was one of the first times I remember a poem that was pretty clear about what it was talking about without explicitly stating it. Lines from it have stuck with me in the intervening years.

 

There was an edition published a number of years ago that was printed in colored ink, just the way Faulkner imagined it. Only a limited number of copies were printed (1000 perhaps?), so you may have a hard time finding it. But it's definitely out there for anyone who's interested.

 

It's interesting that some of you really liked The Sound and The Fury, by William Faulkner. I was forced to read it as a junior in high school. I'm still scratched and bruised from the experience.

I remember not having a flipping CLUE what was going on. (And I was a very-well-read teenager, I assure you.) I got more and more flubbed up, trying to figure out who these people were, why they kept changing POV, etc. I had to write an essay on the book, and I had to call upon all my powers of Verbose Waffle to scoop a "B" grade on it.

It wasn't till the next year, when I was a senior, that I read MacBeth ...a skoosh, compared to The Sound and the Fury ...and came upon that famous 'brief candle' soliloquy by MacBeth that ends: "...it is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Light bulb moment.

Well. What a revelation! And then I was completely irritated. WHY did Faulkner assume that everybody had to read MacBeth before they could figure out what he was on about? The story was skewed and incoherent because it was a mentally retarded person telling it! I wish I had figured that out when I was reading the dang thing. It was a lesson to me. Don't put unnecessary barriers between yourself and the reader.

Or so I thought. Then I read Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker... Nearly gave up on that, too, but because I was reading it jointly with another person who was studying it in his class, we both perservered. The light-bulb moment in THAT book was huge. If it hadn't been written the way it was, we never would have got there. Fabulous.

So who knows, I might even go back and re-read The Sound and the Fury. Maybe I was just too immature at the time to appreciate it.

 

The problem is that without the different colors, it's nigh impossible to figure out at which point of the timeline you are when reading The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner didn't, afaik, even write it in a way that we could borderline effortlessly decipher that -- hence the different colored fonts he would've wanted to use. It's a very challenging novel, and I got through because I didn't even try to make sense out of it. Believe me, when we had to analyze it on-class, other students were just as flabbergasted

 

This is how I remember reading the book:
Benjy's Chapter: What is going on!? I thought Benjy was an infant for the longest time. Then, in confusion, I checked the back of the book which had something along the lines of "Benjy the idiot brother". Moment of revelation. But why does the POV change?
Quentin's Chapter: Finally some prose. I understood the chapter pretty well, Quentin's obsession with time, virginity, and honor. And incest. I hoped the rest of the book would be like this.
Jason's Chapter: Wait. There are two Quentins!? Cue flipping back through the book. Other than that, that chapter cleared up most problems I had with the first chapter.
Dilsey's Chapter: What a lame ending I was very hyped for the ending and was pretty disappointed when it ended. Missed nearly all of the religious symbolism because I wanted to learn what happened to Quentin and Jason's money.

Then as I read the last sentence, I flipped the page to find the Portable Faulkner.
Instant face in palm.

 

The one book that stands out from my schooldays is Animal Farm by George Orwell. It is an excellent lesson in why communism will never work. Great in principle but due to the failings of human nature will never work in practice.
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
LM

 

One i was FORCED to read? Hmm...

Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck by far! The ending spoke to me...

SPOILERS!!!!!!
SPOILERS!!!!!!
SPOILERS!!!!!!

^^Just in case there are people who havent read it yet and want to. When George had to kill Lenny, but he made him die happy. I was a kid when i read it and i cried my eyes out <---just lost some of my manliness! Anywho...this book still pulls at my heart. It was the first book I read that had such an emotional ending to it.

All other books i hated or were ones that I read voluntarily.

 

Faulkner is an exceptionally difficult read no matter one's age, and doubly so if you were in high school. His book has no flow, and getting through it is slow work. However, the one book of his that I've read, Sanctuary, was more than worth it. The ending is one of the greatest pieces of writing I have ever come across.

 

I don't think Faulkner wanted readers to have read Macbeth (although I would say a good number of his readers probably had read Macbeth before). Only one section of the book is about Benjy. The rest of the characters are not mentally challenged. I think what makes this hard to read for most people is that the stream of consciousness technique he uses is difficult for anyone unaccustomed to it. I've read the book twice now (the first time was in school and the second was years later, with a guide), and I still have trouble with parts of it.

If I remember correctly, he italicized the first sentence of any passage that had a time shift. I admit I was completely stumped by that the first time I came across it, but once you figure it out, you can then figure out where the time shifts are.

 

I probably didn't make my point clear enough. That's what I thought THEN (as a 16-17-year-old.) I feel differently now, as a 64-year old, and intend to read the story again with a more mature viewpoint. I was just mad back then that I'd missed the whole point because I didn't understand the significance of the title. There was no hint anywhere on the back cover or whatever as to the mental state of the narrator, and we didn't discuss the book in class. We were just supposed to read it, then write an essay about it. I still think that was a bit heavy for a high school junior.

Shame that sometimes really good literature like this can get stuffed up young people's noses to the extent that they avoid that author forevermore. I really don't think that story was appropriate for my age group, back then.

.................

By the way, I've been out of the loop a while. I just noticed what thirdwind said. Is the term 'mentally challenged' the more acceptable term to use these days to describe a character like Benjy? Back in my day we said 'mentally retarded' without any perjorative connotation, but times change. (We used to say Indian instead of Native American or First Nations as well, and that has changed for the better.) Is mentally retarded a term nobody uses any more?

 

[MENTION=53222]jannert[/MENTION]: Thanks for mentioning Macbeth! I first read that in high school along with Romeo and Juliet, and while the latter I still don't really care for (it's good, don't get me wrong) Macbeth I thought was amazing. I'm now a big Shakespeare fan. I wonder why.

 

Ah, OK. I think for books like these it's important for the teacher to explain a lot of things and encourage discussion. I agree that it's a shame that literature like this is forced on students without proper explanation or guidance. Actually, this makes me wonder how many teachers understand books like these well enough to teach them.

I've heard people say that "retarded" is an offensive term. So I use "mentally challenged," which is the term I usually come across in articles or books.

 

Baltasar and Blimunda, by José Saramago. I didn't bother to read it during classes, not even for the school's final exams. However, I couldn't risk that much when I had to prepare for the Portuguese version of the SATs. I read it the day before and it was useless, because Saramago was completely ignored that year; they went for the classical poets. It still was the best forced read I had. At that point, he was already my favorite author, so I was (am) biased. I had even made a school presentation of his Blindness in 10th grade - it was memorable, with my speech synchronized with a PowerPoint presentation running automatically, some dramatic ambient music, then everybody but the teacher blindfolded, me randomly banging on the tables and saying stuff to make them feel exactly like the characters in the book... Yeah, I'll stop now. Glory days are gone.

 

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

 

Catcher in the Rye and Gatsby

 

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. 1984 by George Orwell. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest by Ken Kesey (cried like a little baby, I did). Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Night by Elie Wiesel.

 

Lord of the Flies, A Tale of Two Cities, Wuthering Heights and Silent Snow Secret Snow all made an impression on me that has lasted to this day. Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath were also memorable. I hated The Old Man and the Sea for some reason. And there are a dozen books I read that I can barely recall. The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, and The Great Gatsby are in that category.

 

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents!! It's a title of a play that I can never forget after taking it for 2-3 years, I'm not sure if it
was in high school or middle school though

 

You were forced to read Atlas Shrugged? Politics aside, that's like 12o0 pages! Really?

 

It was for an English Essay, that had a possible bonus of a scholarship being given to the best one. It was an optional thing, but it was still in my Sophomore or Junior year of high school. I got really bored in normal English class, so they liked to give me extra stuff to keep me occupied.

 

Middle school, but we had to read an excerpt of "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn." Got me hooked.