What’s a book (or books) you had to read for school that you actually ended up enjoying and/or still like today?

27 comments

1. Dracula by Bram Stoker

2. Frankenstein, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Middlesex.

3. All of the Shakespeare plays were fun.

4. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, it was tough to read but I had a fantastic teacher and she made analyzing the book an incredible experience. Same with Catch-22.

5. None, all the Dutch books were about WW2 , got to be very tedious, had to be literature books aka the most boring stuff ever

   All the english books, they were required from certain time periods and the list was very limited, the color purple was a good book, but cant say it was enjoyable due to the actual story, the absolute worst was the hobbit though, first book I never finished and i was a read-a-holic

6. The Giver

7. 1989 by Orwell

8. The Great Gatsby, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, and Lord of the Flies.

9. 1984 and Flowers for Algernon. Both just make me think profoundly about how we treat other people based on perceived power we have over them.

   Also a special mention for My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok. It was probably the first book I read about a person struggling internally with religion and it stuck with me.

   Oh! And Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese. There may be some controversary about the author’s claim to beating alcoholism, but it’s otherwise a really strong story about Canadian residential schools.

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11. A lot of them actually, I’m a nerd lol. There’s only like, 2 things I remember from school that I really hated

    But specifically I think I really enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird and The Scarlet Letter

12. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

13. I loved To Kill A Mockingbird, The Hatchet, and Lord of the Flies. Plus a lot of the Shakespeare.

    I also took a Film & Literature course my senior year in high school and got to read The Exorcist for that one. It let me use the C word in an actual paper! To complain about the use of it.

14. The Awakening

15. The Handmaids Tale.

    And a lot of young adult books: Where the Red Fern Grows, The Giver, Island of the Blue Dolphin, The Sign of the Beaver, Julie of the Wolves.

16. 1984, Animal Farm, To Kill A Mockingbird & Watership down I really enjoyed!

    I distinctly remember the summer I read Watership Down and it was the first time (other than Harry Potter) that I just feel so deeply into a book. I should reread!

    Adding The Giver-saw someone else comment it and I had totally forgotten about it, but so good!

17. 1984

18. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

19. All of the required reading. I love, and still reread, every single one. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, all the Shakespeare, Catcher in the Rye, Diary of Anne Frank, all that stuff.

20. The Hunger Games. Ended up buying the whole series later on (and then the prequel when it came out). Incredible writing and an amazing commentary on American society.

21. In German I loved anything we read from Kafka and Rilke. Loved Faust just for the sheer amount of cultural references that are still used today in Germany. It was just really cool to notice all of them. Loved Death in Venice.

    In English class I remember really liking The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1864, the poem Howl and White Teeth.

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23. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill.

24. All Quiet on the Western Front

25. I remember my class being assigned to read The Outsiders but it wasn’t the type of book I normally read. I didn’t expect to like it but it was really fantastic.

26. Tuesdays With Morrie

27. Few works of Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe and Popular Ancient Greek area authors,

    The outsiders, the glass castle,