The Next Best Book Club discussion

My mother has asked me to compile a list of classics that she should read, and I am starting with the standard High School fair. Please help me list all of the classic books that get read in high school! To be added to this list, you should have read the book in a class in high school... not for outside reading, or not things you think you should have read.

Here is my start! Lets do our best not to repeat!
1. Romeo and Juliet
2. Phantom of the Opera
3. Frankenstein
4. The Diary of Anne Frank
5. Midsummer Night's Dream
6. My Antonia
7. Julius Caeser
8. Oliver Twist
9. The Catcher in the Rye
10. The Great Gatsby
11. The Sun Also Rises
12. Walden Pond
13. "Song my Myself" (poem)
14. Adventures of Tom Sawyer
15. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
16. Grapes of Wrath
17. The Awakening
18. Hamlet
19. Paradise Lost
20. Tess of D'Urbervilles
21. Madame Bovary
22. The Dollhouse
23. Twelth Night
24. Macbeth
25. "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" (poem)
26. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (poem)
27. "A Tell-Tale Heart" (short story)
28. "Fall of the House of Usher" (short story)
29. "The Yellow Wallpaper" (short story)
30. To Kill a Mockingbird
31. The Scarlet Letter
32. Lord of the Flies
33. The Canterbury Tales
34. The Odyssey
35. 1984

In addition to some on your list, i was required to read

36. Beowulf
37. Taming of the Shrew
38. A Brave New World

39. Leaves of Grass
40. The Inferno
41. The Purgatorio
42. The Paradiso
43. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
44. The Red Badge of Courage

45. Great Expectations
46. Much Ado About Nothing

Hi!

Here are some of the books I read in high school:

47. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
48. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
49. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
50. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
51. Animal Farm by George Orwell
52. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
53. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
54. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
55. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
56. The Wars by Timothy Findley
57. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
58. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
58. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
59. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
60. The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence

Tale of Two Cities by Dickens.

66. Fahrenheit 451
67. Don Quixote

68. Black Boy by Richard Wright
69. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
70. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

71. Ordinary People

72. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley(read in conjunction with King Lear).
73. Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck

things fall apart

75. welcome to the monkey house- vonnegut
76. ethan frome- edith warton
77. the crucible
78. night- elie wisel
79. one flew over the cuckoos nest-kesey

memoirs of a geisha-golden
rita hayworth and the shawshank redeption- stephen king
the body-stephen king
(i'm not sure these are considered classics, but i read them in class)

i'm in high school now and it is weird to see what everyone else has read compared to me. i'm a senior and we hardly read any of the books you guys have mentioned

80. The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan
81. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
82. Watership Down by Richard Adams (although I loathe that book)
83. A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

I'm going to use this list for myself! Thanks to everyone for the contributions.

Adding a couple of popular ones not yet listed

84.The Merchant of Venice
85.Far from the Madding Crowd

86. A Hero of our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

87. The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy
88. Othello, by William Shakespeare
89. Antigone, by Sophocles
90. The Tempest, by William Shakespeare
91. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

I went to a rather old-fashioned school; we read nothing more modern than To Kill a Mockingbird.

(For my World Lit class)

92. The Golden Pot, E.T.A. Hoffmann
93. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez
94. Swann in Love, Proust
95. Phedre, Racine
96. Tartuffe & 97. The Miser both by Moliere
98. The Red and the Black, Stendhal
99. No Exit, Sartre

That's a lot of French people for a "World" Lit class.

Katie, you went to a cool school! (Though I also disliked Watership Down and put down Stranger in a Strange Land as soon as I saw dumbass religious explanations.)

100. In the Time of the Butterflies
101. Invisible Man
102. The Poisonwood Bible
103. The Things They Carried
104. Grendel
105. A Doll's House
106. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
107. Siddhartha

**I can't however, in good conscience recommend your mother read any of these, except "A Doll's House".

108. Oedipus Rex
109. Island of the Blue Dolphins
110. A Raisin in the Sun

Julie -- I think that recently the focus has moved a lot from reading the classics to reading books that will get students interested in reading and more modern classics. I noticed this as a general trend with my little sister who is currently a sophomore. She is 10 years behind me and she has been reading less classics and more popular/current books in school than I ever did since elementary school!!

When I was in highschool we read,

The Outsiders
The Red Badge of Courage
Can't remember the title but its the one where the boys school get stranded on a desert island and fight agaist eachother to gain control over the island, characters were Piggy(nickname),Jack I do remember not liking this book cause it was very violent. Let me know if anyone knows this title

The Lord of the Flies

All Quiet on the Western Front
The Book of Job
Mythology - Edith Hamilton

Kaion wrote: "That's a lot of French people for a "World" Lit class."
The other books we did (like Inferno, Sophocles' Theban Plays and Hamlet were already mentioned). We did a new author every two or three weeks so in total I think we read around 25 books and about a dozen poets (we had a selection of poems for them).

I remember reading Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse...why can't I remember too many of the others (besides a few that have already been mentioned)?

We also had some quirky teachers in our advanced English classes who had us studying, instead of Greek & Roman mythology, Mexican mythology.

Not sure how to number these, but to add to your list:
- Lord Jim
- Dubliners
- The Unvanquished
- Native Son

Also, we read a lot from those giant lit readers. Remember those? God, I hated those things. They were so heavy and you had to lug them around everywhere and I always seemed to leave it in my locker or at home when I really needed it. A few short stories I remember from those godawful textbooks:
- A Rose for Emily - Faulkner
- Paul's Case - Cather
- A Worn Path - Welty
- To Build a Fire - London

Also (sorry if there are any repeats):
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein (Yes, we read it in HS and loved it!)
- Dante's full The Divine Comedy
Plus, tons of Greek plays including:
- Aeschylus' Agamemnon, The Eumenides & Prometheus
- Sophocles' Antigone & Oedipus Rex
- Euripedes' Medea, The Children of Heracles & Orestes
- Aristophanes' The Clouds, The Birds & The Frogs

A Jest of God
The Diviners
Mrs. Mike
Lives of Girls and Women:A Novel
Two Solitudes
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
The Red Pony
King Lear
Death of a Salesman
A Streetcar Named Desire
The Old Man and the Sea
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
The Human Comedy
The Good Earth
Under Milkwood
.... Maybe you can tell from my list that I'm from Canada

Brenda, I was just going to comment that I could tell Jennifer was from Canada by reading her list, then noticed yours too, and then saw your note on that! I think the Margaret Laurence books give it away... ;)

You're right Stephanie... and the Hemingway, MacLennan, Atwood ...
Lots of Hemingway even though he was long gone from Canada by then.

Books I had to read at school
Death of a Salesmanby Arthur Miller
Sons and Loversby D.H. Lawrence
Animal Farmby George Orwell
Pygmalionby George Bernard Shaw
The Ghost of Thomas Kempeby Penelope Lively
The Great Gilly Hopkinsby Katherine Paterson
Laidlawby William McIlvanney
To Kill a Mockingbirdby Harper Lee
The Catcher in the Ryeby J.D. Salinger
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMHby Robert C. O'Brien
Hamletby William Shakespeare

Hamlet was the only one I liked!!!

Katie I had to look to see where you were from because we read the same short stories in school but you're not from MA-too funny!

In addition to those named by you all we also read:

The Pearl by Steinbeck
Demian by Hesse
Hedda Gabbler by Ibsen
Waiting for Godot by Beckett
Daisy Miller by James
A Farewell to Arms by Hemmingway
Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson

We also read a slew of short stories by Hemmingway, Faulkner, Welty, Cather, Poe

I'm sure there are ones I've forgotten but your lists did spark my memory. I had forgotten all about Antigone & Oedipus Rex

Rebecca
Old Man and the Sea
Canterbury Tales
Lots of poetry by Robert Frost
To Kill a Mockingbird
Pride and Prejudice
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
Little Women
Of Human Bondage
Tale of Two Cities
David Copperfield
Of Mice and Men
Red Badge of Courage
Lots of Shakespeare. Lots of Faulkner but I've blocked it from my memory.
The Good Earth.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Scarlet Letter
Ethan Frome

The only ones I have that haven't been mentioned are:
Anthem (might have been middle school)
Orlando (We got to choose our own classic, my sister was an english lit major, she gave me the recommendation)
The Cay (also might have been middle school)
White Fang

The only one I haven't seen on these lists yet, The Glass Menagerie

City Boy, Herman Wouk.
Equus, Peter Schaffer.
I also remember having to read a lot of Poe short stories my sophomore year - "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Black Cat", "Murders in the Rue Morgue", etc.
The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara.
Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, Bernard Edelman.
Expendables, Leonard B. Scott.
Beloved, Toni Morrison.

A book I read in high school that wasn't on the list (that I could see) was John Wyndham's The Chrysalids

Li wrote: "A book I read in high school that wasn't on the list (that I could see) was John Wyndham's The Chrysalids"
Ah, I read that one as well - forgot all about it.

Wow, so many books have been mentioned!
The ones I read for school are :
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo
The Master and Margarita byMikhail Bulgakov
Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin

A lot of what I read has already been listed but I also read Fifth Business and Desire Under the Elms.

We had a pretty sweet bookstore at my high school, actually. Two books of note that I bought there were Gone With the Wind and The Women's Room. I still have both original copies, believe it or not, and I graduated in 1981 so you know they're pretty old and tattered. Like me.

ETA, after reading El's post: Also, City Boy, and Henderson the Rain King, which were required summer reading. Sadly those copies have not survived though I do have a new copy of Henderson.

My senior year I was in AP English and our reading list was monstrous. Everything from parts of the Bible to Civilization and Its Discontents, with the horrid Moby Dick thrown in for extra torture. We had to buy (and read most of) The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, Volume 1: The Middle Ages through the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century and The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, Volume 2: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century, as well as other various books like I and Thou, The Denial Of Death, and Man's Search for Meaning.

Geesh Mary - my AP English was way better (and easier) than yours! That sounds like AP English for English majors!

It was ridiculous, frankly. I freely admit to lots of skimming and late-night cram sessions the night before class. No Cliff Notes, though--against our school's honor code, you see.

And was it worth it in the end?

I would have to say, yes. I really enjoyed the Greek plays, for example, and Gargantua and Pantagruel and Candide were hilarious. Up til then I hadn't really thought writings prior to the 20th century would have anything of interest to offer to a modern 80s chick like me, but, delightfully, I was wrong.

Excellent!

I still recall in AP English when we had to read, in one week, The Illiad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, Paradise Lost, and The Rape of the Lock. Man, what a week that was.

The Outcasts
Flowers for Algernon
The Tempest (a play, but still)
Foundation
A Clockwork Orange
Fahrenheit 451
The Hobbit
Animal Farm

Some more required reading that I'm sure haven't been mentioned yet (ctrl+f!):

Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
The Color of Water by James McBride
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
Silas Marner by Geroge Eliot
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Our Town by Thorton Wilder
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd