I was listening to a book podcast recently and they were talking about books they had to read for high school, or in the case of one of the hosts, didn’t read. I was absolutely terrible at actually reading assigned books in high school and Sparknotes was my best friend! It’s just a little ironic to me that someone who read so few of assigned books in school is such an avid reader now!
I blame this mostly on the fact that I can’t read things with confusing language, and as most of the things that we were assigned were classics, I did not understand what was going on in them. Also, I love fantasy and romance, two things that are barely represented in assigned reading.
For a lot of these, I did a mix of actually reading them and also reading the Sparknotes. For others, I can’t recall if I actually read it or I just remember talking about it and seeing the movie. I started 9th grade in 2009, so it’s been awhile. (brb, having a small existential crisis because I didn’t realize it’s been that long)
9th Grade
| Read | Didn’t Read |
| Animal Farm by George Orwell Red Scarf Girl by Ji-Li Jiang Brave New World by Aldous Huxley | Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The Odyssey by Homer |
Animal Farm definitely made the biggest impression on me because the ending messed me up! I also can’t stand The Odyssey to this day because I was just so confused the whole time.
10th Grade
| Read | Didn’t Read |
| The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee |
Did I only read one book this year to spite my teacher? Possibly, but she could have picked better books, so that’s on her. These are all “great American novels”, so let’s just say that’s not my genre. I remember I tried listening to the audiobook for Red Badge of Courage, but I kept falling asleep!
11th Grade
| Read | Didn’t Read |
| The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey The Metamorphosis by Fraz Kaufka Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguro The Stranger by Albert Camus | Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Walden by Henry David Thoreau |
I’m actually surprised that I read so many of these because when I think of this year, I can only dwell on the ones that I didn’t read because I hated them. My teacher was also awful so that didn’t help with my memory of that class.
12th Grade
| Read | Didn’t Read |
| Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Grendel by John Gardner | Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison King Leer by Shakespeare Beowulf Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolfe |
At this point, I’d had the teacher for this class two other times, so he probably knew that I wasn’t reading any of these. Jane Eyre ended up being my favorite from high school overall, possibly because the teacher taught it in a way that was interesting.
What books did you have to read in high school? I feel like my school didn’t teach some of the quintessential high school required reading, or I just didn’t take the classes that they were taught in.
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