High School Reading List

Everyone basically read A Separate Peace at my school too.

The individual English teachers otherwise had some latitude for each class, but the other books I read for my English classes:

Billy Budd

The Scarlet Letter

Macbeth

Great Expectations

Romeo and Juliet

Saint Joan

The Crucible

Some of the Canterbury Tales

At our school the average English class had to read A Separate Peace. You're right, though, it seemed ubiquitous. The higher/AP people (such as myself) read Shakespeare and Dickens as you mentioned as well as Orwell, Huxley and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Things other kids at my high school read:

The Red Pony

East of Eden

Lord of the Flies

A Clockwork Orange

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (the ONLY book assigned written by a woman--and there were no books assigned by non-white authors)

1984

Daisy Miller

Huckleberry Finn

The Great Gatsby

The Scarlet Letter

The Metamorphosis

Siddhartha

Candide

A Million Little Pieces

Emma

Jane Erye

The Goldfinch

Little Woman

The amazing memories of you Eldergays.

I graduated less than 20 years ago and can't remember much--I know we read Catcher In The Rye in 8th grade, and Lord of the Flies in 7th, but that is about it. A bunch of Shakespeare, but I forget which ones were HS and which were college.

Dubliners and Sound and the Fury in 10th or 11th.

I'm sure I'll think of some more later.

Late 80s, Texas:

To Kill a Mockingbird

Silas Marner

The Scarlet Letter

Lord of the Flies

Of Mice and Men

The Jungle

Jane Eyre

1984

Shakespeare (Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth)

Multiple Shakespeare plays

Lord of the Flies

Of Mice and Men

The Guns of Navarone

Hearts of Darkness

Also before senior year Cujo was on my summer reading list. When school started there was this really hot guy who read it and we talked about it. I don't remember the discussion I just remember this really hot guy was talking to me.

Red Badge of Courage and Macbeth. That's all I can remember right now, as far as mandatory reading.

Read many of the titles already listed, but also:

Wuthering Heights

The Stranger

Tartuffe

Wuthering Heights Jane Eyre A Tale of Two Cities Of Mice and Men The Grapes of Wrath Romeo and Juliet The Merchant of Venice Hamlet The Great Gatsby The Old Man and the Sea The Color Purple Of course A Separate Peace An English teacher also introduced me to James Kirkwood's Good Times/Bad Times. As a ninth grader, the book was world changing for me. Full stop. Given that I went to a private Catholic school, it was pretty audacious for him to have suggested it. I guess he just knew. I went on to tear through all Kirkwood's other novels. I remember being distraught when he died of AIDS in the late '80s. My sister just rolled her eyes and said, "Are you surprised? What did you expect?" I'm still peeved at her for her callousness.

My 9th grader will be doing Macbeth, 1984, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and I forget the other ones. (She’s gonna love 1984).

My 10th grader did Antigone and Beowulf last year. This year she’s done Dante’s Inferno and Cyrano de Bergerac.

They go to two different NYC public schools. Guess which one is the elite??

And apologies for the above formatting. Those books should have all been on separate lines. Sigh.

1970s New England all-male prep school. We had trimesters and all English classes were electives, so we choose what course we wanted to take. Here are a few classes I remember:

Science Fiction: Stranger in a Strange Land, Illustrated Man, Rendezvous with Rama, Left Hand of Darkness, Dune

Women's Lit: To the Lighthouse, The Awakening, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Bell Jar, Rubyfruit Jungle, Wuthering Heights

New England Voices: Frost, Emerson, Alcott, Dickenson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville

Existentialism: The Stranger, The Fall, Rhinoceros, Nausea, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

19th Cent English Novel: Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess, Bleak House, Middlemarch

20th century English Novel 3: Passage to India, Horses Mouth, Heart of the Matter, Road to Wigan Pier

Russian Lit: The Brothers K, Ivan Denisovich, The Three Sisters, Cherry Orchard

99% of people who read A Separate Peace never realize it’s a gay love story.

I went to an all-girls boarding school and one year we had a teacher give us a Feminist Lit class. We read The Yellow Wallpaper, My Antonia, Herland, Mrs. Dalloway, The Bell Jar, stories of Kate Chopin, poems of Emily Dickinson, some others I’ve forgotten. We rolled our eyes at the time, but I appreciate it now.

i wonder what the average high school english reading list now is? how would it be the same or differ from years and decades past?

Seriously R14, how TF do you remember every book you read almost 50 years ago in high school?

Because that is one long and extensive list

What are your secrets?

I can tell you that R17-- much more emphasis on non-Western writers as well as people of color in the US

So less Faulkner and Dickens and Bellow and Salinger and more Chinua Achebe and Maya Angelou

I read so many books in high school I don't remember which were required. I wrote in another thread about reading Valley of the Dolls while in high school. A classic!

.......

Thank you Op. I think I was on the smart list.

R17, it also includes recent books like The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Life of Pi.

My niece, a 10th grader, just finished Tennyson's Idylls of the King and Elliott's Silas Marner. She just started Twelve Angry Men. Last year, I seem to recall a lot of Shakespeare.

OMG Billy Budd! I remember having to read that for my summer reading going into freshman year of high school.

I also remember having to read Siddartha, Farenheit 451, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth.

The absolute worst though was slogging through Joseph Andrews and Crime & Punishment sitting on the beach in Wildwood NJ doing summer reading

The Iliad. I hate it to this day.

We always had five books over summer vacation, and the first day of school we were given a test on content. It was a good way to learn not to procrastinate. I still have nightmares all these years later that it's time for the test, and I haven't read any of the five.

R18:

I remember much of that list because I kept many of the books. I've also re-read many of those books in my 50s. I liked Moby Dick, Thomas Hardy and The Brothers Karamazov much more as an adult that I did as a teen.

And I read A Separate Peace in Middle School -- along with the rest of the Prep School Canon (Butterfly Revolution, Catcher in the Rye, and Great Gatsby).

Some of the titles listed were taught at my junior high school. At the time JHS was 7-9 grades. I remember how much we loved A Separate Peace--weird for a LA school with all Latino and Asian students.

We had an entire year or at the very least, a semester of Shakespeare in high school. The teacher was an absolute Anglophile.

Don Quixote

Catcher in the Rye

To the Lighthouse

David Copperfield

Lord of the Flies

Dracula

Animal Farm

The Scarlet Letter

Huckleberry Finn

A Tale of Two Cities

The Good Earth

The Jungle

My favorite was 'Dracula'. I actually had do do a presentation on it, and I received applause (from the other boys in class).

The Canterbury Tales

Dante’s Inferno

Far From the Madding Crowd

R31, for years I thought “Madding” was “Maddening!”

Tales of the City

Brave New World

The Kite Runner

[quote]I went to a private Catholic school

Why do so many Catholic school students insist on putting "private" in front of it? Did they also have [italic]public[/italic] Catholic schools where you lived?

In my Catholic school, we read Shakespeare every year: 9th grade, The Merchant of Venice (we looked at its anti-Semitism); 10th grade, Romeo and Juliet (as the smallest boy, and the one most hated by the teacher, I was chosen to read Juliet, which was okay, as Mike A. was Romeo). We also read Anne Frank, Charles Dickens (TOTC, DC), Far from the Madding Crowd, and a considerable amount of poetry.

When I transferred to public school, I read Hamlet and Macbeth, Great Expectations, Silas Lapham, and Anne Frank's diary again. Also, The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre, Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott.

In regards to reading something by a black author: we read "Song of Solomon," by Toni Morrison. It was during the 11th grade, and it was pretty challenging for me to follow. Even the English teacher seemed to have difficulty following and explaining it to us.

Otherwise, we read most of the same books already mentioned on this thread.

Two that stand out because I hated them so much:

Dr. Zhivago - I have memories of this damn book ruining my vacation

Heart of Darkness (high school and college!)

Be honest, did you actually read the books 100%? I read some of the books listed in junior high and on my own. In high school though, I can't recall actually finishing any of the books assigned (barring Shakespeare's plays).

R34-it's a subtle difference in the type of Catholic school. A private Catholic school is more a tony prep school. A Catholic school is a step down academically where the focus is more on being good Catholics. It's elitist, to be sure, but there's the distinction.

Im like r6, I dont remember a lot of books I read in high school. The ones I hated I remember the most.

A Tale of Two Cities was the most boring required reading EVER, I used to look at the book and fall asleep. I totally used Sparknotes for that one. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson was another sleeping pill.

I read The Fountainhead cover to cover. I imagined Josh Hartnett, who was my crush at the time, as Howard Roark, and I got through that long ass book.