What books were you assigned in High School English?

Tangentially related to my PhD research, but mostly out of my own curiosity, and given what a solid generational range we seem to have on this board, I'm curious to hear what books (novels, mainly, but plays and, what the hell, poems too, I guess) people were taught in high school? As memory serves, it went something like this for me:

Grade 9: Never Cry Wolf
Grade 10: Twelfth Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Grade 11: Macbeth, The Great Gatsby
Grade 12: Hamlet, Brave New World
Grade 13/OAC (fifth year that Ontario used to have for those going on to university): The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Slaughterhouse-Five, Obasan

A lot of those are (were?) high school standards, and a couple are definitely Canada-specific. Shakespeare aside, high school curriculum in the 90s was pretty clearly boomer-approved/influenced. A recent discussion that I was having with one of my profs who has a high school aged daughter revealed that this has changed somewhat--they were now doing things like Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone and Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, which I'm assuming have taken the place of some of the more boomer-y texts (by which I mean that I doubt that Shakespeare, or Gatsby, are going anywhere).

So, what did y'all read?

(also, my apologies if a similar thread already exists--hard to get very specific search results with keywords like "high school" and "English")

Shane
Of Mice and Men
Tale of Two Cities
Scarlet Letter
Julius Caesar
Billy Budd

Oh yeah, and fucking flowers for Algernon...

Flowers for Algernon is a bullet I am always grateful for having dodged.

I don't remember exactly which year each of these was in. I was in the last class which took OAC in Ontario.

Lord of the Flies
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Stone Angel
Fifth Business
Brave New World
1984
The Great Gatsby

Shakespeare:
Twelfth Night
Romeo and Juliet
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hamlet

I also remember doing a long paper on books of our choice in OAC English, where I read Camus's The Stranger, Sartre's Nausea, and Kafka's The Trial.

I recall none of the books I was assigned to read in high school. I am able to recall a few of the books I read on my own: Grapes of Wrath, Crime and Punishment, Hunger (Hamsun).

One I forgot: Animal Farm

I did my OAC independent research project on A Prayer for Owen Meany and Deliverance.

Gr 9-12 were all Gifted classes, if that makes a difference

Grade 9: The Taming of the Shrew, To Kill a Mockingbird, a whack of short stories and poems ("Harrison Bergeron" stands out in my mind and an Alice Munro one about high school girls - "Red Dress"? "Red Shoes"??), a unit on Greek mythology (I did a presentation on Hades and Persephone)
Grade 10: Animal Farm, A Tale of Two Cities, Romeo and Juliet, a unit on English Romantic poetry, a bunch of short stories and essays (Orwell's "Shooting the Elephant" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" stand out in my mind)
Grade 11: Macbeth, Canterbury Tales (excerpts at least), Who Has Seen the Wind? (we sort of covered this; I don't think I read the whole thing), short stories including Lawrence's "The Rocking Horse Winner"
Grade 12: Fifth Business, King Lear, Wuthering Heights, another unit on the English Romantics (I did a presentation where I compared Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" to Sonic Youth's "Shadow of a Doubt"), some essays including McLuhan (iirc) and a humorous thing by Woody Allen
OAC/Grade 13: Hamlet, A Man for All Seasons, The Great Gatsby

Grade 11 Writer's Craft: way too much poetry to remember; standouts include William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say", a bunch of e.e. cummings (including "somewhere i have never travelled gladly beyond"), some concrete poetry, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" again;

Independent studies:
Gr 9: Steinbeck - In Dubious Battle
Gr 11: Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Writer's Craft: Caron - Go-Boy!
OAC: dystopian novels: Rand - Anthem, Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451, Zamyatin - We

What are they reading these days? Graphic novels and shit?

I was in high school from 92-97 btw.

This is reminding me of how amazingly supportive my OAC English teacher was. She was fantastic and made me want to work hard on that paper.

My Gr 12 ISU was about the Lubicon Lake Cree. We just had to discuss some kind of contemporary issue instead of focusing on a book.

many of the things already mentioned plus john gunther's 'death be not proud', which was tedious

Oh yeah, I did The Grapes of Wrath for some earlier independent project.

My grade 11 poetry project was on Peter Gabriel, lol.

Grade 9 was still part of Junior High where I grew up (Alberta), but is included anyways. And in High School, for each grade we read a novel, a Shakespeare play, and some other play. And then there was also some short stories and poetry as well, but I don't really remember those as well.:

Grade 9: The Wild Children and A Midsummer Night's Dream
Grade 10: The Chrysalids, Romeo and Juliet, A Doll's House
Grade 11: Brave New World, Macbeth, The Glass Menagerie
Grade 12: Wuthering Heights, Death of a Salesman, Hamlet
And to fill up a few classes in Grade 11/12, I also remember us watching the films of The Joy Luck Club and Fried Green Tomatoes, because those books were also on the recommended reading lists for those grades.

Also I just found Alberta list of authorized novels for Grade 4-12, which appears to have not changed since 2005, and I graduated in 2003:
https://open.alberta.ca/publications/0778537994

Death of a Salesman is another one I forgot about.

Thanks a bunch for the link Marko! It hadn't occurred to me to seek out things like this (though I'm more at the just-out-of-curiosity stage of this; not sure whether any of this is going to make it into the dissertation).

Right, The Chrysalids, I did a project on that too.

I guess you lucky non-British fuckers never had to read any Thomas Hardy (who I would probably appreciate more nowadays tbh).

I actually discovered that list a few years ago when I was unable to remember what my Grade 9 novel study was, and when I simply asked other people, they gave me answers of books that were familiar, but I knew I n ever studied them. I don't think The Wild Children is a particularly well known book, but was probably chosen due to it relating to Grade 9 Social Studies, in which we learned about the Soviet Union. Wouldn't be surpised if there's similar lists out there for other places.

Also finding it odd that quite a few people in this thread seem to be Canadian.

Of Mice and Men
Emma
Death of a Salesman
Hamlet

are the ones I remember

The Catcher in the Rye is another I forgot about. That was an assigned reading in probably grade 10.

It is weird to realize how mid-20th-century the curriculum was.

I have a terrible memory for these things, but I do remember:
Macbeth
A midsummer nights dream
The mayor of Casterbridge
A view from a bridge
Huckleberry Finn
There was an anthology of poetry and I remember a seamus Heaney poem about the troubles which appeared as an exam question which is probably responsible for me getting a decent grade in gcse english lit.

Also finding it odd that quite a few people in this thread seem to be Canadian.

It is weird to realize how mid-20th-century the curriculum was.

Neither of these things seem weird to me, given our ages and the OP.

I just hadn't thought about it. We didn't read any Romantics or Victorians, as far as I can recall. Very little pre-WW2 fiction, and nothing later than about 1970.

Another Canadian reporting in:

The Catcher in the Rye
The Great Gatsby
The Outsiders

Can't quite recall the others. I went to a French-language high school, though (in Montreal).

9th through 11th grade are mostly blank except for:
9th - Ethan Frome, Romeo & Juliet

10th - An Enemy of The People, Julius Caesar

11th AP American Lit - Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Scarlet Letter, Gatsby, can’t remember this year’s Shakespeare project

12th AP World - Crime & Punishment, The Metamorphosis, The Stranger, Dante, Milton, a Greek play (maybe Oedipus?), Things Fall Apart, got to choose our own Shakespeare and I went with Much Ado

until 12th grade, just a few things each year: among them Huck Finn, Macbeth, Old Man & The Sea, Lord of the Flies,

in 12th grade: Gulliver's Travels, Hamlet, Crime and Punishment, the book of Job (KJV), Wuthering Heights, The Sound and the Fury, Othello, King Lear, The Return of the Native, Invisible Man, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, The Great Gatsby, The Stranger, The Sun Also Rises, As I Lay Dying

(a lot of Southern American lit b/c I was in the American South. rather little in translation.)

& probably more. we read about one novel per week it seemed. we also read a lot of poetry, from some kind of anthology. we read A LOT. I loved it, went to university thinking I'd double in math & English, but my uni English class was way less interesting & I soon realized that philo was what I was really looking for.

my daughter finished her high school literature curriculum last year here in France & (shockingly) read mostly French literature: Céline, Baudelaire, Zola, Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, lots of Hugo, Camus, Sartre, Molière, Racine, Voltaire, de Laclos. nothing by women iirc which she detested

like me she'll go to uni thinking to study both letters & something scientific, probably (like me) computer science & math

That’s a great list

I had teachers telling me that I should read philosophy because I was reading existentialists. I didn't until 1st year in university when we read Phaedrus, which got me hooked.

The ones I remember:

A Separate Peace
Hamlet
Light in August
1984
The Great Gatsby
To Kill a Mockingbird
Grapes of Wrath
Lord of the Flies
The Odyssey
The Merchant of Venice
The Mayor of Casterbridge
The House of the Seven Gables
East of Eden
an abridged War and Peace :P

Also, some great short stories come to mind: Sonny’s Blues, That Evening Sun, A&P, For Esme with Love and Squalor.

Romeo and Juliet
Goodnight Mr Tom
Hamlet
How Many Miles to Babylon?

I'm sure there were more, but that's all I remember. The idea of one novel per week (or something approximate) would have given me nightmares.

Grew up in England. All I remember us reading were To Kill a Mockingbird and Romeo and Juliet. We watched the movie of Lord of the Flies.

I'm surprised at the long lists here.

Grew up in Ohio USA
these are the ones I remember:

A Separate Peace
Romeo and Juliet
The Crucible
The Great Gatsby
The Scarlet Letter
Julius Caesar
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been (Joyce Carol Oates short story that got made into a movie starring Laura Dern iirc?)
Rape Fantasies (short story we had to read in senior comp for reasons unfathomable to me at the time but now I get it)

I'm 100% sure there were others but I don't remember them because it was a very long time ago

I remember in Spanish class we read a play called Yerma as well as some other classics, selections from Don Quixote etc

11 ??
12 Cider With Rosie
13 Z For Zachariah, The Chrysalids
14-15 Hamlet, An Inspector Calls, Of Mice & Men

All I can remember is K. M. Peyton's Flambards, it's almost like they were committed to an anti-reading campaign at my school. I stole The Trial from my school library and got bored 1/4 way through it, and reverted to Stephen King. I stole some Nietzsche from W H Smiths and found him a boring prick as well.

Great thread! Went to HS in the late aughts & early teens on the East Coast. I know I left a few out that I can't remember, the last novel we read in 9th grade is killing me, on the tip of my tongue. Anyway:

9th Grade
Persepolis
Macbeth
A Raisin in the Sun
Silas Marner

10th Grade
The Catcher in the Rye
The Great Gatsby
Othello
The Things They Carried
Our Town
Their Eyes Were Watching God

11th Grade
Celia, A Slave
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
The Scarlet Letter
Walden & Civil Disobedience
The Turn of the Screw
Henry VIII
The Metamorphosis
Being There
Pride and Prejudice
Wuthering Heights
Hard Times
Howard's End

12th Grade
Hamlet
The Problems of Philosophy
No Exit
Black Boy
Invisible Man

this is just novels obviously, not counting textbooks or short stories

oh yeah What is the What was our summer reading between 11th & 12th grade.

+ My Ántonia in 11th grade. that was one of my favorites

I swapped schools at A-Levels and did English Lit at university, which meant I somehow studied Mayor of Casterbridge *three* times.

I like Hardy but that is Too Much Hardy.

summer...reading...?

Crime and Punishment
A Separate Peace
Silas Marner
Howards End
Romeo and Juliet
The Crucible

the great gatsby
the pearl
huckleberry finn
great expectations
hard times

8th: To Kill a Mockingbird, Midsummer Night's Dream, House on Mango Street

9th Oedipus Rex, Manchild in the Promised Land, Thousand Years of Solitude, Autobiography of Malcolm X, Othello, Native Son, and short stories by Faulkner, Chandler, Toni Cade Bambara, Maya Angelou and Zora Neale Hurston. We also read an AMAZING book written by an African author I cannot remember, about witchcraft/curses and a pair of villages who were trying to bring each other to ruin with revenge killings. <– Basically the best 9th grade reading list ever, with an incredible teacher who p. much changed the entire trajectory of my entire life

10th Oedipus Rex (again), Midsummer Night's Dream, Great Gatsby, Macbeth, 1984

11th Huck Finn, Invisible Man, Scarlet Letter, As You Like It, Hamlet

12th Encounters with the Archdruid, Oedipus Rex (again again), Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, The Odyssey, A Good Man is Hard to Find, A Thousand Acres, King Lear, Heart of Darkness, <– basically the antithesis of my awesome freshman year. Horrid teacher with a blond mustache like a pushbroom, real-life friend of acknowledged racist David Mamet, who hated me after I asked him (on the first day, when looking at the syllabus) 'do we read anything by black authors?' and he answered 'Conrad and Kipling both deal with minorities.'

I think the only novel we read in high school was Lord of the Flies. We did Hobson's Choice, Billy Liar, and plenty of Shakespeare too. I don't think they could have made us read 4 novels a year if they tried.

If one of our guileless English teachers would have shown us all the Hobson's Choice movie, it might have encouraged at least a few of us not to become heroin addicts, alcoholics and serial killers:p

9th i only have the vaguest memory of even having 9th grade english, this may have been 8th
1984
romeo and juliet

10th
a separate peace
a midsummer night's dream
my antonia
huckleberry finn
the crucible

11th
lord of the flies
beowulf
great expectations
macbeth

12th
the great gatsby
a raisin in the sun
othello
???

we had somehow gotten a recommended extra reading list that i wish i still had. i read a lot of stuff on it and liked it so much better than the class books.

I had a similar Shakespeare experience as the poster above: We were reading Taming of the Shrew aloud and I was daydreaming until it was my turn and my first line was "Sir, give him head."

*similar to* — obviously less daydreaming would have been beneficial

I'm old so I can't really remember. I was in honors English all through HS as it was my thing at the time. It was an all-girls Catholic HS. What I do remember was getting yelled at by a nun when she saw me pull "On the Road" out of my bag. She told me it was a bad book and that I shouldn't be reading it.

It's bugging me so much that I can't remember that I've just messaged a HS friend to help.

Oh we definitely read Gilgamesh in 9th grade and also Night.

We had to do some independent reading project my sophomore year where we read at least a thousand pages of one author's work and I did a report on Kerouac

Sr. Pat would not have approved.

middle school (5th - 8th grade):

The Phantom Tollbooth
King Arthur (don't remember which version)
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Romeo and Juliet
The Giver (by far my favorite)
Lord of the Flies
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
The Good Earth
A Separate Piece
Things Fall Apart

forgetting a few...

― flappy bird, Monday, October 30, 2017 1:59 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh I think we read most of these in middle school + Pygmalion, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds, and the Chocolate War which had a scene about jerking off and that was a pretty awkward discussion. Oh and Flowers for Algernon!

"my antonia"

holy shit I hated reading that in college. it isn't even very long but it felt like it took forever. I can't imagine suffering through it in high school.

― akm, Sunday, October 29, 2017 9:58 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh yes, this was in there too somewhere. Think I suppressed that one.

Summer reading going into 9th grade was Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

What's high school, age wise

14 - 18 or thereabouts

Oh, sorry so, but I was probably drunk

I think I drank maybe twice throughout all high school, wasted years

13-17 for me but I was always literally the youngest in my class (12/28 birthday)

Yeah, reading through reminded me of a couple more. Must have suppressed these. I was not drunk.

The Heart of Darkness
The Stranger

I'm really struggling to recall any assigned reading in HS apart from year 12 (final year) advanced English. I know that year for specifically on the exams, we studied:
Shakespeare Measure for Measure, Othello and MacBeth
Poetry: Gwen Harwood, Robert Lowell
Pride and Prejudice (didnt even read this, passed my exam anyway somehow lol)

In earlier years I know we did obvious stuff like Mockingbird, of Mice and Men, Z for Zacharia was another early one I recall, but I read for fun so much its all a big blur now. I mean I was reading stuff like "She" by H rider Haggard when I was 12 because some family friend gave it to me as a present (why, ffs).

A few more that I don’t think I’ve seen yet just drifted up to the surface:
Henry James, Washington Square and “The Real Thing”
James Thurber, “The Catbird Seat”
Ernest Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”

why the fuck did a dense, etiolated thing like "The Real Thing" make every anthology

Good question

9th grade: to build a fire, smells like teen spirit, whatever we chose for our self-directed pre-high-school summer reading which in my case included the hot zone, norman mailer's the prisoner of sex, and half a dozen reviews of the movie adaptation of angela's ashes. did fine on that assignment but flunked the class anyway

10th grade: demoted to standard-track english; we analyzed the body language in friends. all my smart kid buddies were doing the odyssey i think

11th: back in honors b/c of the insights i exhibited into friends. frankenstein, heart of darkness, the woman warrior by maxine hong kingston.

12th: remember nothing from this at all except that you could get a late essay accepted if you wrote a second essay explaining the lateness of the first essay, so i put most of my effort into those. school sucks

i don't recall that we covered any poetry at all

We must have read a bit more than I said upthread since it was on the AP.

Did anyone else read Henry IV, Pt. 1? Didn’t notice

i had to write a paper about edna st vincent millay and it was painful
i hated every minute of that experience

year 9, our class was supposed to read To Kill
a Mockingbird
but they decided we would be the guinea pigs in a pilot program to read a local author instead
so WE read Displaced Person by Lee Harding
about a teenage boy who felt ignored & one day discovered that he had ~disappeared~ into a limbo realm

it was the WORST thing
we all hated it
even our teacher hated it
we wrote stories about the dumb guy living in limbo with all the socks & coins & bobby pins that went missing down the back of the couch

ugh

the worst

I recall asking my year 12 3U english teech why we couldnt do Plath (lol shut up) and he went all angry and said he hated her.

Found out a bit later that he was actually a trained maths teacher and knew fuck all about English/Lit.

My friend came through with one I’d forgotten - The Awakening - and I remembered The Yellow Wallpaper.

they say 'maths' in england bc they have so many of them. thousands of unknowable maths. and they say 'sport' bc they just have quidditch

— merritt k (@merrittk) October 23, 2017

Macbeth (twice)
Hamlet
Hating Alison Ashley (Australian YA book)
The Hobbit
Of Mice and Men
The Kraken Wakes
Z for Zachariah
Lord of the Flies
To Kill a Mockingbird
That Eye the Sky

9th grade: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Great Expectations, the Odyssey, Animal Farm, Pygmalion, the Lottery, lots more myth stuff and short stories I can’t remember

10th grade: Doctor Faustus, Siddharta, The Stranger, Brave New World, No Exit, Catcher In The Rye, 1984, Notes From Underground, Jane Eyre, Salinger short stories, Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, maaaaaybe the Merchant of Venice and definitely some Chekhov.

11th grade: The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald shorts inc Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Hiawatha, The Grapes of Wrath, Yellow Wallpaper (this was American Lit year, can’t remember much/awful teacher).

12th grade AP: Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Nausea, Death in Venice, Wuthering Heights, Medea, sonnets of Shakespeare, one independent book meaning: fighting with teacher about Dorian Gray being a major work for a month, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (LOL it’s as if AP English teacher went ‘where are the women’ and quite right too).

same for 11th grade. forgot about Bernice Bobs Her Hair, hated that one. hated that whole year! Natty Bumppo sucks. I don't know why they make kids read this shit, it is so boring and illuminated exactly nothing worthwhile about the American experience for me.

also read Animal Farm in 9th gr

that was harsh, i think i just hated all of 11th gr tbh

oh man "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," which I also read in high school, was one of the few that seemed to reflect the experiences of actual high schoolers.

because my 8th grade teacher hated me she didn't recommend me for honors english in HS, so I was in with kids who could barely read. The class was taught by the golf teacher (why was there a golf team in souther colorado? I don't know) who was completely checked out. We read 2 plays the ENTIRE year, one of them being Life with Father, which I'm positive was picked only because it was in the ancient textbook they gave him. Kids tried to stammer their way through it for months out loud. It was toture. He gave me special dispensation to leave the class and go sit in the library most of the time. I left Colorado after that and when I got to California was properly tracked into the non remedial classes.

high school was 1972-76 (sigh) so I only remember a few: Huck Finn in 9th grade, 10th grade a total blank, 11th grade Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, where I fell in love w/Shakespeare's sonnets, 12th grade a great anthology of short stories and novellas, can't remember title, included One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich and Bellow's Carpe Diem.

oh just remembered reading Antigone by Sophocles in between prelims and finals of a swimming meet during 10th grade

oh we did Antigone, too

Is there a more depressing book than Ethan Frome to foist upon kids, is what I want to know

Finnegans Wake & the Twits probably.

Year 7 - Danny the Champion of the World, Fire in the Stone, Sun on the Stubble

Year 8 - Playing Beattie Bow, Bridge to Terabithia

Year 9 -Julius Caesar, Romeo & Juliet, The Outsiders, Of Mice & Men

Year 10 - The Chosen? Great Expectations?

senior year 11-12 (I took English literature but we also had standard English too i think?)Jane Eyre, Great Gatsby, Sylvia Plath poetry, Macbeth, Elli, The Crucible, Taming of the Shrew, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

pretty sure we did That Eye The Sky at some point, but dunno when

9th grade I remember a lot of non-Western literature - Nectar in a Sieve, Things Fall Apart, The Sound of Waves. We also didn't have a real teacher for two months or so and I mostly remember the sub showing us Barefoot Gen.

The class was taught by the golf teacher (why was there a golf team in souther colorado? I don't know) who was completely checked out.

lol we hate school so much, what a shitty country

Oh yeah my high school was terrible. It was also the only school you could go to if you lived in my town. There's no school choice in the country.

I don't know why they make kids read this shit, it is so boring and illuminated exactly nothing worthwhile about the American experience for me.

also read Animal Farm in 9th gr

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Tuesday, October 31, 2017 1:04 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So dire.

I think my favorite high school lit anecdote came during college:

Of the essays we had to write on books we read on our own, we had one list that included Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which was excellent. For those who haven't read it, the narrator is never named, but toward the beginning when he introduces himself he says "You can call me Jack the Bear." I found out one of my classmates had written his entire report referring to the narrator, every time, as "Jack the Bear."

I wish I'd done that!

We had American lit in 10th grade, wherein we read Huck Finn but maybe no other novels. But we read a LOT of Southern short stories, Faulkner and Welty and O’Connor, like dozens by those three, and it was great! the American south is generally a terrible place but for lit it’s >>> the north

in the north we learned about freedom

yeah, the Jonathan Franzen book

Required reading at ALL east coast high schools

glad I got out of school before the Franzen era

lol i was jk BUT I do remember Freedom being prominently displayed in the school library when it came out at the start of my senior year

Gerald Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins. Aargh. This typo has been eating at me. Should blame it on autocorrect, but what happened was, believe it or not, I remembered it correctly but then decided to fact-check myself and misread what I googled (or did I?). Between the thought and the expression.