ITT: High school English curriculum reading that was actually good

>>9727468
Catcher in the Rye

>>9727468
10th grade we read Being and Time. It was dope.

Beowulf
Macbeth
Romeo and Juliet
An Enemy of the People
Lord of the Flies
Some Pound, Dickens
Epic of Gilgamesh
The Things they Carried

Basically everything junior year and after was pretty great

>>9727487
What kind of school did you go to? That seems amazingly advanced.

>>9727468
King Lear, Passage to India, 1984, Citizen Kane.

All of it i tell you shamelessly.

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>>9727468
Brave New World is fucking awful. It's okay as a political work (even though Huxley later went off the deep end with that Indian voodoo shit), but it's not literature.

Anyways, pic related.

>>9727512
Frankford High School. We went through all the German Idealists. It's really not advanced material tbqh.

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In Australia we had to read shit australian YA and very few classics. I only discovered my love for literature and philosophy a year into my CompSci degree after a lot of psychedelic use and changed to a BA.
Not all Australian schools are like this, i was just in a very poor town and half my school were aboriginal. (Not being racist, it just meant the focus was more on keeping us out of bad shit than getting us in to good shit)

>>9727523
This was my choice. I hated it at the time but after a while for some reason it grew on me. Really wanna reread it.

>>9727523
Fitzgerald is trash and so are you

Beowulf, Grendel, The Things They Carried, Brave New World, Things Fall Apart would be my pics.

>>9727534
i also went to school in a shitty small town (replace coons with fetal alcohol syndrome babies) and we didnt do any books. just movies.

My English teacher had me read Animal Farm instead of choosing between Brave New World or 1984. I liked it a lot and intend to re-read it soon.

Heart of Darkness
Crime and Punishment
Hamlet
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Moby Dick

>>9727637
>read C&P and Moby Dick in highschool
Not sure whether to call you a liar, or feel bad for you.

>>9727644
They would have been hell, but I had two really great AP English teachers for my junior and senior years. Going through those books with that level of intensity and something like 5 papers each gave me a level of respect and understanding for literature I probably never would have had otherwise.

>>9727644
Not that guy, but AP english 4 read C&P at my high school.
>tfw was in regular english since 10th grade
I am kind of glad. I would have had too many opportunities to share my edgy teenage boy beliefs during the discussions.

>>9727468
I never had to read this for high school. I think I got so annoyed at the fact that I didn't have to read it that I picked it as my summer reading homework so that I could finally read it.

>>9727659
oh shit, that name was left over from another thread.

>>9727676
Wow, is that true though? I wanna find out.

Damn, it is. About fucking time. Wonder when that changed.

Hamlet
Great Gatsby
Charlotte's Web
Death of a Salesman

>>9727468
I didn't really like BNW. I'm not sure why.

The only book I enjoyed at school was The Crucible, and that's a play not even a novel.

>>9727468
>tfw spic and read Cortázar's Hopscotch in 9th grade and didn't enjoy it one bit

am I just retarded or regular teens probably aren't supposed to read this at that age?

Odyssey and Emily Dickinson.

>>9727696
I didn't really like 1984. It's fine and I agree with the point, but it just came off pretty boring all around to me.

>>9727754
BNW had too little character development in my opinion. Everyone was really one-dimensional and I guess that would be okay if the book was more obviously satirical, but it took itself pretty seriously especially the ending. I haven't finished 1984 yet.
>inb4 pleb because I haven't already read it

>>9727784
BNW is a prolonged thought experiment, not so much a narrative or character study (which 1984 is). Huxley builds up the negative and positive elements of both the savage lands and the utopian society, and then asks you to choose one with full knowledge of the outcome.

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>Some of the world's greatest minds come together to build a monument in celebration of human progress
>serial killer subplot
>(ostensibly) nonfiction

Fun read

>>9727794
In that case interesting characters aren't necessary. I never thought of it like that.

>>9727799
>>/pol/

>>9727797
On close observation, 1984 has no interesting characters either. It is a character study, but only of the most middlebrow average person Orwell could invent, and the observation of his reactions inside a political, crowbarred-together dystopia.
Orwell was, I believe, unconfident that people would understand the horror of his world had he not injected a living anachronism into it for them to relate to. More interesting a narrative would be to take a true denizen of that society, follow their lives and let the audience draw its conclusions organically (which Huxley attempted, albeit with limp wrists, in BNW).
1984 loses its bite when you're already familiar with the horror.

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>>9727696
It's been quite a few years since I read through BNW, but I remember hating the middle section/final conversation. Made it seem like Huxley gave up and said "ok, here is the point" But then again it has been a while, so my opinion might have changed.

>>9727702
Everyone hated that in my class, not sure why. It was short, easy to understand, had controversial stuff, all great for slackers. But you'd probably have to at least attempt to read it to figure that out

>>9727512
>That seems amazingly advanced
Pfffft, we had to read the Summa Theologica untranslated in 7th grade over Christmas break.

A Streetcar Named Desire
Macbeth
A Doll's House
Woman at Point Zero
Beowulf
Of Mice and Men

Most books read in high school are really good, the problem is that the "analysis" we are taught is mostly shitty and gets in the way of actual enjoyment. When you actually read the books on your own, different things pop out at you.

>1984 in class: this is a book about surveillance!
>when reading 1984 on my own: this book is really about the inversion of truth...winston's internal monologue is fascinating.....I love how the scene where he and Julia are in the woods is so much more colorful by contrast to the rest of the story

>great gatsby in class: this book is about the roarin' 20s and the american dream
>reading it on my own: almost every line is just breathtakingly beautiful prose..this book is about nostalgia, endless longing, and desiring something that is always just out of reach...favorite scenes are when nick is walking among the "lonely metropolitan twilight" or when gatsby and daisy kiss "during the strange excitement that comes from the two changes of the year"....

etc....The messages that our teachers drill into us, tend to be the most bland official interpretations imaginable.

>>9727468
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

>>9727468

Portrait
Crime and Punishment
Heart of Darkness
Wuthering Heights
Grapes of Wrath
The Odyssey

>>9727563
>Fitzgerald is trash and so are you
>Brave New World
>The Things They Carried
>Things Fall Apart
>>>/r/eddit is that way

>>9727892
my teacher focused more on what you are talking about for the gatsby when he taught it.

>>9727523
>it's not literature

If you don't think BNW is an example of literature, what would you define as literature? Because apparently from what you're saying Oxford's "Written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit" is all kinds of wrong.

On the thread's topic: Brave New World, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Macbeth, Hamlet, Beowulf, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Paradise Lost, and The Canterbury tales are the ones that stick out as far as high school goes.

Most of the usual high school books we didn't read in my classes because my profs didn't like them and chose alternatives. Did Julius Caesar instead of Romeo and Juliet for example.

Shout out to one of my crazy elementary school teachers that was a poet that read us the Wrinkle in Time series in grade 3 or 4. Most of the class didn't listen but for the few of us that listened and understood bits here or there had our minds blown. I remember her trying to explain what a tesseract was by drawing it on the board. It was so strange.

>>9727468
Honestly imo most of high-school-english-core is actually pretty good. It's just that the education varies from "eh" to "god fucking awful", and what genuinely awful books are included in the curriculum are enough to kill interest in reading books, especially when having to read them on tight schedules (for the average teenager).

>>9727468
>ctrl-f The Jungle
>no results
I've unironically read it three times.

>>9728136
My history teacher took a fetishistic pleasure in describing every detail of this book, his eyes were always red and bulging with excitement as he saw the class recoil in disgust.

He also replayed the Kennedy assassination 12 times in class With close ups and slow mos with equal excitement, so take that as you will

>the sound and the fury
>A portrait of the artist as a young man
>The grapes of wrath
>Their eyes were watching good
>Moby dick

High school AP English was lit

>>9727922
Is this copypasta or new

>>9727962
A Wrinkle in Time was required reading for me in 4th grade. The tesseract concept in the book had nothing to do with the square in a square tesseract desu.

>>9728313
Brand new

Were all of you in my highschool english class?
Who decided we were all going to read these books and are they guilty of social engineering?

The Stranger
Siddhartha
Brave New World
The Jungle
Animal Farm
Fahrenheit 451

Books I didn't like much but I can see their merit
Their eyes were watching God
Grapes of Wrath
Shakespeare
The Crucible

>>9727468
>watching my classmates defend the world of BNW
wew lad

Animal Farm
Night
Old Man and the Sea
To Kill a Mocking Bird
Catcher in the Rye
Great Gatsby
Lord of the Flies
Hamlet
The Crucible

We did Frankenstein, Of Mice and Men, Othello, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, as well as McBeth in my after school drama class. Also did Holes as part of a unit on children's books, which wasn't to bad for what it was.

>>9728921
my teacher wouldn't let us read to kill a mocking bird because it was her favourite book and didn't want any of us to dislike it. Got to read Great Expectations instead tho and that was dope.

>>9727503
the things they carried was good. also the remains of the day and catcher in the rye

The Metamorphosis. Most people kept asking why poor Gregor was turned into a bug but I liked it.

We had to read books written by islanders in my school.

>>9727468
As a German, the English works we got to read were mostly interesting (although not very advanced) while the German works were absolutely uninspiring colour-by-numbers garbage (Emilia Galotti; Irrungen, Wirrungen etc.)
Pretty jealous of the posts here.

Why did all of you also read non-english literature in English class?
Didn't they teach you other languages or something?

>>9729180
Are you referring to Beowulf?

Pretty much everyone studies that in school here in Britain. It's written in English, just an older form of English

>>9728608
Federal education bureaucrats. Yes, but honestly a lot of the material picked is great when you consider what most teens want to read.

>>9729180
No, I mean stuff like metamorphosis, Crime and Punishment, the stranger.
We read Beowulf too for English, just transliterated with the old text next to it.

>>9727523
>I don't like it so therefore it's not literature

>>9727702
I felt like my experience with The Crucible was totally ruined because despite being in an AP class, my English course was full of people who could not fucking read out loud.

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Freshman Year: Romeo and Juliet
Sophomore Year: Lord of the Memes for the 3rd time and To Kill Mockingbird, which we didn't even get to finish and had the ending spoiled to us so the teacher could show us the movie
Junior Year: Read the textbook
Senior Year and AP Lit/English: Lord of the Memes again, Hamlet for the 6th fucking time, and Frankenstein
tell me /lit/, my high school was fucking trash, wasn't it?

>>9727523
BMW had some interesting ideas but overall I think it lacked in plot development. I remember losing interest because the story was all over the place.

>>9729678
>To Kill Mockingbird, which we didn't even get to finish and had the ending spoiled to us so the teacher could show us the movie
What school did you go to?

>>9729688
This, BNW's ideas will also be more and more important as the age of UBI approaches, but the characters were poorly written, the prose was average at best, and the world-building isn't anything to write home about.

>>9729214
I hated this in high school. Reading plays was always such a fucking chore, especially for the students that regularly took part in plays.

I did drugs through high school. There was one teacher who had a doctorate in poetry and taught British Literature as a way to study the history of civilization through the literary record. His was the only class I took seriously, I loved the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and translating the Lord's Prayer from Old English was fun exercise.

I feel like over-analysis before you even begin reading can ruin the experience. Before we even STARTED reading Animal Farm, for instance, we had to learn all about the allusions to Soviet Russia and who each animal represented. Why not just let us read the story, have our own conclusions, then tell us more about the symbolism?

>>9729696
Centennial, Las Vegas

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In High School we had to read The Fountainhead AND Atlas Shrugged (the former junior year, the latter senior).

fuckin Texas man.

How about highschool /lit/ you HATED?

>The Turn of the Screw
>Their Eyes Were Watching God
>The Awakening
>The Glass Castle
>The Unvanquished (definitely need to re-read though, didn't have an appreciation for Faulkner)
>A Movable Feast (also need to re-read, they had us read this before any other Hemingway)
>The Scarlet Letter
>The Great Gatsby
>Great Expectations

>>9729909
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Fucking awful

>>9729909
>The Turn of the Screw
reevaluate yourself.

>>9729909
>Great Gatsby
>Great Expectations
>bad

Neck yourself.

>>9729909
HOLES

>>9727853
bitch please, when i was 12 our /lit/ teacher made us read El Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha in the original ancient Spanish(even today is a pain in the ass to read such a mess even being antive speaker and reading everyday)

>>9727962
>BNW
>Reveal the entire plot on the 1st chapter
>literature

k

Does the US reading curriculum actually get people to read after High School?

>>9730114
I had to read that in High School, as well as Sarah's Key. They were okay but Sarah's Key ending was fucking bullshit.

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>all these good books anons read in highschool
My high school curriculum was pretty much just Orwell's stuff and a bunch of civil rights books. They weren't bad but it's just a slog to go through the same civil rights period every year for English class

>>9729909
>hated The Awakening
baka desu senpai

I had a literal heroin addict teacher for AP Lit during my senior year. She got fired after a semester, but analyzing poetry and talking about music with her was the bomb.

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I don't even remember what we had to read.

High school just went past in a flash, and I wasn't even there for the most part.

>>9730769
My sophomore English teacher was a pill popper and got fired the year after I had her for stealing money from the cheerleading fund. She had us read a bunch supernatural/weird fiction type stuff like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, The Monkey's Paw, The Lottery, etc. Total milf and now I'm kind of sad thinking about it.

War and Peace and Fahrenheit 451 were both good. Also grapes of wrath.

>>9727534
>and half my school were aboriginal

I'm not trying to /pol/-up this thread, but how was this?

Robinson Crusoe

>>9730235
bitch please, when i was a fetus in my mothers womb i listened to the audiobook of Thus spoke Zarathustra, that shit was dope

>>9727523
>indian voodoo shit
You're a fucking retard, I hope you know

L'Etranger, Anna Karenina and 1984 were all pretty comfy.

>>9727534
Went through something kind of similar here in Scandinavia. Only after High School did I start to become interested in lit and philosophy.

>>9729909
I don't think anybody in my classes enjoyed either Steinbeck or Miller novels yet our teachers all fucking loved them.

>>9727503
What the fuck man. In Canada we read The Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird, so much for making fun of Burger education.

My favorite year of English was Freshman year. I have a feeling my former teacher browses this board.

>Gilgamesh
>The Odyssey
>The Divine Comedy
>The Metamorphoses
>Mahabharata
>The Apology of Socrates
maybe a few smaller works as well, can't recall

I don't think anyone in the class really understood what we were reading, but it served as a gateway to find out for ourselves. He certainly sparked my passion for literature, and for that I am eternally grateful.

>>9731587
To be fair a lot of my classes were being completed at a college while I was in a special snowflake academic program. I think the normal course for our public school was TKAMB, Flies, Beowulf, and The Kite Runner.

>>9729854
Why are there so many people from Vegas and/or Henderson on here? I went to Green Valley and I know of at least four other people from my graduating class that regularly browse this board - not to mention all the times I've seen one of our high school mentioned here or on /fit/, /int/, and /soc/

>>9729909
The Poisonwood Bible
It is the absolute worst book I have ever read. Beyond trash.

Revolutionary Road

>>9727468
The whole grade had to read Death Of A Salesman junior year. Even back then, I could tell it was the biggest pleb filter in 11th grade; all the Honors kids adored it, and everyone else hated it. My wannabe-jock friend couldn't comprehend why I decided not to skip the last day of school and watch the movie adaptation with John Malkovich and Dustin Hoffman.
"It's just a boring play."
Only time I've ever gotten mad over literature.

>>9731707
To clarify, I decided to watch the movie adaptation with my English teacher on the last day of school rather than skip. Sorry about the unclear language.

The 120 Days of Sodom

>>9729778
I guess I shouldnt assume anything about where youre from, but usually burgerland education makes ABSOLUTELY SURE they spell out everything to the idiots and slackers. If they didnt tell you anything about it, tons of kids likely wouldve not understood anything, thought it was just a book about talking animals, and wouldve given up on it immediately. "No child left behind"

The Scarlet Letter was pretty good. We were going to read The Crucible but ran out of time.

>>9730316
No if anything the way that the "Correct" interpretation of the book is force-fed to you and the busywork that you are forced to do because the state and/or city mandates a certain amount of assignments must be allocated during each quarter turns you off reading and turns a lot of classically good books into terrible boring slogs that you can't wait to finish. Public Schooling in general is less about actually trying to teach you how to think and more about making you go through the motions because that is what has to be done. I learned more about literature in my 9th grade geometry class than i did in any english course i took in highschool because listening to a man talk to you about something he read and loved is way more engaging and has a higher likelihood of making you want to read than listening to your retarded 60 year old single mother english teacher tell you what the correct interpretation of moby dick is so you can regurgitate it when test time comes. Public schooling is fucking gay is what im getting at here.

Good:
>The Great Gatsby
>The Lord of the Flies
>Siddhartha
>Inferno
>Shakespeare
>All the King's Men

Not Good:
>A Tale of Two Cities
>To Kill a Mockingbird
>Scarlet Letter

High school lit teacher here

The general consensus that seems to be coming up in this thread is that on the whole, the required high school reading isn't really bad, it's just the teachers/classes that make the experience negative.

So then how does one teach these novels "well"?

>>9728936
Not wanting to teach a book because she was afraid some kids wouldn't like it? Your teacher sounds like a bad teacher.

>>9733246
>To Kill a Mockingbird
>not good
Reddit's that way. *jerks thumb* Get out.

>>9733827
Don't move through the book at the speed of slugs churning over two pages for 6 hours (and running out of time after 1/3 of the book).

Don't do the "the curtains are blue" shit, children will admire an author's genuine talent but hate it when you try to make it more than it is or worse, put yourself on his level by overanalyzing.

At the same time, don't underanalyze. I fucking hated it when lazy kids got away with obviously retarded interpretations just because the teacher followed the "every opinion is a good opinion" mindset.

Read up a bit on the Internet so you know when someone has only read the summary or copied his homework off some site. No one is motivated when you let people get away with that.

Give the book a chance as the piece of art it is. Don't immediately turn it into a textbook designed as a chance to teach rhetorical devices or political propaganda.

>>9734057
>Don't do the "the curtains are blue" shit
>tfw posting on a blue board

>>9733827

I personally find it strange that, before we actually started reading the books, we usually took a day or so to learn about the context and symbolism and why the book was being written. I think that's a poor decision. I dont fully want to know the author's intentions and symbolism before I even start reading, because I think it diminishes the experience, and makes it harder to come up with your own conclusions. Sure, tell me when the book was written, and maybe the political situation at the time, but I don't need to know much more than that. I hate when teachers tell you, before even reading, what the book is fully about or what the author's full intentions were.