What’s your mandatory high-school literature in your country?

This was a few years ago and from a western Canadian High school, but the ones that I remember that had the most impact on me were:

Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm

In Search of April Raintree

Flowers for Algernon

I don't think I would've known about any of these if they hadn't been required reading. They all lead to some very interesting class discussions.

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri and The Bethroted by Alessandro Manzoni are a must in pretty much all schools here, and teachers will usually make you read them in full. As for everyone else, we usually read bits and pieces from different authors, including but not limited to: Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Boccaccio, Ludovico Ariosto, Carlo Goldoni, Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Giovanni Verga, Giovanni Pascoli, Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello. Oh, and there's also Homer and Virgil, of course

Some teachers will also give you books to read, though that really depends on teachers themselves. For example, during my first two years in high school our teacher gave us to read The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello, To each his own by Leonardo Sciascia, The path to the nest of spiders by Italo Calvino and Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie... then, at the beginning of the third year, we got a new teacher who wouldn't even bother with the mandatory Divine Comedy, let alone giving us books to read -____-

From what I could see, things are still pretty random nowadays too: I've seen my students bringing to school pretty much anything from Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk to the whole friggin' Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1000+ pages) ò___ò

War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Storm by Ostrovsky, Oblomov by Goncharov, A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov, Fathers and Sons by Turgenev... Hated all of those passionately, just like my high school literature teacher hated me for loving and knowing foreign literature

I'm not sure if it was really mandatory to actually read it or not, but my teacher tasked us to read one of a few old, legendary novels, such as Atheis3, Salah Asuhan2, Siti Nurbaya1, Layar Terkembang1, and many more. I couldn't remember which one I read. They are generally dramatic stories with so many hardships, I believe. Could only manage to read in modern spelling. Even then, somehow they don't make sense lol.

Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Ethan Fromm. America, deep south, 1970s. I have to admit, that Ethan Fromm made a better movie than a high school reading assignment. I once did a writing assignment on "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." by Edgar Allen Poe and was failed because the teacher didn't think it was literary enough.

At least at my high school we had Beowulf, the Great Gatsby, 1984, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and a whole bunch of Shakespeare among other stuff. For AP we also had Beloved and Crime and Punishment, among others.

(My favorite was either Beowulf or Hamlet. My least favorite was the Metamorphoses)

I can remember three from upper-school English. Not sure what the fourth one was, but evidently, it wasn't compelling enough to stick.

Year 11

• Looking for Alibrandi (I loathed this book. It was utterly dull for me.)
• All Is Quiet On The Western Front (Loved it, made me cry.)

Year 12

• 1984 (Loved it, I re-read it occasionally. It totally tripped me out though. I had to stand up and like... hold onto my wardrobe for a bit after marathoning it, to convince myself reality was still more than language. We were also learning about 20th century European totalitarianism in history at the time, so the crossover was tangible.)

A few titles I can remember are Romeo and Juliet, Huckleberry Finn, Odysseus, The Great Gatsby, and The Road. The Great Gatsby was by far my favorite.

Mine was Dutch so...
"Max Havelaar" or as it is also called "de koffiveilingen der Nederlandsche handelmaatschappy" - a fictional story about a coffee trader buying a box full of colonial stories and Memoires of Max Havelaar

We got to choice between others tho, so we read some more old Dutch medieval stories, some from other time periods, etc.
For English I read hound of the Baskerville's, a farewell to arms, and some others, I don't remember.

I know it differs depending on where you go but these are a few that I remember

The Evil Which I hated with all my heart. I can't with stories where the end philosophy is that the world is forever and irreversibly tainted by evil. Wrote a scalding review and didn't even finish the story.
The boy in the striped pyjamas I actually liked it but it's too sad I would never have read it on my own
Another Swedish book called Sandor /slash/ Ida. It was kind of a general romance novel with general bullying, homophobia, growing up themes. I don't have any strong emotions about it.
I read War of the Worlds in english class, and I liked it a lot. The class had a few different classics in different difficulty levels to read from and this was the hardest difficulty level and I was the only one who chose it lol.

The UK syllabus tends to always include a couple of Shakespeare plays, which cycle by year, so I seem to remember at GCSE I did Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, and then at A-level it was Hamlet and Measure for Measure (underrated play).

I seem to remember for GCSE I definitely studied Lord of the Flies, because I found it really upsetting and depressing. I can't remember what else now... it was a long time ago.

For A-level I also studied The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman (by the way, if you're in a British classroom, the reaction to the stage direction "enter Bernard, wearing knickers" is a glorious thing), The Way of the World (a restoration comedy play by Congreve that's pretty entertaining) as well as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (which became one of my favourite books) and the poetry of John Donne, "Oh, unruly [replace the word sun with whatever is annoying you]!" became something of a meme in our class.

High School, back in the late 80s-Early 90s.

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We had to read many different fragments from stories. Sometimes we had to choose what to read ourselves.
We had to read Latvian poems from a poem collection that was collected by Krišjānis Barons.

Some books we had to read:

Most stories that we had to read where dated and boring.

For English we were required to read 1984 and Catcher in the Rye
For Dutch we could choose from several books, I chose Gijsbrecht van Aemstel for example. I think you could also choose "Van den vos Reynaerde" and other classics. Also read a lot of Arnon Grunberg for school (but not everyone chose books from that writer)

I had to read Macbeth

So, high school here is 5 years.My class focused on literature, so I had 10/12 hours of it every week.

• In grade 8th we focus on light native literature from the 20th century - poems by Asen Razcvetnikov, Valeri Petrov, Blaga Dimitrova, Dimcho Debelyanov, Nikolai Liliev, as well as some short stories and novels by Nikolai Haitov(Dervoshov's seed), Pavel Vezhinov's One Autumn day on the road, Svetoslav Minkov's The lady with the X-ray eyes(if you can find it translate it, read it - it's a really good story - it has moral elements paired with a sci-fi plot), etc.

From grade 9th till 12th the literature we study time period matches the time periods we study in History class.

• Grade 9th - Greek and Egyptian mythology, the Old and New Testament, some native Medieval literature, Arthurian myths.

• Grade 10th - Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca, Shakespeare's tragedies(that I had to study in both Bulgarian and English), Don Quixote, Moliere's Tartuffe, Romanticism - English poets(Bairon and Shelly) and The Count of Monte Christo, French Realism - Bel Ami and Père Goriot, Russian writers - Gogol, Pushkin and Lermontov(had to read them in both Bulgarian and Russian).

And grade 11th and 12th are solely for native literature because it's part of your Literature matura's material.

• 11th grade - You start with Istoriya Slavyanobulgarska by Paisii Hilendarski, the poems of Hristo Botev(poet and revolutionary), Ivan Vazov(aka the patriarch of Bulgarian literature) - some of his poems, his Epic of the Forgotten, his novel Under the Yoke(which covers the April uprising), Aleko Konstantinov's Bai Ganyo and Different people, different morals. Dobri Voinikov's The misunderstood civilization.
  Petko Slaveykov's Gergana(The fountain of the white legs is the literal translation of the title).

• 12th grade - Pencho Slaveykov's poems(Pencho is the son of Petko). Peyo Yavorov's poems, Dimcho Debelyanov's poems(All three poets die within two years of each other - Slaveykov in 1912 finally succumbing to his illness, Yavorov in 1914, after a second suicide attempt and Debelyanov in 1916, in action during WWI, with critics citing all three deaths some of the biggest loses for our literature).
  Elin Pelin and Yordan Yovkov's stories, who had a feud created by the media. Dora Gabe and Elisaveta Bagryana's poems. Elisaveta had an affair with Dora's husband, however, they didn't fall for the feud created by the media.
  Geo Milev's September, Hristo Smirnenski's poems and his story "Tale for the lather", Nikola Vapzarov's Motor songs(his book of poems), Song of the man, The fight is unforgiving and Farewell(To my wife). Dimitar Talev's The Iron lanthern and Dimmitar Dimov's Tabbaco.

Here's what I remember having to read, circa 2010 - 2014

• Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (required reading that every single student enjoyed)
• Othello by William Shakespeare
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (this was also a class favorite)
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare
• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Night by Elie Wiesel (he came to our school when I was younger and we had a school wide assembly to listen to him talk, I don't think I was old enough to understand the gravity of his lived experiences at that time)
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

I think we also read a Nicholas Sparks book, but it's such a vague recollection that I don't remember which one. I think we also read a few excerpts from The Odyssey by Homer.