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

[arxianfall]

Love it or hate it (usually hate it) What were you required to read in high-school.
I'm excluding poetry only novels.

Here, are some our choices:

Ion or/and forest of the Hanged. - War, spousal abuse, greed, treason etc.

Morometii - Traditional rural family is traditional.

The hatchet - Murder mystery but with peasants.

Otilia's Enigma The official guide to the classic simp.

At the Medeleni (trilogy) Mostly abandoned, even by teachers. Hated it, utter bore, and all I remember is something about a proto-goth teen going bye bye.

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Please share you love or hate for mandatory literature!

[FafasMcMelt]

As far as I know, there isn't really widespread mandatory high-school literature in my country. But you do need to read some post modern shit and communist propaganda for the entrance exams for federal colleges.

[Fuzzyman818]

From what I remember in High school, it was Macbeth, Animal Farm, The most dangerous game, The Odyssey, The Kill a mocking bird, 1984, The Count of Monte Cristo and A Sperate Peace.

Just to name a few.

[arxianfall]

I count that in the same category!

[ar-ninetysix]

Of Mice And Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, and.. Catcher in the Rye. That's about all I can remember tbh I know there's others but these are the main ones I remembered reading.

I hated reading, mostly because we each had to read paragraphs out loud. I never really paid attention to what was going on because I was too anxious about what part I had to read next. I remember it being interesting to see what happens when a student has to read one with the inevitable N-word with a hard "R". Sometimes the teacher asked to censor it or and other times, they preferred to read it the word as is out of being true to the book. But yeah.. It wasn't the most fun in middle school lol

[Ruthful]

Beowulf, Romeo and Juliet, Animal Farm, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 are just a few that I can recall

[WizardWatson]

The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, East of Eden, Old Man and the Sea, The Sound and the Fury, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, and several Shakespeare plays. The usual suspects, really.

If I were a diabolical supervillain trying to come up with a way to make children hate reading, I don't think I could have done a better job myself. I don't think I read a genuinely good book until I was in college.

[arxianfall]

East of Eden,

I'm going through the wikpedia page on it. Wow what a soap opera! Or a Sims playthgough.

[ryoko]

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.

[Llyrel]

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

[Kelheor]

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

[shfra13]

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 Atheis, Salah Asuhan, Siti Nurbaya, Layar Terkembang, 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.

[sevenstarsofeightIam]

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.

[Rocksteady_Comics]

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)

[Kaydreamer]

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.)

[maiishira04]

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.

[Crusoe]

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.

[KhanSpring]

Which year? Or should I give a brief summary ?

[SagaHolmgaard]

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.

[darthmongoose]

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.