• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Assigned Reading/Classic Literature you Loved

Sceptic Realist

Bad Speller
Sceptic Realist
Joined
Sep 24, 2006
Messages
954
I thought it would be a nice contrast to the other topic here. Just to kick things off, I'll start listing some that I REALLY liked/enjoyed:

-Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
-Anything by Shakespere
-Brave New World
-Candide
-Lord of the Flies
-Inherit the Wind
-Picture of Dorian Grey
-Crime and Punishment
-Fahrenheit 451
-Catcher in the Rye

I'm sure I'm missing several, but hopefully this will get things going!
 
Last edited:
truly, i hated all the assigned reading we were given at school....i think i hated it because we had to study and not just read ..... picking over it sentence by sentence - "and here DH Lawrence is making a subtle reference to the 16th century protestant reformation with a witty double entendre....." whilst 30 collective minds glaze over for the next 50 minutes....

maybe i'm just a philistine :)

The last "classic" i read was the epic of gilgamesh (available to read here )- i think it's a fascinating example of how literature transcends generations.....
 
Madame Bovary
To Kill A Mockingbird

But the former wasn't "taught", it was just an optional read, and the latter I didn't appreciate until I reread it at age 28.
 
Alain Fournier: "Le Grand Meaulnes" (in the original French, or in several English translations - either with the French title, or as "The Wanderer")

Haunting. Still one of the most important books to me.
 
andyandy said:
truly, i hated all the assigned reading we were given at school....i think i hated it because we had to study and not just read ..... picking over it sentence by sentence - "and here DH Lawrence is making a subtle reference to the 16th century protestant reformation with a witty double entendre....." whilst 30 collective minds glaze over for the next 50 minutes....
Click to expand...

Well, I personally never payed any attention to the analyzing, and just read it and interpreted it in my own way. That usually got me by on the tests and essays. But I agree, too much analysis just ruins it.

andyandy said:
The last "classic" i read was the epic of gilgamesh (available to read here )- i think it's a fascinating example of how literature transcends generations.....
Click to expand...

A very interesting read. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
 
Sceptic Realist said:
I thought it would be a nice contrast to the other topic here. Just to kick things off, I'll start listing some that I REALLY liked/enjoyed:

-Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
-Anything by Shakespere
-Brave New World
-Candide
-Lord of the Flies
-Inherit the Wind
-Picture of Dorian Grey
-Crime and Punishment
-Fahrenheit 451
-Catcher in the Rye

I'm sure I'm missing several, but hopefully this will get things going!
Click to expand...

I cannot even remember which of these I had to read in school, and which I read of my own will, but out of your list I enjoyed Brave New World (it was my favourite book for a while), Candide and Catcher in the Rye. Catcher in the Rye made sense when I was a teenager, I think I re-read it in my 20's and found it slightly annoying.

I also enjoyed Pygmalion, I enjoyed it even though we spent far too much time on it in my English class in high schol. I very much enjoyed Master and Margarita, but I cannot remember if I had to read it in school.
 
Last edited:
Assigned reading I loved:

Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment and The Idiot
Edgar Allan Poe: Stories
Boccaccio: Decameron
Corneille: El Cid
Dickens: The Cricket on the Hearth (Judging by the posts in the other thread, Dickens seems to be very unpopular. I never hated any of his works, but I did skip some boring parts to get to what was happening to the characters.)
Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Kafka: The Trial (although I didn't like it as much when I read it at school as I did when I re-read it as an adult)
...and many more that I can't think of now.

Classics I read as an adult and loved:

Everything by Jane Austen, especially Northanger Abbey
Tolstoy: The Resurrection
Thackeray: Vanity Fair
H. C. Andersen's stories and fairy tales (hated them as a child, love them now.)
 
My Brother Jack. Australian, so for much of the world obscure, but like many books, interesting to re-read when you are older.

The Catcher in the Rye. Once again, re-reading when older puts a whole new perspective on it.
Catch-22.
Slaughterhouse 5.
Lord of the Flies. Yet again, re-reading.....
Huckleberry Finn.
The Go-Between. Didn't understand anything about it at the time, but loved it. Re-reading ......
Could not get past Shakespeares language, unfortunately, not good at languages at all.
 
Classic I loved reading over the years are

Time Machine- Wells
Brighton Rock - Greene.
Captain Blood - Sabatini.
Oliver Twist - Dickens
Alice in Wonderland - Carroll
Age of Innocence- Wharton
Lady Chatterleys Lover- Lawerence.
 
Tom Sawyer. Read it for the first time in 3rd grade, and multiple times between then and when it was assigned in 7th. Knew it back to front by that point, and suffered for it at the hands of bullies.

The Martian Chronicles.

Farenheit 451. Liked it so much I read it in one sitting.

Dune. Optional reading, picked from a list made by an English teacher who I now know to be enlightened. Had read it several times already, so was able to correct her when she quizzed me on it.

The Outsiders.

Hated The Sound and the Fury until about halfway through, when I understood what Faulkner was driving at. Decided at that point that I loved it.

Somehow managed to miss being forced to read this in school, but I love, LOVE, LOVE Moby Dick. Never understood the ire heaped upon this book.
 
Almost forgot--
Huck Finn (I didn't care much for Tom Sawyer, but I absolutely loved Finn).
 
Buckaroo;2076884Somehow managed to miss being forced to read this in school said:
LOVE[/b] Moby Dick. Never understood the ire heaped upon this book.
Click to expand...

Moby Dick is a DAMN FINE book. It wasn't required reading when I was at school, but I discovered it a couple of years ago.

At school (gosh, near on 20 years ago now) We had to read:
Merchant of Venice
Othello
Measure for Measure
Vanity Fair - Thackary
Murder in the Catheral - T. S. Eliot
The Inheritors - William Golding
My Family & Other Animals - Gerald Durrel
Persuasion - Jane Austin

I found The Inheritors brilliant. I re-read it again a few years ago and it is still brilliant. Golding wadn't just a one-trick pony.
 
I had to take a 20th-century American Lit class in college to full some pre-requisites for something else. I had it in my mind that I was going to hate it, but I absolutely fell in love. These were some of the highlights. Like Buckaroo, The Sound and the Fury took a while, but, in the end, I was able to appreciate it much more than I would have reading it on my own. This class helped me to get so much more out of these books than I would have otherwise.

Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner

East of Eden - Steinbeck

The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway

Other favorites from high school classes that come to mind:

The Pearl - Steinbeck

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Solzhenitsyn

Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
 
My favorite required reading that I can remember is Les Miserables. While everyone else read the abridged version, I read the one that weighed five pounds. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I got a lot more out of the book then the rest of the class did.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card was also a good one, though I had read it long before my ninth grade teacher offered it as required reading.
 
It's been a long time, and I've forgotten some, I'm sure.

I got The Stranger and Candide in both English and French at various times and liked them both both times. I liked Racine in French too, but I now remember neither the French nor the details of the plays.

Any Shakespeare. No teacher could kill him. A couple tried. Shakespeare won.

Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, Invisible Man (Wright, not Wells), Lord of the Flies, but I'd already read it so maybe it doesn't count, and I actually did rather enjoy Moby Dick even though it was pretty slow going at times. I had that as part of an "American studies" course combining literature and history, and so we got more into the historical and social aspects of the story, rather than the usual crap about Ahab and his metaphorical quest.

Not much else I can think of before college level that was both assigned and enjoyed, though I'm sure there were a few others.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom