Required Reading (in other words, the gamble that may bore you to death)

[Blastoise Fortooate]

I'm reading "Crispin, Cross of Lead". Not bad, but historical fiction isn't really my thing. Luckily, since I didn't sign up for Advanced Language Arts, I didn't have to read "Across Five Aprils", which I've collected from Altaria 88 is about potato farming during the Civil War. <(*n*)>

 

[Zora of Termina]

The only ones that I can really remember are:

7th grade- Tuck Everlasting: I can't even remember any of it except about a spring that made you immortal or something. It was OK though, from what I remember.

8th grade - The Outsiders, like most everyone else had to do at some point: It might be my love of violence talking, but I actually liked it a lot.

9th grade- The House on Mango Street: Hated it.
Of Mice and Men: I rather enjoyed it, particularly the "Beans with ketchup" line at the beginning.
To Kill a Mockingbird: Struggled to keep my interest at certain points, but at others it had me gripped. Overall it was good though, so.
Romeo & Juliet: I liked it, yet I didn't. Although getting to read out lines like the script, with different people for a change instead of popcorn reading, was pretty fun. An inside joke stemmed from this when my friend was reading the lines for Paris and made him sound totally gay. That was hilarious.
Antigone: Not significant enough to remember. My teacher was on a shakspeare push.

10th grade- The Westing Game: This was actually pretty good. I thought it was very well-written, although confusing at points.
Money Hungry: You've probably never heard of this, but it was about a girl obsessed with money who was living in a poor neighborhood. Although... Though, the odd thing about it was that one of the main characters was also named Zora, so when people would talk about the book it sometimes sounded like they were talking about me. >>
Begging for Change: Sequel to the above.
Speak: I actually have a drawing based on a scene in here. >>

And this isn't even counting the books that my 9th and 10th grade teacher would bring in for me to read during free time because she thought I'd be interested. And I usually was.

See the problem is, I usually like everything they assign me to read. Then again, the only requirement I have for books is that it must be able to hold my interest past the first few chapters.

 

[Falthor]

Freshman Year:
Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Book of preference that is on a certain list: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield
Tides of War, Steven Pressfield

Sophomore Year:
1776, David McCullough
How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, Joseph E. Ellis
The Stranger, Albert Camus
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

Junior Year:
The Octopus, Frank Norris
The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara
The Last Full Measure, Jeff Shaara
Mythology, Edith Hamilton
The Gifts of the Jews, Thomas Cahill
Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, James McPherson
Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Krik? Krak!, Edwidge Danticat
The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane

And if you thought Junior Year was intense
Senior Year:
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Othello, William Shakespeare
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
The Republic, Plato
A Doll's House, Henrik Ibson
Early Autumn, Robert Parker
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Beowulf, Anonymous
Ulysses, James Joyce

Whew. I can't believe I remembered all of them.

 

[Icalasari]

Oh, right! Also read Tuck Everlasting and The Westing Game :3

 

[Storm Earth and Fire]

I too had to read Romeo and Juliet. I didn't particularly like it except at certain bits, but I at least respect it as a work of literature.

 

[Alexi]

I never did Summer Reading when I had it, so hah. XD

But required reading in school has been a mix.

In the seventh grade, I had to read Animal Farm, which I thought was cool, but as I knew nothing of the Russian Revolution, and my teacher really did not go into it, I didn't get that part until I reread it for fun in 9th grade. That's when I fell in love with it. <3

I read a book called Night in 10th grade, and while it was a good story (an autobiography about a Jewish boy in a Nazi concentration camp), I found it BORING.

And after that, I read Much Ado About Nothing and Lord of the Flies. I had switched English classes then, and my second English teacher was amazing, and she made reading those books awesome. Also, the class was very intelligent, and the discussions we had were good.

Then last year, I had an English class that was centred around Forensics and Forensic research, so we didn't read boring classic books. :D We read one book with almost put me to sleep, called The Lovely Bones, about some girl who was murdered, and her ghost is telling the story, and then we read Catch Me If You Can, which I fell in love with. We read Othello, which my English teacher and my friends made amazing (Shakespearian Yaoi!).

I can hardly wait for Senior Year. :D

 

[Flora]

8th grade - The Outsiders, like most everyone else had to do at some point: It might be my love of violence talking, but I actually liked it a lot.
10th grade- The Westing Game: This was actually pretty good. I thought it was very well-written, although confusing at points.
See the problem is, I usually like everything they assign me to read. Then again, the only requirement I have for books is that it must be able to hold my interest past the first few chapters.

Outsiders=yay

...My sis is only in 6th grade and SHE has to read The Westing Game.

EDIT: Read Night in Summer Enrichment. Sad and pretty boring. D:

 

[Phoenixsong]

Antigone: Not significant enough to remember. My teacher was on a shakspeare push.

What does your teacher being on a Shakespeare push have to do with Antigone? Sophocles wrote that, not Shakespeare.

Whether or not I like assigned reading is pretty hit-or-miss, really. I certainly don't have a problem with the prospect, bibliophile that I am (although I haven't been reading as much lately), but if you get a sucky book then you get a sucky book. I can say that I did enjoy Cat's Cradle, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Things Fall Apart and uh Don Quixote; The House on Mango Street, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (or whatever), Dracula, Call of the Wild, The Pigman, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Giver were decent; and I swear to god if I so much as look at The Things They Carried, Jane Eyre or The Pickup (AAAARRRGH) ever again I will stab myself in the throat. That's about it.

I've also had to read a lot of short stories, none of which I remember very well which presumably means they weren't excellent/awful.

 

[Flametail von Karma]

Well, I've never had to read (much less do anything else involving school) over the summer, but I've loved just about every book the school's had me read. Wait, no, that's not true. I didn't like this year's books very much because they were way under my reading level. Two and three years ago, however, it was much better. I loved Animal Farm, The Giver, The Messenger, Lord of the Flies, The Oustiders, Call of the Wild, White Fang (okay I read that one on my own this year but it was basically for school), and Fahrenheit 451. Those are books I'll never forget.

 

[Dannichu]

We read one book with almost put me to sleep, called The Lovely Bones, about some girl who was murdered, and her ghost is telling the story,

I adore that book <3 I love all of Alice Seabold's stuff. It's depressing as hell, but damn good.

Pre GCSE:

The Very Hungry Caterpillar X3
Harry Potter (1&2)
Romeo and Juliet
Gulliver's Travels
Animal Farm
Holes by Louis Sacher

GCSE:

Macbeth
Twelfth Night
To Kill a Mockingbird (other books on the syllabus here were Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies, so I read those too)
Three monologues from Alan Bennet's Talking Heads
H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds
A ton of poetry by Seamus Heaney and Carol-Ann Duffy and some multicultural stuff

And from the A-level couse (which I didn't take (because I'm a moron), but I read the books on it so I could comment on them with my friends who did):

Pride and Prejudice
Cat on a Hot Tin Rood by Tenesee Williams
The Wife of Bath by Chaucer (Chaucer makes reading Shakespeare like the Very Hungry Caterpillar)
A ton of poems by Keats
Measure for Measure
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (ew ew ew)
A Handmaid's Tale by Margret Atwood

With the exception of P&P, the entire A-level EngLit course is about sex and death.

 

[#1 bro]

In fourth grade (worst year of my life, except maybe fifth grade) we had the worst books EVER for required reading. :0 There was Owls In the Family, which is just as awful as it sounds and it was about a kid that adopted two owls. The writer seemed to think he was hilarious, because he would always describe these WACKY ANTICS! that the owls would do. It probably would have been vaguely funny on a film, but in a book... it was just stupid. :| Then there was My Side of the Mountain, a book about a kid that runs away to live in the wilderness. It was completely ridiculous, the kid "befriended" a bunch of wild animals. UH HELLO I'M PRETTY SURE THAT DOESN'T ACTUALLY HAPPEN. Also, then his dad comes and finds where he's hiding out in the woods, and then - get this - tells his son that he can keep living out in the woods if he wants. No joke. The dad even visits like every month. Completely stupid. And last but not least, we had Second Bend In the River, which is a love story. Newsflash: ten year olds do not appreciate love stories. This chick fell in love with an Indian chief, and then at the end of the book she got married to some guy named George. also there were like no sex scenes wtf

The entire fourth grade curriculum really sucked, actually, we spent the entire time learning about Ohio. Yeah, we're totally going to need that information when about half of us go and move to a different state after we get out of college.

 

[Flitterbie]

Those books I can remember:

Fourth grade:
The Whipping Boy - Don't really remember this one that well.

Fifth grade:
The Giver - <3 <3 <3 This book. In fact, I'm going to re-read it after I finish the book I'm reading right now.

Sixth grade:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - It was okay. Wasn't exactly memorable.

Eighth grade:

Night - Loved this book. Gone me into a bit of a Holocaust-obsession phase (In a not-creepy way).
Lord of the Flies - KILL THE PIG, CUT HER THROAT. Loved this one too. Watching kids slip into madness and kill each other is more fun than you'd think.
The Outsiders - Once again, loved it. Have a copy of this around here somewhere. And the movie.
A Midsummer Night's Dream Best Shakespeare I've read so far. Donkey-headed people are always fun.
Antigone - All I really remember about this is that the titular character is the result of incest.
We also read a lot of Poe that year. Most of it was good.

Freshman year:
Of Mice and Men - Once again, loved it. Can't wait to read Grapes of Wrath this year if it's even half as good as this.
Our Town - It was okay. Don't remember it well.
Romeo and Juliet - Almost too sad of an ending, to the point of it being cheesy. Almost.
To Kill a Mockingbird - We spent a quarter of the school year on this, and with good reason. It was really, really good.

Sophmore year:
A Separate Peace - All I really remember is my friends consistentally calling Gene and Finny gay. I never really picked up on it, and I think my friends just didn't like it.
Macbeth - It was okay. Pretty interesting loophole in that prophecy.
Various King Arthur legends - I liked these stories. They were fun.

And that's all I can recall.

 

[Valerunner]

Every required reading I've done is more boring than OAP wrestling. The books were good, it's just everything else.

Of Mice and Men is interesting, but not when every single thing has to have meaning. SHOES DON'T HAVE MEANING. A FUCKING FEATHER ON A TOE DOESN'T HAVE MEANING. IT'S A FEATHER. NOT SOME DESIRE TO FLIRT WITH EVERYONE. GOD.

Now I loved Macbeth, but rereading every single line in the book "for hidden meanings" can make any book torture.

I've read The Lovely Bones and I absolutely fell for it. But knowing the style of teaching over here, even that's gonna be mind-numbing.

 

[Involuntary Twitch]

This year is my first year having summer reading, and it's been at least partially good. I've also got a whole lot of books to choose from for the ELA reading, and technically I could just cop-out because I'd already read one of them (Ender's Game) prior to recieving the list. As a whole, the books are about racism, which is bad but sort of meh-ish when you've got a whole stack of books on the topic.

...But there were two required books for History, so I read them.
Siddhartha- It was a struggle because the people don't follow logical thought, but when I finished it I felt somewhat enlightened. But then I realized that everyone in school will have read it too, which took the special feeling away somewhat.
Does my head look big in this?- Was AWESOME. Okay, okay, so this muslim girl decides to weat a hajib and faces some racism. There's also high school drama and crushes and kissing scenes. I got so emotional. ;D "No, Amal! Just kiss him! I don't care if it's against your religion!"

And I think I'll read Joy Luck Club so I'm not on awkward footing since it's been so long since I read Ender's Game. (Basically, we can read any number of the books on the list, min one.)

 

[Harley Quinn]

This year, I read The Chosen. I was relieved when my English teacher told me that I would never read a more boring book again in my life.

 

[Flora]

Chromosome Six got better. Everything gets better when people get kidnapped by monkeys.

I have to read The Pearl for English class. AGAIN. -.-

I also have to read Animal Farm, which, by your responses to it, I will take as a good book.