What is the best book you've ever read for School?

Dr.Strangefate

He Sees You When You're Sleeping. He Knows When Yo
Joined
Oct 24, 2004
Messages
10,075
Location
New York, NY
I think the title is pretty self-explanatory... A lot of times teachers force students to read utter crap, so its always awesome when, out of the blue, we end up reading something extraordinary.

For me that's happened a few times... I still can't believe I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for school.

What have you read that's pretty fancy?
 
Gotta be Cathcer in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I LOVED that book.

though one of my friends says it doesn't hold up as well now that we're older... that it fits best with your high school mentality and mind-set.

I have to give it another shot.

I also did get to read Watchmen for school. That one's pretty good ;)
 
My Freshman and Junior English teacher was an absolutely incredible picker of wondrous books. Check all of this out:
Frankenstein, The Odessey, Gilgamesh, Antigone, Oedipus, Complete Arthurian Legends, Complete Norse Legends, All Quiet on the Western Front, Lord of the Flies, Midsummer's Night Dream, Cach-22, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Catcher in the Rye, As I Lay Dying, The Great Gatsby, and Moby Dick. Easily, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was my fav.

Plus he used to read comics as a kid; I used to bring in all my essentials and he'd tell me stories about collecting "Ant-Man' comics and trading comics as a kid.
 
Oh yeah, the Odyssey was amazing too (read it for Latin). I also read 1984 (awesome), a bunch of Emerson and Thoreau (which I ate up), Gilgamesh (sucked), Beowulf (Grendel = awesome, Grendel's mother to Dragon = suck), MacBeth (alright), Julius Caesar (pretty awesome), the Iliad (awesome, but drawn out in some parts), the Aenead (easier than the Iliad, worse than the Odyssey)... im sure there's others, just dont remember them.
 
Without a doubt, To Kill A Mockingbird. It was assigned for class but I read it right away and then again for class immediately after.
 
This is really tough, I've actually had the pleasure of reading a huge amount of good works (both fiction and non) for school. For fiction, two works (that I was assigned to read in high school) would probably qualify for my picks because they were not only fantastic books, but changed the way I read, wrote, and thought extremely. Grendel by John Gardner and The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth. Both books are just masterpieces (though certainly neither writer's strongest works) that blew me away with both the ease they read and the depth they had.

For non-fiction, I couldn't really answer what the best thing I read was, there are two many.
 
Last edited:
I went to crummy Catholic schools, so we don't get to read any book more awesome than the Catechism.
 
I got to read quite a few books including the before mentioned Lord of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye, but my two favorites by far were I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier ( sounds odd but if you haven't read you should) and The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton (book as usual was way better than the movie, although the movie didn't suck for it's time)
 
1984. Nothing surpasses it in any way. Slaughter House 5, Catcher in the Rye and The Once and Future King were all good.
 
I went to crummy Catholic schools, so we don't get to read any book more awesome than the Catechism.
Well, that's got most of my "bad Catholic experience" stories beat.... :( I at least got to survive public high school.

I was surprised to find that I actually enjoyed The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), and The Bell Jar (Plath). The last one was in Young Adult Literature in college, so maybe it shouldn't count. A lot of the rest of what we read in high school English was merely tolerable, or downright unenjoyable. (Don't get me started on Franz Kafka....)
 
Catch-22 - AMAZING

Animal Farm - Read concurrently with History lessons, adding perspective!
 
Well, that's got most of my "bad Catholic experience" stories beat.... :( I at least got to survive public high school.

I was surprised to find that I actually enjoyed The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), and The Bell Jar (Plath). The last one was in Young Adult Literature in college, so maybe it shouldn't count.
I wasn't terribly fond of The Scarlet Letter and I've never read The Bell Jar, but I'll check it out when I get a chance.
A lot of the rest of what we read in high school English was merely tolerable, or downright unenjoyable (Don't get me started on Franz Kafka....)
But he turned into a bug!
 
1984, Slaughter-house 5, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, In Cold Blood, Catch 22, A Farewell to Arms, Ethan Frome, and a Brave New World are all some of my favorites.
 
[snip](Don't get me started on Franz Kafka....)
But he turned into a bug!
We read The Trial in high school, so, sadly, no bugs. (No real interest on my part, either, I'm afraid. Honestly, I found the idea of existentialism to be thoroughly unappealing.)

I'm not sure if you'll like The Bell Jar. It's a semi-autobiographical novel -- it deals with a woman suffering from emotional and mental illness, which I believe Plath had for much of her life. Yes, depressing topic, but in the book I recognized some of the women's issues I'd had to deal with as a teen/young adult. (For example, some of the book's critics couldn't understand why Plath seemed to use babies to symbolize death. As someone who was raised in a society where women were still expected to have to choose either a family or a career, but not both [and family was the preferred choice], I completely understood the author's symbolism.)
 
I'm currently in a World Literature class, and we've gotten to some very touching stuff so far.

Life of Pi
The Inheritance of Loss
The Sea

The short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri, is also really good.
 
Well, that's got most of my "bad Catholic experience" stories beat.... :( I at least got to survive public high school.

I was surprised to find that I actually enjoyed The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), and The Bell Jar (Plath). The last one was in Young Adult Literature in college, so maybe it shouldn't count. A lot of the rest of what we read in high school English was merely tolerable, or downright unenjoyable. (Don't get me started on Franz Kafka....)

God do I hate Metamorphosis. So confusing and unbearable to read.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top