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This post makes me sad. As a literature teacher, honestly, it’s pretty discouraging – especially because just about EVERY book apparently sucks. 

I don’t know if this post will get any traction whatsoever; I’m a wee bug here on tumblr without much of a voice. But I’d really appreciate it if – even if you don’t post comments of your own – if you’d reblog this so that some of your followers might see it and respond.

Lord of the Flies. I was absolutely enraptured by that book and I read it three times my senior year.

Honestly there were hardly any assigned books I didn’t love but then also I ended up becoming an English major, so…

Highlights though: Le Morte d’Arthur. A Separate Peace. Hamlet (ok, but I’d read it twice on my own before we got around to reading it in school…). And since I also minored in Latin: Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

FRANKENSTEIN.

Fucking changed my life. Considering writing my senior thesis on it.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskin.

The way smell is described and its effect on people, is just freaking incredible.

Summer of the monkeys.

Great Gatsby, assigned in 9th grade, to the point that I now have my favorite lines as a massive tattoo.

Dracula. I already loved the format, already enjoyed vampire fiction, but ohhhhhh my godddddd I still have the saddest crush on actual canon Mina Harker.

Also Inherit The Wind, if plays count. Tenth grade was a good year, I guess?

Lord of the Flies, literally all the Shakespeare, the Handmaid’s Tale, Regeneration (the series that became my favourite books ever), Naked Lunch which was kinda a cheat because I’d already read it once…

Black Boy by Richard Wright, the Regeneration trilogy, The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp

Great Gatsby.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  The Scarlet Letter.  It’s been a while since high school, so I’m almost certainly missing some that I enjoyed but have forgotten with time, but those are three I enjoyed.

Additionally, one thing that one of my high school english teachers did that really made her a popular teacher and helped people enjoy a lot more of the books read in her class, was to teach about the time period in which the book was written before we read each book.  Before starting a new novel, she would put together a little presentation on some highlights of the political and cultural climate that the author grew up in, as well as any relevant pieces of the author’s personal history that informed their writing.  It helped ground the stories for her students, and made it much easier to understand the characters and pick up on themes in each novel.

The Outsiders, Pride & Prejudice, 1984, Black Boy

Wuthering Heights, Sula

Sula, The Catcher in the Rye, To the Lighthouse, Macbeth

Granted that except for the first two all of these were assigned at university rather than in high school, but – 

The Great Gatsby, A Streetcar Named Desire, Absalom, Absalom!, Mrs. Dalloway, Madame Bovary, A Confederacy of Dunces, Giovanni’s Room, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and probably others I’m forgetting.