Favorite book from school?

[alyxen]

What is the book that you can still remember reading and thoroughly enjoying while you were in school?

I can recall quite a few greats, like Of Mice and Men of course. But one of those that I still remember to this day would be The Master Puppeteer by Katherine Paterson.

I don't even remember what year of school it was from, but considering it was published in 1989, it must have been pretty late.

I can't recall the entire plot, but I remember I found it fascinating and it was always my favorite school induced book.

What were some (or one) of yours?

 

[Guest]

Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit when I was 5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov when I was 14. Both stories affected me deeply.

Perdita

 

[Belegon]

So many, but the first thought that popped into my mind was a high school course called "American History Through Literature" and Michael Sharra's "The Killer Angels".

Started my interest in the Civil War.

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

I remember when they put "The Book of Lies" by Aleister Crowley on the book list to show the students that one can have their own opinions about a book and share them openly and emphatically thus reinforcing the values of free thought and persuasive argumentation that were the highly held and oft-repeated cornerstones of my English classes.





Okay, now that I'm done rolling on the floor, I remember fondly reading "Catcher in the Rye" by Salinger and trying emphatically to resist my teacher's desire for us all to write condemnations of it.

All my real reading that changed my life and all the jazz I was supposed to get in ma schoolin' was either during my free time or happened to be on the optional lists of books kids are supposed to read before college (of course most of them didn't have the star next to them to indicate teacher's favorites). And people wondered why such an avant writer and reader was happy about having to only take a single quarter of college english.

 

[Weird Harold]

What is the book that you can still remember reading and thoroughly enjoying while you were in school?

Are you asking about "required reading," or just books we liked from roughly ages five to eighteen?

99% of the required reading for me was either entirely forgettable or mixed in with what I read for fun -- the exception being Lord of the Flies.

We read Dickens and Shakespeare and Mark Twain and all of the other "classics" in class, but I'd read most of them long before they were required (usually because my sister was required to read them four years before I was and I read her copies.)

My favorite read as a school-child was The Wizard of OZ -- all forty-some volumes -- and The Hardy Boys all seventy some volumes. At one point, my mother and the town librarian conspired against me to limit me to one OZ book, One Hardy Boys book, One other science fiction or fantasy, and one book from the "opposite end" of the library.

I've continued as I began, and it only takes me about a year to read through any given library branch's science fiction and fantasy section -- including re-reads of large portions of it.

 

[GingerV]

Books we were forced to read in school.....that I don't count as time the government owes me back?

Tough call. The good stuff I read at those ages was always the pile of books my Dad turned up with in protest of the nonsense I had to read for school.

If I have to choose, I'd have to say The Great Gatsby. But mostly because I read it cover to cover the night we got it, before they could ruin it. I mean honestly, with everything that book's about (for better or worse) is the important thing really that the barman's shirt is yellow?

Ask me about college and I've got a whole raft of them. Everything changed when they started talking about the book and stopped testing just to make sure we read it and hadn't picked up any scandalous ideas from it.

Do we get to do worst books now? Or has that already been covered .

 

[Clare Quilty]

If we're talking about high school--and not counting Shakespearean plays as books-- I'd have to say Gatsby and Catcher. Both books affected me on a deeply emotional level. However, the book that had the most significant affect in shaping the person I was to become was Walden.

 

[lucky-E-leven]

The Little Engine That Could: Pre-School

The Black Stallion and Little House on The Prairie: Grade School

Great Expectations and Fahrenheit 451: Middle School

Beowulf and Uncle Tom's Cabin: High School

 

[oggbashan]

Finch and Trewartha (et al) Geography.

It was the first US text book I had encounted and I understood it. It was laid out with space around points, had plenty of pictures and was a heavy tome. UK text books at the time assumed that paper was in short supply so filled each page with blocks of text.

Christopher Fry 'The Lady's Not For Burning'. I loved his passion for words.

Jean Cocteau 'La Machine Infernale' - French I could read easily and concepts I could understand.

The classics of English Literature were essential but I enjoyed Thomas Love Peacock's 'Headlong Hall' too much and started writing like him.

Og

 

[pixiesjuice]

The Outsiders - S E Hinton

The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde, our class was that small that we all had separate characters.

To Kill A Mockingbird - I think i was 10 when our class read this book.

My Darling My Hamburger - Paul Zindel

In the two years before i left school i had the most amazing english teacher, she was a huge fan of Robert Frost, so we spent quite a while on poetry, our interest was caught because one of his poems was mentioned in the book 'The Outsiders'. It was the only time i ever saw a teacher show enthusiasm while teaching a group of teenagers.

 

[CharleyH]

I'll take it you are referring to high school, and it suddenly strikes me that the curriculum always seemed to offer plenty of books about the male hero or anti-hero, but few books with strong female leads. Nonetheless, Shakespeares, "The Merchant of Venice," sticks out because of the character, Portia. Of course I was 14 at the time and have yet to revisit it.

Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Aurbervilles," (sp) Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" D.H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers," and particularly Aldous Huxley's "Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell," have all left powerful impressions on me.

 

[tolyk]

My favorite book through school would have to be the one that inspired me to start reading as a recreation, it would be the only one that has had a real impact on my life. (Due to starting to read that is )

That book would be J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit", and I read it for grade 6, and over 20 times again over the summer.

 

[rgraham666]

My two faves from high school, that is books I had to read for the cirriculum, were The Chrysalids by John Wyndham and Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

Favourite non-cirriculum books, The Lord of The Rings by You-Know-Who and At The Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovercraft.

 

[tolyk]

The Lord of The Rings by You-Know-Who /QUOTE]

You know, despite how much I loved 'The Hobbit', I honestly did NOT enjoy reading Lord of the Rings.. It took me way too long to finish, because I never fully got into it like I did with Hobbit. In fact, it used to cure my insomnia quite well. *snicker*

 

[impressive]

Assigned H.S. reading? I can only remember 2 titles -- Great Expectations and Lord of the Flies -- neither of which had a profound impact upon me. The sciences were more my focus in H.S. (and college, for the most part). The subjective nature of most grading in language arts was a turn off to me. I suppose a good teacher would have helped, eh? I seemed to get the passive-aggressive types who were frustrated by their own inability to get published.

Of course, I spent a lot of time with extra curricular reading. I was moved by Heinlein, Tolkein, and even Stephen King (The Stand). Through it all, however, I kept returning to Dr. Seuss. Still do. (Gotta love the Sneetches!)

 

[thebullet]

Catcher in the Rye blew me away. For years thereafter I tried to imitate Sallinger when I wrote.

I was also a sucker for Stranger in a Strange Land even though when I look back on it I wonder why.

 

[Wicked-N-Erotic]

Bridge To Terabithia, Farenheit 451, Red Badge of Courage, Where the Red Fern Grows and books I loved to read outside of the classroom were anything by Stephen King, The Nameless, and Lord Of the Flies

Wicked

 

[Guest]

Taming of the Shrew.. alot of shakespear
Lord of the Flies... we had to dissect that. piggy always my fave character in that book

in senior year we had to read a book and rewrite the ending..
i chose Gone With The Wind.. poor scarlet and her fam. died from starvation.. but they had tara.

 

[thebullet]

in senior year we had to read a book and rewrite the ending..
i chose Gone With The Wind.. poor scarlet and her fam. died from starvation.. but they had tara.

That brings back memories. In 9th grade we were supposed to rewrite an ending to Great Expectations, a book I hated. For those of you who read that epic, it started, as I recall in a graveyard where the protagonist is accosted by a thug of some kind. So I had the thug (Magwitch?) kill the protagonist (Pip?). But before he dies, the protagonist writes the story in blood on the top of a grave.

I thought it was funny but my teacher was horrified.

 

[cloudy]

In junior high we read Cannery Row, and had to invent a character to include, and write a chapter about that character. I was hooked on Steinbeck from then on.

In high school, we read the Oddysey, and I'm now determined to read it again before much longer - such an epic story, and I was lucky enough to have a teacher that refrained from picking things apart, and let us enjoy literature, instead of analyzing it.

 

[McKenna]

The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

Introduced me to the Vietnam war; absolutely unforgettable book.

 

[trendyredhead]

Kate Chopin's The Awakening
To Kill a Mockingbird
Our Town
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
I Never Saw the Sun Rise (Joan Donlan)
Rod McKuen's poetry

....

In HS, I took a class called Adolescent Lit, which was very interesting - all books about the Adolescent, including The Outsiders and others you've already mentioned. I read a lot of books that semester which impacted me, too many to list here.

 

[alyxen]

Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird are two of the books that we read, and then watched the movies of.

Of the two, I think Mice was the most dissapointing. Only because the characters didn't stack up to my mental images of them. We actually watched both versions of the movie.

The other was pretty true to the book, if I recall correctly, and cast pretty well.

 

[Guest]

My Darling My Hamburger - Paul Zindel

Pix, please explain. Intriguing title.

Perdita

 

[Dream Keeper]

'A Wrinkle in Time' by Madeline l'engle. Beautifully written story, and something that you don't see everyday. It was a fantasy adventure, but It had many scientific premises along with it, and was a touching story, at that. I loved it.