Never too Late to Read Classics discussion

YA books are generally books aimed at a teenage readership. However, many classics read in secondary schooll are meant for a wider readership.
Pleae share the titles of some of the books that were on your school reading lists. If you wish, you can also share your opinions on those books.

Have you re- read any of those books for fun?

Our class read The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham when I was in grade 10. I am now a grandmother, so that was quite a while ago.
I didn't enjoy it very much. Since then, I have read just about every novel John Wyndham wrote and enjoyed them all. This year I finally reread The Midwich Cuckoos and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it.
If you have not read any books by this author before, I highly recommend Chocky.
My daughter studed The Chrysalids when she was in high school.

I read The Good Earth, Catch-22, To Kill a Mockingbird, and I think I read Flowers for Algernon. Maybe more that I can't remember. The Good Earth I don't remember at all. Interestingly I was never assigned any Shakespeare in all of my school years including college. But I made up for it later in our homeschoolong years.

We read Fail Safe and On the Beach in Grade 10. This was in the mid 60's, after the Cuban Missile Crisis and before the beginning of the Vietnam War. They were depressing.
We read a Shakespeare play each year. My favourite was Macbeth.

I detested "English Literature" lessons! Shakespeare every year, read out loud in turn around the class. It was painfully embarrassing & done so badly that it took me years to realise there was any rhythm to it. I'm still mystified that some of his works are considered to be comedies. Other books at school? - I don't remember. The best introduction to the classics when I was young were the traditional BBC Dickens dramas, usually televised as series on Sundays. They followed the stories from the books very closely & the costumes were beautiful.

I remember watching a BBC black and white serialization of David Copperfield and then reading the book. Later on, I saw a colour version of War and Peace that was very entertaining.

In 15 days, I'll be going into the 10th grade. We are assigned to read Frankenstein (1818) over the summer ... but here is what we read last year:

A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
Julius Caesar (1599)
Romeo and Juliet (159-)
Siddhartha (1922)
The Old Man and the Sea (1951)
The Pearl (1947)
The Odyssey (parts of it, anyways)
A Separate Peace (195-)


Welcome to the Monkey House (1968 ... not sure if it's considered a classic)

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Of those, Siddhartha and Julius Caesar were definitely my favorites. Welcome to the Money House was also a good read.
I didn't care for The Odyssey or Romeo and Juliet, and The Old Man and the Sea wasn't my favorite read either.

Thank you, Grace. You read a wide variety of books last year. I enjoyed Julius Caesar as well. I read Siddhartha long after I graduates from high school.

Grace wrote: "In 15 days, I'll be going into the 10th grade. We are assigned to read Frankenstein (1818) over the summer ... but here is what we read last year:

A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
Julius Caesar (1599)
..."

Grace, I graduated from high school in the 1970s and I read those same books (except for Siddhartha). I didn't like The Old Man and the Sea either and intend to re-read it someday. I enjoyed A Separate Peace.

Grace wrote:... but here is what we read last year:
...
Siddhartha (1922)
..."

Siddhartha is a great book, but a very difficult read. I am impressed that you liked it at relatively young age.

Interestingly I lived some time in the town (Calw in South West Germany - stronghold of German protestant pietism) where Hermann Hesse was born and grew up. Even in our days the inhabitants have split feelings towards him. The our proud of the Nobel Prize winner, but still fret that he did not speak favourably about them.

Peter wrote: "Grace wrote:... but here is what we read last year:
...
Siddhartha (1922)
..."

Siddhartha is a great book, but a very difficult read. I am impressed that you liked it at relatively young age.

In..."


You definitely have to think through Siddhartha. I enjoyed it so much that I finished it the day we received it before school let out. I then read it again to keep up with the class discussions/reading checks/etc which allowed me to understand and appreciate the text even more.

Hesse was a thinker, of course some would grow to dislike him. It seems that Germany didn't treat him all that great either, but either way he definitely earned his recognition.

Kathy wrote: "Grace wrote: "In 15 days, I'll be going into the 10th grade. We are assigned to read Frankenstein (1818) over the summer ... but here is what we read last year:

A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
Julius ..."


Those books are good reads, I'm glad former educators thought the same.

Got the syllabus for English this year (10th) ...

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman
Twelfth Night by Shakespeare
Great Expectation by Charles Dickens
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
1984 by George Orwell

Grace, that list has a lot of familiar titles on it. I hope you enjoy Lord of the Flies. I have recently reread it, and also read it in Grade 10.

Rosemarie wrote: "Grace, that list has a lot of familiar titles on it. I hope you enjoy Lord of the Flies. I have recently reread it, and also read it in Grade 10."


I've read Lord of the Flies a while ago and I enjoyed it a lot -- excited to see what what we do with it.

That's great, Grace. I know that I usually gain new insight into a second reading of a classic.
I have never read Twelfth Night, but have seen various versions on stage. It is one of Shakespeare's funnier plays.

High School was 100 years ago for me. The only books I can absolutely remember reading were Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I re-read One Day in the Life recently since I remember enjoying it.

High school was ages ago for me, but we spent a lot of time on each book, so they stayed in my mind. One year we read The Crucible and the Scarlet Letter. In other years we read The Mayor of Casterbridge and A Tale of Two Cities, among others.

A long time since high school but I remember some of the literature very well. What stands out is a Utopian Lit class where we read several books but the ones I liked were "Utopia" by Thomas More and "We" by Eugene Zamyatin. We had Continental Lit and the only book that really stands out was "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky. We had a semester of Shakespeare and all I remember is Macbeth and that i did not like it at the time. However, I've grown to really love Shakespeare. And - "David Copperfield" by Dickens was read at some point which I remember was a long slog. I am not a Dickens fan. I've tried a few since but never made it through, always thinking he could have used a good editor to curb some of the excessive verbiage.

My British secondary school education was some time ago, but here are the books I remember.

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
King Lear by William Shakespeare
The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare
The Wasteland, Prufrock and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot
Emma by Jane Austen
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
The Metaphysical Poets by Helen Louise Gardner
Over the Bridge by Richard Church


We had a great teacher for Shakespeare. 'Bomber' was a big character and a Shakespeare enthusiast. Every couple of weeks we had to memorise a fairly lengthy speech from Shakespeare or a poem and when we thought we had learned it, we each had to find him in one of the school breaks and recite it out loud to him from memory. It was great when we came to exams as you had loads of text in your head that you could use as quotes.

From what I remember:

Romeo and Juliet, The Pearl, Lord of the Flies, The crucible, The Scarlet Letter, works by Poe like The Raven.

I actually read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee in 8th grade in middle school along with The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. I have re-read the latter multiple times, as it is my favorite book.

High School:

9th - Romeo and Juliet; Locked in Time by Lois Duncan.
10th - Julius Ceaser.
11th - The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne; The Crucible by Arthur Miller; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (my first reading... I then had to read it twice during college). Earlier this year I re-read The Great Gatsby to remember why the story was so good.
12th - Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (forgive me, but I hated that book and only could get through 1/3 of it. Test = C). Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

I know that I read more in school, but that's all I can presently remember. I loved my 11th grade English teacher, which is probably why I best remember those books.

Samantha, I have noticed the same thing. If I liked the teacher or the course, I remembered more of the books we read. I also remember books I disliked, and finally reread The Midwich Cuckoos after 48 years (yikes, where did the time go?)and enjoyed it this time around.

Rosemarie wrote: "Samantha, I have noticed the same thing. If I liked the teacher or the course, I remembered more of the books we read. I also remember books I disliked, and finally reread The Midwich Cuckoos after..."

Exactly, Rosemarie. I loved my 9th grade English teacher, too, but I think we just read out of the textbook more. I do fondly remember the mythology unit she taught us, though, due to finishing content early.

We read lots of Shakespeare at secondary school, which I loved, but I really did despise having to read Dickens' Bleak House in grade eight, too long and involved for a junior high English class.

Books I did love that we read in secondary school

Cry, the Beloved Country
How I Spent My Summer Holidays
The Sparrow's Fall
How Green Was My Valley
Les Belles-Soeurs (in French)
Cet été qui chantait (in French)
Zone (in French)

I remember in 8th grade reading about Mythology. I love reading about god lore!
9th was Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies

We read Macbeth my Sophomore year.
In our Junior year it was Poetry by Frost and Poe, To this day I recall disliking the analyzing.

Lesle, your comment about not liking to analyze poetry is why so many people don't like reading poetry- it brings back memories of the tedium of analyzing it in school. Most students do not encounter a teacher that brings poetry to life. I like poetry, despite the fact of boring high school classes.

Lesle wrote: "I remember in 8th grade reading about Mythology. I love reading about god lore!
9th was Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies

We read Macbeth my Sophomore year.
In our Junior year it was Poetry by Fro..."

We did mythology in grade seven, and in both grade seven and eight, we also read the King James version of the Bible as literature (the OT in grade seven, the NT in grade eight, something that I found very interesting and enjoyable, but I wonder if with today's political correctness and keeping religion out of the classroom, perhaps all of this would not even be acceptable, I mean, we read the Bible as literature and there was no religious indoctrination ever, period, but I could well imagine that many would not consider the Bible acceptable reading material and choices for their children, which I think is sad, as the King James version of the Bible is a very interesting and literarily important book).

Rosemarie wrote: "Lesle, your comment about not liking to analyze poetry is why so many people don't like reading poetry- it brings back memories of the tedium of analyzing it in school. Most students do not encount..."

I like reading poetry and I like in general analysing it, but it does get majorly tedious to focus on metrics, set-up and the like, it tends to destroy the lyric qualities and joys of poetry.