So yesterday I finished reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, just one of many novels assigned over the course of a decade of Literature classes. And I loved it. It dawned on me, however, that I probably would have never given the book any mind if I hadn't had to read it for school.

I actually owe it to those classes for helping me discover some other great novels I might have never tried. And Then There Were None and A Tale of Two Cities are my runner-ups.

So Escapists, what is your favorite book that you were assigned in school?
Note: This isn't just limited to literature classes.

I got to read Dracula and Frankenstein in my English classes (The latter was for part of the exam) and I've since been given a Barnes and Noble Leatherbound edition of Dracula and bought my own copy of Frankenstein. They were probably the best two.

Brave New World, it was so interesting

Othello. Yes, it's a play rather than a novel, but the novels we were made to study at school were either parochial scottish rubbish by Cliff Hanley, Brave New World, which in retrospect seems like a bit of an odd choice, and Of Mice and Men. The other class got 1984. Yeah, English classes in 80s Scotland were pretty damn depressing. Probably some lingering Calvinist anti-fun tendencies showing through.

And the only reason we got Othello was that we were given a choice between that and Death of a Salesman, and the entire class had been bored out of their minds by another Arthur Miller play the year before, so Shakespeare won by a landslide.

Primary School- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Well ok it was this other book I liked more but I have competely forggoten the name of it.

High School- An Inspector Calls. Heck the book even got me to watch the film version of it!

"Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo.

At the time I was really into Metallica, so I thought it was pretty cool that I was reading the book that inspired the song "One" off the "...and Justice for All" album. Turns out though it was actually a pretty good book, too. Disturbing as all hell.

Tim and the hidden people.

It was pure gold....

The writing was like angels speaking to me.

Granted I was 4 and it was primary school but still....

Probably our GCSE Poetry anthology. It was a really varied bunch of literature and some of it was actually good. We never really read that many novels though, so possibly Animal Farm, but that's out of about 5 choices.

Well this is an easy one. 1984, followed closely by Animal Farm. Both books really are timeless. Although I'll be honest, I did like most of the stuff I've had to read for school. Of course, I'm sure that if I went back and read some of them, I wouldn't like them nearly as much (with a few that I might like more, thanks to a shitty teacher skipping large and important parts of a couple books).

Oddly enough, my fav book from school was not from English literature, it was from freakin' physics: Mr Tompkins in Paperback. Great introduction to advanced physics, recommend it to anyone, written for a lay audience and it's quite accessible.

To Kill a Mockingbird. That is a stunning book, Harper Lee was write when she said she wasn't going to write another book because how do you beat perfection? Also all the nameslip ups it caused Tequila Mockingbird, How To Kill a Mockingbird... okay they aren't particularly funny but it's a hard title to get right and school children don't have the most sophisticated humour...

I'm pretty sure the only other book of note I read was Romeo and Juliet which wasn't that good (Where did Benvolio go??). We read Animal Farm, but I'd already done that one and it's not as good as TKaM. It did have the best bit of teaching I've experienced though, because one day the teacher came in and started yelling at us and handing out punishments for incredibly trivial things. It was complete silence or nothing and naturally we all shut up pretty fast and kept our heads down when he was ripping into someone else...and then at the end he told us that's why the animals seem to put up with these extraordinarily bad things and how Napoleon isn't challenged

I believe it was called something like "the apple" It was about a Utopian society in the future, but it had serious drawbacks to the societies structure

1984 for me. Great book there and something I almost definitely would have read at some point anyway.

The best ones were the ones I got to pick from the summer reading list (Catch-22, flags of our fathers).

Mandatory ones were: Macbeth, Hamlet, 1984, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and their eyes were watching God.

I dont think I enjoyed a single book my school set, apart from Hamlet perhaps - but I count that as a play.

The only proper booked they made us read that I enjoyed was The Catcher in the Rye, but only because hating Holden Caulfield was the most enjoyable thing about it. I never had that teenage rebellion phase, so identifying with him was hard, but even so - he's an utter gimp.

Most of the stuff we had to read was okay, but one book I really liked.
It was called All Quiet on the Western Front. Not really sure what i liked about it, but i enjoyed it. Maybe because it showed that solders were human beings, not just some things that shoot. And that there isn`t really a good or an evi side, just the one you end up in. And how horrible war is, and how it effects humans. Or maybe i misunderstood the whole book, who knows. But i really liked it nonetheless.

My favourite was an anthology of Philip Larkin's poems called "High Windows". (Ok, not a work of fiction, but it was still a "book").
Most of the other books, poetry, plays etc. we analysed to death and so it was impossible to get any enjoyment out of a book whle re-reading the same paragraph over and over in order to find every simile and metaphor.

Larkin was different, mostly because I felt I could relate to some of his work. He was a fragile guy terrified about the future and didn't need to use 700 metaphors to talk about his fear of death.

Lord of the Flies is the only one I really remember. I always found studying literature at school, be it novels, plays or poetry, always takes something away from it. We spent so long analysing and read the book in stages, so I can't really say I enjoyed reading it.

That said, I'm definitely aware that it's an outstanding book, and keep meaning to read it again for pleasure. I have such a backlog of books to read, especially now I'm starting a university module that requires me to read a few books. I can't stop buying new ones either.

I just wish I was a faster reader.

Of Mice and Men.
Though probably because it's basically the only good book school made me read.

tippy2k2:
The book that got me into sci-fi was introduced me thanks to my English class in high school.

Ender's Game

I loved my English class, there are so many great books that our teacher had us read but Ender's Game wins. For fun, here are a few other gems:

The Adventure of Tom Sawyer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (it was terribly awkward in class though due to the profuse use of "Nigger" in the book)
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tomorrow when the war began

Sounds like you had the best English teacher ever.

This a tough question, I didn't particularly like any of the books I've read for school that I can think of. To Kill a Mockingbird was decent, I guess. One that my school made us read was an actual memoir by a former child soldier from Africa called A Long Way Gone, it was quite interesting. I read a book called "Lamb" by Christopher Moore for English, but wouldn't count it since I selected it myself.

In middle school, each grade had a certain amount of books to read for something I can't recall. But we had to take quizzes on the library computers for each book.

For my 7th grade year, we had two books: Jade Green and FireGold. They were the best ones. I liked them lots.

High school, 10 grade English class, we had to read multiple books as well. My favorite? Bless Me, Ultima.

The Great Gatsby.

I hope the new film adaptation doesn't change around a bunch of things - Particularly the ending.

Probably "Silverwing" by Kenneth Oppel. It was in Middle School and I believe we were either assigned different books, or we had the choice to pick which book out of a list we could read. Either way, I ended up reading Silverwing.

I wasn't into reading stuff beyond books like Captain Underpants back then. Silverwing was probably the first assigned reading book that I ended up getting hooked on. The concept itself was interesting enough, it was a story entirely focused on bats. The characters were probably what hooked me into the story. The main character Shade, is probably my favorite character in the story. I found myself rooting for him the entire way through and spent a lot of time reading the book just to see what happens next.

When I began writing my book report for it, I tried to avoid spoiling the ending as I feel that this is a book everyone should experience for themselves. Unfortunately, the requirements for the book report required me to do so.

After I was done with the book report, I found out that there was a sequels to the book. Sunwing and Firewing. I got each of them from the school's library and read them both cover to cover at my leisure. No other book has ever caused me to do that before. I usually spent my free time watching TV or playing video games.

Last year, I saw Sunwing among a group of books that were donated to the place I used to work at. I found myself feeling a huge amount of nostalgia just from seeing the title.

Bottom line: Silverwing was an awesome book, and was the first book assigned by my school that made me want to read the entire series.

hazabaza1:
Of Mice and Men.
Though probably because it's basically the only good book school made me read.

Yeah I'll second this. I really enjoyed reading Of Mice and Men.

Waiting of Godot.

Funny story, the day we started reading it, Critical Miss did that comic and I nearly shit bricks...

In high school? Lonesome Dove. It was one of the only school-assigned books that I actually liked.

In college (university for you silly not-americans), there a few, but I can't remember what they were.

dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey. i love my 5th grade teacher for sugesting this book to do my book report on instead of harry potter.

I have to say Of Mice and Men. And when it came to reading Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew was really good.

I loved Ten Little Indians (And Then There Were None) and The Maltese Falcon. I think I liked these because I'm really into mystery; but I honestly hated everything else. I was generally a really good writer but I was absolutely not interested in books throughout grade school/highschool/university. Instead of giving you a book that has a compelling story they always would throw books at you that have some sort of "symbolism" or are abstract in some way. I got so sick of that kind of nonsense when for a university literature class we had to read a book that was written as if the speaker/narrator was mentally disabled; it felt like my brain was trying to rip itself out of my head.