Assigned Reading/Classic Literature you Loved

Sceptic Realist · 5th November 2006, 12:10 AM

I thought it would be a nice contrast to the other topic here. Just to kick things off, I'll start listing some that I REALLY liked/enjoyed:

-Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
-Anything by Shakespere
-Brave New World
-Candide
-Lord of the Flies
-Inherit the Wind
-Picture of Dorian Grey
-Crime and Punishment
-Fahrenheit 451
-Catcher in the Rye

I'm sure I'm missing several, but hopefully this will get things going!

andyandy · 5th November 2006, 01:29 AM

truly, i hated all the assigned reading we were given at school....i think i hated it because we had to study and not just read ..... picking over it sentence by sentence - "and here DH Lawrence is making a subtle reference to the 16th century protestant reformation with a witty double entendre....." whilst 30 collective minds glaze over for the next 50 minutes....

maybe i'm just a philistine

The last "classic" i read was the epic of gilgamesh (available to read here )- i think it's a fascinating example of how literature transcends generations.....

TragicMonkey · 5th November 2006, 06:39 AM

Madame Bovary
To Kill A Mockingbird

But the former wasn't "taught", it was just an optional read, and the latter I didn't appreciate until I reread it at age 28.

orpheus · 5th November 2006, 08:40 AM

Alain Fournier: "Le Grand Meaulnes" (in the original French, or in several English translations - either with the French title, or as "The Wanderer")

Haunting. Still one of the most important books to me.

Sceptic Realist · 5th November 2006, 09:08 AM

Originally Posted by andyandy

truly, i hated all the assigned reading we were given at school....i think i hated it because we had to study and not just read ..... picking over it sentence by sentence - "and here DH Lawrence is making a subtle reference to the 16th century protestant reformation with a witty double entendre....." whilst 30 collective minds glaze over for the next 50 minutes....

Well, I personally never payed any attention to the analyzing, and just read it and interpreted it in my own way. That usually got me by on the tests and essays. But I agree, too much analysis just ruins it.

Originally Posted by andyandy

The last "classic" i read was the epic of gilgamesh (available to read here )- i think it's a fascinating example of how literature transcends generations.....

A very interesting read. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

Tanja · 5th November 2006, 09:23 AM

Originally Posted by Sceptic Realist

I thought it would be a nice contrast to the other topic here. Just to kick things off, I'll start listing some that I REALLY liked/enjoyed:

-Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
-Anything by Shakespere
-Brave New World
-Candide
-Lord of the Flies
-Inherit the Wind
-Picture of Dorian Grey
-Crime and Punishment
-Fahrenheit 451
-Catcher in the Rye

I'm sure I'm missing several, but hopefully this will get things going!

I cannot even remember which of these I had to read in school, and which I read of my own will, but out of your list I enjoyed Brave New World (it was my favourite book for a while), Candide and Catcher in the Rye. Catcher in the Rye made sense when I was a teenager, I think I re-read it in my 20's and found it slightly annoying.

I also enjoyed Pygmalion, I enjoyed it even though we spent far too much time on it in my English class in high schol. I very much enjoyed Master and Margarita, but I cannot remember if I had to read it in school.

Terry · 5th November 2006, 09:27 AM

The Crucible.

Fitter · 5th November 2006, 09:32 AM

The Dubliners by Joyce

Maja · 5th November 2006, 09:34 AM

Assigned reading I loved:

Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment and The Idiot
Edgar Allan Poe: Stories
Boccaccio: Decameron
Corneille: El Cid
Dickens: The Cricket on the Hearth (Judging by the posts in the other thread, Dickens seems to be very unpopular. I never hated any of his works, but I did skip some boring parts to get to what was happening to the characters.)
Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Kafka: The Trial (although I didn't like it as much when I read it at school as I did when I re-read it as an adult)
...and many more that I can't think of now.

Classics I read as an adult and loved:

Everything by Jane Austen, especially Northanger Abbey
Tolstoy: The Resurrection
Thackeray: Vanity Fair
H. C. Andersen's stories and fairy tales (hated them as a child, love them now.)

a_unique_person · 5th November 2006, 06:29 PM

My Brother Jack. Australian, so for much of the world obscure, but like many books, interesting to re-read when you are older.

The Catcher in the Rye. Once again, re-reading when older puts a whole new perspective on it.
Catch-22.
Slaughterhouse 5.
Lord of the Flies. Yet again, re-reading.....
Huckleberry Finn.
The Go-Between. Didn't understand anything about it at the time, but loved it. Re-reading ......
Could not get past Shakespeares language, unfortunately, not good at languages at all.

LibraryLady · 5th November 2006, 07:04 PM

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold.

Corpse Cruncher · 6th November 2006, 01:05 AM

Classic I loved reading over the years are

Time Machine- Wells
Brighton Rock - Greene.
Captain Blood - Sabatini.
Oliver Twist - Dickens
Alice in Wonderland - Carroll
Age of Innocence- Wharton
Lady Chatterleys Lover- Lawerence.

zizzybaluba · 7th November 2006, 11:55 AM

T.H. White's The Once and Future King
Flowers for Algernon

Buckaroo · 7th November 2006, 11:59 AM

Tom Sawyer. Read it for the first time in 3rd grade, and multiple times between then and when it was assigned in 7th. Knew it back to front by that point, and suffered for it at the hands of bullies.

The Martian Chronicles.

Farenheit 451. Liked it so much I read it in one sitting.

Dune. Optional reading, picked from a list made by an English teacher who I now know to be enlightened. Had read it several times already, so was able to correct her when she quizzed me on it.

The Outsiders.

Hated The Sound and the Fury until about halfway through, when I understood what Faulkner was driving at. Decided at that point that I loved it.

Somehow managed to miss being forced to read this in school, but I love, LOVE, LOVE Moby Dick. Never understood the ire heaped upon this book.

zizzybaluba · 7th November 2006, 12:10 PM

Almost forgot--
Huck Finn (I didn't care much for Tom Sawyer, but I absolutely loved Finn).

StewartP · 7th November 2006, 12:22 PM

Originally Posted by Buckaroo;2076884Somehow managed to miss being forced to read this in school, but I love, LOVE, [b

LOVE[/b] Moby Dick. Never understood the ire heaped upon this book.

Moby Dick is a DAMN FINE book. It wasn't required reading when I was at school, but I discovered it a couple of years ago.

At school (gosh, near on 20 years ago now) We had to read:
Merchant of Venice
Othello
Measure for Measure
Vanity Fair - Thackary
Murder in the Catheral - T. S. Eliot
The Inheritors - William Golding
My Family & Other Animals - Gerald Durrel
Persuasion - Jane Austin

I found The Inheritors brilliant. I re-read it again a few years ago and it is still brilliant. Golding wadn't just a one-trick pony.

Katana · 7th November 2006, 12:51 PM

I had to take a 20th-century American Lit class in college to full some pre-requisites for something else. I had it in my mind that I was going to hate it, but I absolutely fell in love. These were some of the highlights. Like Buckaroo, The Sound and the Fury took a while, but, in the end, I was able to appreciate it much more than I would have reading it on my own. This class helped me to get so much more out of these books than I would have otherwise.

Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner

East of Eden - Steinbeck

The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway

Other favorites from high school classes that come to mind:

The Pearl - Steinbeck

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Solzhenitsyn

Julius Caesar - Shakespeare

gaiapan · 7th November 2006, 03:46 PM

My favorite required reading that I can remember is Les Miserables. While everyone else read the abridged version, I read the one that weighed five pounds. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I got a lot more out of the book then the rest of the class did.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card was also a good one, though I had read it long before my ninth grade teacher offered it as required reading.

bruto · 7th November 2006, 09:45 PM

It's been a long time, and I've forgotten some, I'm sure.

I got The Stranger and Candide in both English and French at various times and liked them both both times. I liked Racine in French too, but I now remember neither the French nor the details of the plays.

Any Shakespeare. No teacher could kill him. A couple tried. Shakespeare won.

Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, Invisible Man (Wright, not Wells), Lord of the Flies, but I'd already read it so maybe it doesn't count, and I actually did rather enjoy Moby Dick even though it was pretty slow going at times. I had that as part of an "American studies" course combining literature and history, and so we got more into the historical and social aspects of the story, rather than the usual crap about Ahab and his metaphorical quest.

Not much else I can think of before college level that was both assigned and enjoyed, though I'm sure there were a few others.

EvilSmurf · 8th November 2006, 10:07 AM

Macbeth
Hamlet
Tomorrow When The War Began
Catch 22

Glen.Nogami · 9th November 2006, 05:04 PM

The Stranger

The Old Man and the Sea (most of Hemingway's stuff, actually.)

Invisible Man is awesome. (Ellison, not Wells.)

East of Eden

Trigood · 10th November 2006, 01:35 PM

Originally Posted by bruto

Any Shakespeare. No teacher could kill him. A couple tried. Shakespeare won.

Nominated this line. Classic, Bruto.

Trigood · 10th November 2006, 02:12 PM

I usually liked the assigned readings. I guess I was a nerd that way. But not always. (I'll post those on the other thread.)

The ones I really liked:

The Scarlet Letter
Great Expectations
Pride and Prejudice
Hamlet
The Wild Duck
All My Sons
(and lots of other plays that I can't remember; there was an actual semester-long course in drama, which I took)

I don't remember being assigned a lot of books/novels in high school; maybe it was just the teachers I got.

On my own, I enjoyed:

1984
War and Peace
The Hobbit
The Lord of the Rings
Various novels of Madeleine L'Engle
Poetry of William Blake and Wm Butler Yeats

A little later in adulthood, I enjoyed:

Tess of the D'Urbervilles
The World According to Garp
Burger's Daughter
A Passage to India

Something about "being assigned" a book makes things less fun for me.

Foolmewunz · 10th November 2006, 08:14 PM

One school-assigned - Huckleberry Finn
One personal choice - Gravity's Rainbow

I think I've re-read them both at least a half-dozen times. (Yes, even GR - although it's more like always having a copy open to some chapter so that I can just revel in it.)

Pynchon's my personal pick for greatest American author, although I guess a few more homeruns would help. Like any great writer, he's had his ups and downs, but V, Gravity's Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon rate very highly in my estimation. I'm anxiously awaiting the release of Against the Day later this month.

slingblade · 11th November 2006, 04:37 AM

Oooh, I like this topic!

Howard's End
The Old Man and the Sea
Bartleby the Scribner
Canterbury Tales
Beowulf
Hard Times
Anything by Flannery O'Connor, especially A Good Man is Hard to Find
Anything by T.S. Elliot, although I didn't like The Wasteland at first, at all! I had to get into it, break it open, and learn to enjoy its chewy literary goodness.

And a great deal of classic poetry I had thought I'd hated, because of the way it was taught in high school. When I got reacquainted with Frost, Dickinson, HD, and Yeats, I found I loved them because we were examining meanings and allusions instead of foot and meter and rhyme.

ranson · 11th November 2006, 07:44 AM

Of all I was forced to read for class, my favorite was Machiavelli's The Prince. The two of us in the room that "got" the book effectively terrified the rest of the class with our discussions of it.

I enjoyed Brave New World, but partially because I got to argue that it wasn't a dystopia as the teacher defined it. I got to use Asimov's Foundation series as the basis of one of my senior research papers. The other used Heller's Catch-22 and Something Happend. Those were good. I liked Of Mice and Men, and all the works of the Bard that were acted out/read out loud instead of just assigned. Farenheit 451 was in there, too. Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and Dante round it out, I think.

Timble · 11th November 2006, 09:38 AM

I liked Shakespeare, Beowulf, Alice In Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass, also some John Steinbeck.

Also Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, I've read other Dickens, but those weren't on the syllabus.

TJ · 11th November 2006, 12:11 PM

Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine by Tom Wolfe
Any and all Mark Twain, especially the essays
The Stranger by Camus
Animal Farm, other Orwell
The Inferno by Dante
Slaughterhouse-five by Vonnegut
Shakespeare's sonnets, but not so much the plays. I had trouble wrapping my young brain around reading a script. Even though I loved the stories, I thought they were better performed rather than read.
All Dickens
Scarlet letter
Frankenstein (LOVED IT!)

One's I didn't like:

Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
Faust
Crime and punishment

Brian Jackson · 11th November 2006, 01:13 PM

Originally Posted by zizzybaluba

Flowers for Algernon

I second!

Elizabeth I · 11th November 2006, 02:58 PM

Pride and Prejudice
To Kill a Mockingbird
Babbitt
The Canterbury Tales
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Beowulf
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Les Misérables
Great Expectations
Huckleberry Finn
A Perfect Day for Bananafish and Other Stories by J.D. Salinger (but I HATED Catcher in the Rye)

malha111 · 15th November 2006, 03:14 PM

I dunno if it's a classic by your standards, but Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat is my all-time favourite book, maybe with the exception of August Strindbergs De Lycksaliges Ö (the English title eludes me, but it translates into something like Island of The Fortunate).

MetalSeagull · 4th December 2006, 05:01 PM

Ivanhoe
The Three Musketeers
Of Mice and Men
Don Quixote
Cry the Beloved Country
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Three Men in a Boat

Kochanski · 4th December 2006, 07:51 PM

From school I loved:

All of Shakespeare, I was fortunate, my teachers did a good job with it and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

All of Dickens, I know some people can't take him, but he does pull me into the story and once I am in I can just devour any good tale.

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn

Cheaper by the Dozen, read it in grade school, it was fun.

After I finished school I got into Jane Austen and enjoyed her. Don't think I would have so much in school.

I have a few other favorites, don't know if you could consider them classics, but I love E F Benson's Mapp & Lucia stories, they are such fun.

Anything by James Thurber

I am probably forgetting lots of others.

Myriad · 5th December 2006, 09:00 AM

Quote:

Flowers for Algernon

This wasn't assigned reading for me. I encountered the original novella in an SF anthology. And I don't think "loved" is quite the right word. Perhaps, "was reduced to a near-catatonic state for several days by" better describes it.

I was a stereotypical preteen, lonely, over-schooled nerd.* And I have a mentally retarded twin brother.

Anyone who's read the story, I invite to imagine the impact for themselves. (Just as well it wasn't a school assignment. If required to discuss it in class, I probably would have just sat there and screamed incoherently.)

Respectfully,
Myriad

*In case you're wondering why I use the past tense. I'm no longer preteen or lonely.

Retrograde · 6th December 2006, 11:36 AM

I've managed to avoid college English, so all my assigned reading dates back to high school.

What I particularly liked:
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
most of The Scarlet Letter
A Tale of Two Cities (even if the heroine was a dud)
War and Peace (for 17 year olds it's a great big soap opera)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (every American should read this book. So should many non-Americans. Unfortunately, most people seem to focus on the language (aside from the n-word, the dialect Huck uses is not easy) and never get to the part where Huck says that if rescuing Jim is wrong, by damn he'll go to hell)

Great Books I've particularly liked since then:
Moby DickCarroll's Alice books
The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row

Mr. Retrograde has been trying to get me to read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his idea of light vacation reading. But then he reads Greek histories for fun (Did you know that the plot of the movie The Warriors is based on Xenophon's Anabasis?)

Roswell-Perseis · 7th December 2006, 01:07 AM

Assigned: Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean; Trifles, Susan Glaspell; "The Things They Carried" (chapter one as short story), Tim O'Brien, Edgar Allen Poe

Not Assigned: Flowers for Algernon & 1984

Godmode · 15th December 2006, 04:08 AM

I was fascinated with "Lord of the Flies" and even wrote a paper on it for a political science class in college that I got an A for.

I loved On the Beach, The Great Gatsby, 1984, and many others (too many to list)

The truth is, in most cases I had read the books assigned in school long before on my own. I was an avid reader brought up by an avid reader. Our house was like a mini library, lol.

Boo · 16th December 2006, 06:57 AM

Originally Posted by gaiapan

My favorite required reading that I can remember is Les Miserables. While everyone else read the abridged version, I read the one that weighed five pounds. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I got a lot more out of the book then the rest of the class did.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card was also a good one, though I had read it long before my ninth grade teacher offered it as required reading.

I actually burned my copy of Les Mis because that's what I was reading it, MISERABLE.

I am very glad to hear that Ender's Game is being assigned as reading. It's something that should be and often isn't.

For myself, Shakespeare entranced me so much that I read most of the plays by the time I had graduated from high school. I also enjoyed James Joyce. Nothing else stands out.

Boo

pgwenthold · 16th December 2006, 08:02 AM

Originally Posted by Brian Jackson

I second!

I third the nom of Flowers for Algernon, although I never took the class that had it assigned reading. My brother did, though, and had the book, and I read it. Loved it.

My all-time favorite of something I was assigned is Animal Farm.

Doc Daneeka · 10th January 2007, 06:03 PM

I don't know if these two count, because they were assigned for a class I audited rather than paid for. Lol.

"Pale Fire" by Nabokov.
"The Crying of Lot 49" by Pynchon.

As for high school reading, I was lucky enough to have a class where, towards the end of the year, the teacher would allow students to assign themselves three books. He'd make recommendations though, based on what he knew of the students. It was a small class. He ended up getting me to read two things I'd never have come across on my own (partly because I read very little that is fictional):
"The Glass Bead Game" by Hesse
"The Autumn Of The Patriarch" by Garcia Márquez
The one I assigned myself was nowhere near as good as the two he suggested.

5th November 2006, 12:10 AM	#1
Sceptic Realist Bad Speller Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: All Along the Watchtower Posts: 952	Assigned Reading/Classic Literature you Loved I thought it would be a nice contrast to the other topic here. Just to kick things off, I'll start listing some that I REALLY liked/enjoyed: -Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -Anything by Shakespere -Brave New World -Candide -Lord of the Flies -Inherit the Wind -Picture of Dorian Grey -Crime and Punishment -Fahrenheit 451 -Catcher in the Rye I'm sure I'm missing several, but hopefully this will get things going!
	Last edited by Sceptic Realist; 5th November 2006 at 12:29 AM.

5th November 2006, 01:29 AM	#2
andyandy anthropomorphic ape Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: up a tree Posts: 8,196	truly, i hated all the assigned reading we were given at school....i think i hated it because we had to study and not just read ..... picking over it sentence by sentence - "and here DH Lawrence is making a subtle reference to the 16th century protestant reformation with a witty double entendre....." whilst 30 collective minds glaze over for the next 50 minutes.... maybe i'm just a philistine The last "classic" i read was the epic of gilgamesh (available to read here )- i think it's a fascinating example of how literature transcends generations.....
	__________________ "Contentment is found in the music of Bach, the books of Tolstoy and the equations of Dirac, not at the wheel of a BMW or the aisles of Harvey Nicks."

5th November 2006, 06:39 AM	#3
TragicMonkey Poisoned Waffles Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: Monkey Posts: 30,112	Madame Bovary To Kill A Mockingbird But the former wasn't "taught", it was just an optional read, and the latter I didn't appreciate until I reread it at age 28.
	__________________ One cannot expect wisdom to flow from a pumpkin.

5th November 2006, 08:40 AM	#4
orpheus Thinker Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Here. Where else is there? Posts: 233	Alain Fournier: "Le Grand Meaulnes" (in the original French, or in several English translations - either with the French title, or as "The Wanderer") Haunting. Still one of the most important books to me.
	__________________ "Sometimes the kindest thing you can say about God is that he doesn’t exist." -Rabbi Sherwin Wine

5th November 2006, 09:23 AM	#6
Tanja Comfortably Numb Join Date: Nov 2003 Posts: 3,002	Originally Posted by Sceptic Realist I thought it would be a nice contrast to the other topic here. Just to kick things off, I'll start listing some that I REALLY liked/enjoyed: -Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -Anything by Shakespere -Brave New World -Candide -Lord of the Flies -Inherit the Wind -Picture of Dorian Grey -Crime and Punishment -Fahrenheit 451 -Catcher in the Rye I'm sure I'm missing several, but hopefully this will get things going! I cannot even remember which of these I had to read in school, and which I read of my own will, but out of your list I enjoyed Brave New World (it was my favourite book for a while), Candide and Catcher in the Rye. Catcher in the Rye made sense when I was a teenager, I think I re-read it in my 20's and found it slightly annoying. I also enjoyed Pygmalion, I enjoyed it even though we spent far too much time on it in my English class in high schol. I very much enjoyed Master and Margarita, but I cannot remember if I had to read it in school.
Tanja Comfortably Numb Join Date: Nov 2003 Posts: 3,002	Last edited by Tanja; 5th November 2006 at 10:02 AM. Reason: spelling

5th November 2006, 09:08 AM	#5
Sceptic Realist Bad Speller Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: All Along the Watchtower Posts: 952	Originally Posted by andyandy truly, i hated all the assigned reading we were given at school....i think i hated it because we had to study and not just read ..... picking over it sentence by sentence - "and here DH Lawrence is making a subtle reference to the 16th century protestant reformation with a witty double entendre....." whilst 30 collective minds glaze over for the next 50 minutes.... Well, I personally never payed any attention to the analyzing, and just read it and interpreted it in my own way. That usually got me by on the tests and essays. But I agree, too much analysis just ruins it. Originally Posted by andyandy The last "classic" i read was the epic of gilgamesh (available to read here )- i think it's a fascinating example of how literature transcends generations..... A very interesting read. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

5th November 2006, 09:27 AM	#7
Terry Zeitgeist-impaired Technical Moderator Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: logged in to the server Posts: 6,450	The Crucible.

5th November 2006, 09:32 AM	#8
Fitter Illuminator Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Where the pavement ends Posts: 3,505	The Dubliners by Joyce

5th November 2006, 09:34 AM	#9
Maja Thinker Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: Zagreb, Croatia Posts: 159	Assigned reading I loved: Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment and The Idiot Edgar Allan Poe: Stories Boccaccio: Decameron Corneille: El Cid Dickens: The Cricket on the Hearth (Judging by the posts in the other thread, Dickens seems to be very unpopular. I never hated any of his works, but I did skip some boring parts to get to what was happening to the characters.) Flaubert: Madame Bovary Kafka: The Trial (although I didn't like it as much when I read it at school as I did when I re-read it as an adult) ...and many more that I can't think of now. Classics I read as an adult and loved: Everything by Jane Austen, especially Northanger Abbey Tolstoy: The Resurrection Thackeray: Vanity Fair H. C. Andersen's stories and fairy tales (hated them as a child, love them now.)

5th November 2006, 06:29 PM	#10
a_unique_person Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Mt Disappointment Posts: 33,339	My Brother Jack. Australian, so for much of the world obscure, but like many books, interesting to re-read when you are older. The Catcher in the Rye. Once again, re-reading when older puts a whole new perspective on it. Catch-22. Slaughterhouse 5. Lord of the Flies. Yet again, re-reading..... Huckleberry Finn. The Go-Between. Didn't understand anything about it at the time, but loved it. Re-reading ...... Could not get past Shakespeares language, unfortunately, not good at languages at all.
	__________________ *Continually pushing the boundaries of mediocrity.* Everything is possible, but not everything is probable. For if a man pretend to me that God hath spoken to him supernaturally, and immediately, and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce to oblige me to believe it. Hobbes

5th November 2006, 07:04 PM	#11
LibraryLady ...but not JUST a LibraryLady Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Building a house in the common ground Posts: 13,079	Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold.
	__________________ What would Hüsker Dü? I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight, seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about. Mildred Loving

6th November 2006, 01:05 AM	#12
Corpse Cruncher Guest Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: In the great cooking pot in the sky. Posts: 3,811	Classic I loved reading over the years are Time Machine- Wells Brighton Rock - Greene. Captain Blood - Sabatini. Oliver Twist - Dickens Alice in Wonderland - Carroll Age of Innocence- Wharton Lady Chatterleys Lover- Lawerence.

7th November 2006, 11:55 AM	#13
zizzybaluba sultan of zip Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: glen burnie, md, usa Posts: 383	T.H. White's The Once and Future King Flowers for Algernon
	__________________ Have a zippy day!

7th November 2006, 11:59 AM	#14
Buckaroo Graduate Poster Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: Washington, D.C. Posts: 1,717	Tom Sawyer. Read it for the first time in 3rd grade, and multiple times between then and when it was assigned in 7th. Knew it back to front by that point, and suffered for it at the hands of bullies. The Martian Chronicles. Farenheit 451. Liked it so much I read it in one sitting. Dune. Optional reading, picked from a list made by an English teacher who I now know to be enlightened. Had read it several times already, so was able to correct her when she quizzed me on it. The Outsiders. Hated The Sound and the Fury until about halfway through, when I understood what Faulkner was driving at. Decided at that point that I loved it. Somehow managed to miss being forced to read this in school, but I love, LOVE, LOVE Moby Dick. Never understood the ire heaped upon this book.
	__________________ "You ask me do I love you... does the pope live in the woods? Quad Erat Demonstrandum, baby... " "Oh! You speak French!" -- Airhead, by Thomas Dolby "When you're slapped you'll take it and like it." -- Sam Spade

7th November 2006, 12:10 PM	#15
zizzybaluba sultan of zip Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: glen burnie, md, usa Posts: 383	Almost forgot-- Huck Finn (I didn't care much for Tom Sawyer, but I absolutely loved Finn).
	__________________ Have a zippy day!

7th November 2006, 12:22 PM	#16
StewartP Critical Thinker Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: Angouleme, France Posts: 449	Originally Posted by Buckaroo;2076884Somehow managed to miss being forced to read this in school, but I love, LOVE, [b LOVE[/b] Moby Dick. Never understood the ire heaped upon this book. Moby Dick is a DAMN FINE book. It wasn't required reading when I was at school, but I discovered it a couple of years ago. At school (gosh, near on 20 years ago now) We had to read: Merchant of Venice Othello Measure for Measure Vanity Fair - Thackary Murder in the Catheral - T. S. Eliot The Inheritors - William Golding My Family & Other Animals - Gerald Durrel Persuasion - Jane Austin I found The Inheritors brilliant. I re-read it again a few years ago and it is still brilliant. Golding wadn't just a one-trick pony.
	__________________ A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Groucho Marx

7th November 2006, 12:51 PM	#17
Katana Illuminator Join Date: May 2006 Posts: 4,894	I had to take a 20th-century American Lit class in college to full some pre-requisites for something else. I had it in my mind that I was going to hate it, but I absolutely fell in love. These were some of the highlights. Like Buckaroo, The Sound and the Fury took a while, but, in the end, I was able to appreciate it much more than I would have reading it on my own. This class helped me to get so much more out of these books than I would have otherwise. Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner East of Eden - Steinbeck The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway Other favorites from high school classes that come to mind: The Pearl - Steinbeck One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Solzhenitsyn Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
Katana Illuminator Join Date: May 2006 Posts: 4,894	__________________ "I think Katana is as big of a perv as the rest of us." - Dragonrock "The rationality was there, and clear and concise. The condescention was hinted at and was like french onion dip on the perfect potato chip. Tasted like woo smackdown." - Fowlsound (aka Ducky, darnit) "Katana is one quick shut-yo-mouth!" - JonnyFive StopSylviaBrowne

7th November 2006, 03:46 PM	#18
gaiapan New Blood Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 6	My favorite required reading that I can remember is Les Miserables. While everyone else read the abridged version, I read the one that weighed five pounds. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I got a lot more out of the book then the rest of the class did. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card was also a good one, though I had read it long before my ninth grade teacher offered it as required reading.
gaiapan New Blood Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 6

7th November 2006, 09:45 PM	#19
bruto Penultimate Amazing Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: way way north of Diddy Wah Diddy Posts: 11,191	It's been a long time, and I've forgotten some, I'm sure. I got The Stranger and Candide in both English and French at various times and liked them both both times. I liked Racine in French too, but I now remember neither the French nor the details of the plays. Any Shakespeare. No teacher could kill him. A couple tried. Shakespeare won. Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, Invisible Man (Wright, not Wells), Lord of the Flies, but I'd already read it so maybe it doesn't count, and I actually did rather enjoy Moby Dick even though it was pretty slow going at times. I had that as part of an "American studies" course combining literature and history, and so we got more into the historical and social aspects of the story, rather than the usual crap about Ahab and his metaphorical quest. Not much else I can think of before college level that was both assigned and enjoyed, though I'm sure there were a few others.
	__________________ "Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.(Samuel Johnson) The gods are less for their love of praise....(Wendell Berry)

8th November 2006, 10:07 AM	#20
EvilSmurf JREF Bowl Pool Champion Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: The USA Posts: 1,551	Macbeth Hamlet Tomorrow When The War Began Catch 22
	__________________ Ah, Australian animals. If it isn't venomous, carnivorous, or has foot-long claws, it's a tourist.

9th November 2006, 05:04 PM	#21
Glen.Nogami Critical Thinker Join Date: Sep 2006 Posts: 495	The Stranger The Old Man and the Sea (most of Hemingway's stuff, actually.) Invisible Man is awesome. (Ellison, not Wells.) East of Eden
	__________________ Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low. -Isaiah 40:4

10th November 2006, 01:35 PM	#22
Trigood Muse Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 994	Originally Posted by bruto Any Shakespeare. No teacher could kill him. A couple tried. Shakespeare won. Nominated this line. Classic, Bruto.
Trigood Muse Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 994	__________________ Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you cannot bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain. - Kahlil Gibran

10th November 2006, 02:12 PM	#23
Trigood Muse Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 994	I usually liked the assigned readings. I guess I was a nerd that way. But not always. (I'll post those on the other thread.) The ones I really liked: The Scarlet Letter Great Expectations Pride and Prejudice Hamlet The Wild Duck All My Sons (and lots of other plays that I can't remember; there was an actual semester-long course in drama, which I took) I don't remember being assigned a lot of books/novels in high school; maybe it was just the teachers I got. On my own, I enjoyed: 1984 War and Peace The Hobbit The Lord of the Rings Various novels of Madeleine L'Engle Poetry of William Blake and Wm Butler Yeats A little later in adulthood, I enjoyed: Tess of the D'Urbervilles The World According to Garp Burger's Daughter A Passage to India Something about "being assigned" a book makes things less fun for me.
Trigood Muse Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 994	__________________ Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you cannot bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain. - Kahlil Gibran Last edited by Trigood; 10th November 2006 at 02:16 PM. Reason: add P&P

10th November 2006, 08:14 PM	#24
Foolmewunz Grammar Resistance Leader Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Pattaya, Thailand Posts: 20,530	One school-assigned - Huckleberry Finn One personal choice - Gravity's Rainbow I think I've re-read them both at least a half-dozen times. (Yes, even GR - although it's more like always having a copy open to some chapter so that I can just revel in it.) Pynchon's my personal pick for greatest American author, although I guess a few more homeruns would help. Like any great writer, he's had his ups and downs, but V, Gravity's Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon rate very highly in my estimation. I'm anxiously awaiting the release of Against the Day later this month.
	__________________ Ha! Foolmewunz has just been added to the list of people who aren't complete idiots. Hokulele Don't you wish someone had slapped baby Hitler really really hard? [i] Dr. Buzzo 02/13 [i]

11th November 2006, 04:37 AM	#25
slingblade Guest Join Date: Jul 2005 Posts: 23,642	Oooh, I like this topic! Howard's End The Old Man and the Sea Bartleby the Scribner Canterbury Tales Beowulf Hard Times Anything by Flannery O'Connor, especially A Good Man is Hard to Find Anything by T.S. Elliot, although I didn't like The Wasteland at first, at all! I had to get into it, break it open, and learn to enjoy its chewy literary goodness. And a great deal of classic poetry I had thought I'd hated, because of the way it was taught in high school. When I got reacquainted with Frost, Dickinson, HD, and Yeats, I found I loved them because we were examining meanings and allusions instead of foot and meter and rhyme.
slingblade Guest Join Date: Jul 2005 Posts: 23,642

11th November 2006, 07:44 AM	#26
ranson Scheme Monkey Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 1,049	Of all I was forced to read for class, my favorite was Machiavelli's The Prince. The two of us in the room that "got" the book effectively terrified the rest of the class with our discussions of it. I enjoyed Brave New World, but partially because I got to argue that it wasn't a dystopia as the teacher defined it. I got to use Asimov's Foundation series as the basis of one of my senior research papers. The other used Heller's Catch-22 and Something Happend. Those were good. I liked Of Mice and Men, and all the works of the Bard that were acted out/read out loud instead of just assigned. Farenheit 451 was in there, too. Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and Dante round it out, I think.
ranson Scheme Monkey Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 1,049	__________________ It's your contention that being sane is living a sheltered life? -- thaiboxerken

11th November 2006, 09:38 AM	#27
Timble Muse Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Wisteria Avenue, Huntingdon Posts: 934	I liked Shakespeare, Beowulf, Alice In Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass, also some John Steinbeck. Also Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, I've read other Dickens, but those weren't on the syllabus.
	__________________ We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

11th November 2006, 12:11 PM	#28
TJ Amateur Rhythmatist Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Denver, Co Posts: 2,352	Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine by Tom Wolfe Any and all Mark Twain, especially the essays The Stranger by Camus Animal Farm, other Orwell The Inferno by Dante Slaughterhouse-five by Vonnegut Shakespeare's sonnets, but not so much the plays. I had trouble wrapping my young brain around reading a script. Even though I loved the stories, I thought they were better performed rather than read. All Dickens Scarlet letter Frankenstein (LOVED IT!) One's I didn't like: Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy Faust Crime and punishment
	__________________ In most of the states of this union, I could not give testimony. Christianity has such a contemptable opinion of human nature that it does not believe that a man can tell the truth unless frightened by a belief in God. - Ingersoll My Blog

11th November 2006, 01:13 PM	#29
Brian Jackson Graduate Poster Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Atlanta, Georgia Posts: 1,024	Originally Posted by zizzybaluba Flowers for Algernon I second!

11th November 2006, 02:58 PM	#30
Elizabeth I Olympic Equestrian Wannabe Join Date: Jul 2006 Location: Defending the Alamo Posts: 9,269	Pride and Prejudice To Kill a Mockingbird Babbitt The Canterbury Tales Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Beowulf A Midsummer Night's Dream Les Misérables Great Expectations Huckleberry Finn A Perfect Day for Bananafish and Other Stories by J.D. Salinger (but I HATED Catcher in the Rye)
	__________________ • There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man. - Winston Churchill • Never wrestle with a pig - you just get dirty and the pig enjoys it. • My blog: Pardon me, may I ask...

15th November 2006, 03:14 PM	#31
malha111 Student Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Sweden Posts: 34	I dunno if it's a classic by your standards, but Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat is my all-time favourite book, maybe with the exception of August Strindbergs De Lycksaliges Ö (the English title eludes me, but it translates into something like Island of The Fortunate).

4th December 2006, 05:01 PM	#32
MetalSeagull Critical Thinker Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: NC Posts: 367	Ivanhoe The Three Musketeers Of Mice and Men Don Quixote Cry the Beloved Country One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Three Men in a Boat

4th December 2006, 07:51 PM	#33
Kochanski Master Poster Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: Anonymous Unimportant Place (not a secret Scorpion training facility for Shosuro ninjas) Posts: 2,669	From school I loved: All of Shakespeare, I was fortunate, my teachers did a good job with it and I enjoyed it thoroughly. All of Dickens, I know some people can't take him, but he does pull me into the story and once I am in I can just devour any good tale. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn Cheaper by the Dozen, read it in grade school, it was fun. After I finished school I got into Jane Austen and enjoyed her. Don't think I would have so much in school. I have a few other favorites, don't know if you could consider them classics, but I love E F Benson's Mapp & Lucia stories, they are such fun. Anything by James Thurber I am probably forgetting lots of others.
	__________________ The faith of a skeptic is always in doubt Ninja weasel courtesy of http://www.cheeseweasel.net I-con 31 - March 30 - April, 1, 2012 - There is no place like home - Stony Brook http://www.iconsf.org/

5th December 2006, 09:00 AM	#34
Myriad Hyperthetical Moderator Join Date: Nov 2006 Posts: 8,205	Quote: Flowers for Algernon This wasn't assigned reading for me. I encountered the original novella in an SF anthology. And I don't think "loved" is quite the right word. Perhaps, "was reduced to a near-catatonic state for several days by" better describes it. I was a stereotypical preteen, lonely, over-schooled nerd.* And I have a mentally retarded twin brother. Anyone who's read the story, I invite to imagine the impact for themselves. (Just as well it wasn't a school assignment. If required to discuss it in class, I probably would have just sat there and screamed incoherently.) Respectfully, Myriad *In case you're wondering why I use the past tense. I'm no longer preteen or lonely.

6th December 2006, 11:36 AM	#35
Retrograde Critical Thinker Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Just downstream from the Big Tree Posts: 437	I've managed to avoid college English, so all my assigned reading dates back to high school. What I particularly liked: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar most of The Scarlet Letter A Tale of Two Cities (even if the heroine was a dud) War and Peace (for 17 year olds it's a great big soap opera) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (every American should read this book. So should many non-Americans. Unfortunately, most people seem to focus on the language (aside from the n-word, the dialect Huck uses is not easy) and never get to the part where Huck says that if rescuing Jim is wrong, by damn he'll go to hell) Great Books I've particularly liked since then: Moby DickCarroll's Alice books The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row Mr. Retrograde has been trying to get me to read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his idea of light vacation reading. But then he reads Greek histories for fun (Did you know that the plot of the movie The Warriors is based on Xenophon's Anabasis?)