2015 Reading Challenge [Closed] discussion

I have a small problem.

I'm a stickler for the rules. And I have a problem with the topic about a book I was supposed to read in school, but didn't. I read everything I was supposed to. You know, because I was supposed to.

I'm thinking that a way around it, to satisfy my compulsion for completion & inherent inability to break the rules is to perhaps beg my fellow bookworms to name some of the books that they had to read in high school, and then I can pick one of those.

I'm in my late 30s, so if you are vaguely around my age, even better.

Thank you!

Okay, I just a little older than you, I can't remember everything I had to read, but here are some that I recall.

Of Mice & Men
Shakespear (can't remember which ones, because I really don't enjoy them)
Lord of the Flies


I had the same problem as you, so I just looked up what other places have on their reading lists. My daughter, who just finished gr 9 English, had to read The Book Thief, so if you haven't read that one, it is also an option.

Also this list could help.

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/4...

Good luck.

It's also worth looking at books that are on other countries syllabus! In the UK our reading lists haven't progressed much from when my mum was at high school 30 years ago! GCSE varies much less than A Level - all syllabuses are similar, here's a general list of GCSE books studied in the UK:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebite...

Then at A Level I remember my friends reading some of these (I didn't do A Level English Lit):
The Great Gatsby
The Kite Runner
Othello
Death of a Salesman
The Poems of Robert Browning
Frankenstein
Dr Faustus
The Bloody Chamber
The Handmaid's Tale
The Feminist Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy
Jane Eyre
Silas Marner
Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Poetry of Thomas Hardy
Mrs Warren's Profession
A Woman of No Importance
Oliver Twist
Wuthering Heights

So you're not really limited whatsoever! :D Also, if all else fails, most school study one Shakespeare play at each level. So if you're inclined you can always pick one of those up!

I had the same problem! I ended up choosing one from my daughter's year 10 reading list.

She has Night, The Bunker Diary (which is the one I''m reading for this category) and The Hunger Games on her list this year.

Some that I remember from mine and my sister's reading lists
Diving for Pearls,
The Divine Wind,
Tomorrow, When the War Began,
Unmentionable!,
Of Mice and Men,
Romeo and Juliet,
Othello,
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Thank you! I love that list Christine - I think I'll pick one from there. I've already read a bunch of them, but there are quite a few on there that match up with my existing to-read list.

It just bugs me not being able to follow something to the letter. I'm all twitchy just thinking about it.

I know, I'm more than a little sad.

Jody, I was the same at school. There were two books that I didn't read that I should have. One was To Kill a Mockingbird which would have been covered the next term if I hadn't moved, and had been covered the previous term by the school I moved to. But I'm reading that for my Pulitzer Prize winning book in Week 18.

And The Great Gatsby which is the book I never finished because it wasn't a compulsory read but one which my English teacher selected for a few of us to read. And we hated it so I never got past the second chapter and he allowed us to try something else.

I ended up picking something I knew my brother studied at school. Different classes had different book lists so he got different books than me. So I've picked Of Mice and Men because had I been in a different English class I should have read it. ;-)

Oh Cait - To Kill a Mockingbird was by far my favourite book that we had to read in high school. I hope you love it! I hated The Great Gatsby when I read it - I'm considering giving it another crack, but there are way too many books I *need* to read first.

The Great Gatsby is my Week 52 book. I'm determined to get to the end of it this time because I very rarely leave a book unfinished and this one will haunt me for evermore if I don't finish it eventually. ;-)

Ha! I was the same until I determinedly ploughed through those God-awful Twilight books. My stubbornness wouldn't let me not finish them, but then I realised that life's too short to really truly crap books. ;)

it is a shame the purpose of reading and high school is to get kids to really really want to read, and if you're reading Movie Dick which I hated; you're not inclined to read much more :-)The Great Gatsby was probably one of the few books I actually finished and high school :-(this is a great thread I think I will pick a book off of here most of the books I had to read and high school were not very exciting.

I absolutely loved Moby-Dick! It was certainly dry in parts but an absolute masterpiece. I can't imagine many high school students ploughing through it or enjoying it though - I'm glad I waited until now to read it.

The only book I read in high school that I remember really not enjoying was Animal Farm, but at 13 I was somewhat too young to understand the communism parallels. I've since re-read it and loved it though. Maybe I should give poor old Gatsby another shot ...

That's funny you say that :-) I now remember reading Animal Farm, I did like that one in high school.

Hi there - I'm quite a bit older actually, but in College in an American History class, we were to read Killer Angels by Michael Sharra. I actually really enjoyed this story of Gettysburg during the Civil War.

I loved reading in high school, but I honestly hated the books I had to read for high school. Here's some I never finished: Heart of Darkness, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Stranger, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

However, I would suggest The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness. I didn't finish this book when it was required in college. Not because I hated it but because I never had time to read.

Cait wrote: "The Great Gatsby is my Week 52 book. I'm determined to get to the end of it this time because I very rarely leave a book unfinished and this one will haunt me for evermore if I don't finish it even..."

The Great Gatsby is the book I have for 'Author that shares the same initials as me' because my initials are FF and he was the only author I could find but I have never had any desire to read that book and still don't! I'm still trying to find other authors with my initials but I'm struggling to find someone else but I really don't want to read that book! Lol!

Also, your choice to read 'Of Mice and Men' I think is a great choice. One of the few books I had to read at school that I genuinely loved. I thought it was a great book (it may have also been due to the fact that it was also the book that I found the easiest to write good essays about) but I still love that book!

I have The Scarlett Letter for mine which isn't a book that was even set for our school (I'm not sure if it's even set for any schools in England, maybe universities, but it seems to be set mostly for American schools) but I'm not 100% sure if I'll stick with that as my choice. To be completely honest, I only heard of the book properly from the movie Easy A!

I've decided to go with Kidnapped - I'm changing my interpretation of the "should have read" to being a more general should, rather than a book that was set for me to read. I consider it a classic that I certainly should have read while I was at school! :)

Jody, if you go to my page, I have a book shelf that is for school bookshttps://www.goodreads.com/review/list... . So, you can check out any of them. The only book I didn't finish in school was The Good Earth. I read the first hundred pages; did not like it at all, so for the first and only time I rented the movie (yes, this was before netflix and red box where you had to go to the video store and hunt the shelves for a remaining VHS). The movie was black and white, and only covered the hundred pages that I read. I could not believe it! This book was for summer reading, so when we returned to school in the fall and were tested on the book, I wrote a note to my teacher explaining why I was going to fail the test. I did fail it, and I didn't care.