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Required Reading That You Enjoyed
some of the business books i've had to read have been quite enjoyable..such as Who Moved My Cheese & From Good to Great. In my English comp class we read Death of a Salesmen. I enjoyed that alot. other than that..my required reading has been less than satisfying.

Two of my favorite books are actually from required reading lists: Things Fall Apart and The Things They Carried.


I probably wouldn't read books like that unless I had to though, but it was a good book either way.

I liked a lot of the things I had to read. <3
Em...Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Go-Between, loads of poetry by W.B. Yeats and John Donne.

Catch-22, The Things they Carried, and All Quiet on the Western Front (my summer reading for my senior year of high school; one of 3 groups chose from)
The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Huck Finn were all from my sophomore year of high school and I've had to re-read Gatsby and Huck in college.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Others and Nature and Selected Essays (Emerson) were ones from college that I've enjoyed.
I haven't taken a good lit class where I just loved every bit of reading. My adviser told me that when he went to college, he got a list of books his freshman year (or maybe it was when he declared) and he was supposed to read those books. Any he hadn't finished by his senior year, they did a capstone course to cover them. I would have loved to do this!

Catch-22, The Things they Carried, and All Quiet on the Western Front (my summer reading for my senior year of high school; one of 3 groups chose from)
The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Huck Finn were all from my sophomore year of high school and I've had to re-read Gatsby and Huck in college.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Others and Nature and Selected Essays (Emerson) were ones from college that I've enjoyed.
I haven't taken a good lit class where I just loved every bit of reading. My adviser told me that when he went to college, he got a list of books his freshman year (or maybe it was when he declared) and he was supposed to read those books. Any he hadn't finished by his senior year, they did a capstone course to cover them. I would have loved to do this!


My friend's English class was reading The Catcher in the Rye, but my class wasn't. So after she was finished with the book I asked if I could borrow it and it's one of my favorite books to this day :)

In college I've had to read mostly short stories, but as far as novels go.. I really loved Cat's Cradle and One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest was ok.

Two other books that I read in high school that I absolutely love and would totally recomend to everyone would be the trial and the namesake. both amazing!!!
I really need to read The Great Gatsby..I don't recall us every having to read it. I think maybe it was on a summer reading list where you had to choose one of so many books..but I never HAD to read it.

Some required reading that I enjoyed (of what I remember)
Catcher in the Rye
To Kill a Mockingbird
Rebecca
The Bean Trees

Wuthering Heights
Any Shakespeare
Sophie's World
I have a hard time trying to remember what I read for fun and what I had to read.


The Great Gatsby
To Kill a Mockingbird
Macbeth
1984 (I read that one on my own first though)
a bunch of poetry by English people
The Once and Future King
Frankenstein

Okay well as an avid reader, through elementary, middle and high school I read all the required reading before the year we were supposed to read them. I loved them all. :-) I'd always get mad we were reading those books because I had already read them!
In college, I read THINGS FALL APART (which I actually disliked in high school but ended up loving in college). We read a lot of short stories in my college English class & we also read ALL SOULS, which was a book about Boston the 70s and 80s. (My school is located in the area so it made sense)
In college, I read THINGS FALL APART (which I actually disliked in high school but ended up loving in college). We read a lot of short stories in my college English class & we also read ALL SOULS, which was a book about Boston the 70s and 80s. (My school is located in the area so it made sense)


In college I would have to say Persuasion, The Mill on the Floss, Twelfth Night, Rebecca and Dracula. What can I say, I'm an English major.

All of my college required reading has been political science research and philosophy of religion. I don't really think I have any favorites from there, haha. I have a slew of books about Islam that I like, though.


When I first started college, the freshman class was assigned to read Caucasia by Danzy Senna over the summer. I had never heard of it but I loved it, and the author came to the campus during the second semester and autographed our books.
I also always enjoy the short stories I have to read for my English and Creative Writing classes.
As for poetry...there wasn't much. I liked many of Shakespeare's sonnets and I really loved My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, but that's about it.

I switched to college for 11th & 12th and I took all the English classes I could. I found my love for John Keats, Raymond Carver, and Victorian literature.

I also loved almost all of the poetry we read, which was mostly English and included Elizabeth Barret Browning, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Shakespeare, Petrarch (we did a whole section comparing their sonnets and writing our own), William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
I love poetry, and my teacher taught it very well.
I don't remember liking any of the required reading, but I do remember absolutle hatred for some. Since I have been out of classes that require reading for awhile now (other than text books) I have reread some of those required in high school and enjoyed some, tolerated others. I guess I am not too good with books that we had to disect. I want to read for enjoyment. I don't mind discussing reads but when you pick it apart piece by piece it ruins the book/story for me.

Most of the stuff I have to read for college I really like. For instance Death Without Weeping The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Although I dunno if 'like' is the right word for that book. It's the most horrible thing ever, it'll make you extremely angry at the way things are and extremely upset at the same time...but it's a fantastic book.

Required reading I remember liking in high school, or was at least glad someone made me read:The Bean Trees, 1984, Of Mice and Men, and The Joy Luck Club
The Handmaid's Tale is absolutely brilliant!!!





Registration for Spring starts next week and I'm really hoping to get into a Contemporary Lit class. All of the books on the syllabus sound great:
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
...and there are like six others.

Books mentioned in this topic
Mythology (other topics)The Things They Carried (other topics)
Things Fall Apart (other topics)
Things Fall Apart (other topics)
The Translator (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Edith Hamilton (other topics)Italo Calvino (other topics)
Haruki Murakami (other topics)
J.M. Coetzee (other topics)
Jeanette Winterson (other topics)
More...
Two books that I enjoyed in past terms are:
Things Fall Apart for an English 118 class I took.
My Name is Asher Lev for a Humanities class.
Both of these books are very good.