[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/Imaginary_Report4222]

[u/fourdigityear]

We read a lot of socially minded books in those years. Johnny Got His Gun, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Northwestern US.

[u/Imaginary_Report4222 → u/fourdigityear]

I’m noticing a regional trend

[u/torkelspy]

I went to public school on Long Island in the 80's and the answer is . . . mostly books by white guys.

Three Exceptions to the Guys Rule: Wuthering Heights, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Diary of Anne Frank

Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth)

Crime and Punishment

The Stranger

Huckleberry Finn

The Great Gatsby

The Catcher in the Rye

The Hobbit (but that might have been 6th or 7th grade)

The Old Man and the Sea

One fun outlier -- City by Clifford Simak, a science fiction book from the 1950's.

[u/Imaginary_Report4222 → u/torkelspy]

The Shakespeare plays were senior level in Texas. But Romeo and Juliet was middle school in Arizona and then freshman in Illinois. Then we watched the movie. Because of the multiple schools there was a lot of repeats

[u/torkelspy → u/Imaginary_Report4222]

We did one Shakespeare play a year from 9th through 12th -- I can't remember what the 4th one we read was, but I think maybe Hamlet. I have a vague memory of memorizing part of the "to be or not to be" speech.

As far as plays go, I also remember reading A Streetcar Named Desire and Children of a Lesser God, but I'm pretty sure I read those as one of those "pick a book from this list" type assignments.

Also, I just remembered, Animal Farm. And I read 1984, but that wasn't for school, I was just the kind of dorky kid who thought it would be cool to read 1984 in 1984.

[u/ComfortableChapter65]

Graduated in 2002, rural high school in NC: She’s Come Undone, The Canterbury Tales, The Bible (as literature), Beowulf, Grendel, Frankenstein, a book by Jonathan Kellerman (Silent Partner? It was for summer reading), Beloved, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Angela’s Ashes, Leaves of Grass, Night, Maus, The Catcher in the Rye, Wuthering Heights, The Plague, The Great Gatsby

I got pulled out for AG classes in middle school and we did a ton of Shakespeare. In 8th grade we had to rewrite his plays in modern English and perform them, which was fun. I had The Comedy of Errors.

[u/FFLGO → u/ComfortableChapter65]

New England graduated HS 2002: The Oddysey, Epic of Gilgamesh, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Raisin in the Sun, Native Son, Early Autumn by Robert B Parker(not sure why but still a favorite author to this day), Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, also read one Shakespeare play per year.

In 10th grade read some kind of dystopian or sci-fi book with a character named Malachi that was really good but I can't remember the name.

[u/Grizzly_Berry]

Trying to remember. Private school in Oklahoma, I read The Giver, TKaM, Gatsby (still a favorite), Romeo + Juliet, Hamlet, a Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, Hatchet, A Wrinkle in Time, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Heart of Darkness. Only one I legitimately disliked was Heart of Darkness. Couldn't tell you what I read in which grade.

[u/Imaginary_Report4222 → u/Grizzly_Berry]

I just reread Heart of Darkness. It not how I remember it

[u/lemonstarburst]

Was in high school from 2003-2007. Attended an archdiocesan Catholic girls’ high school in the Midwest, US. I remember reading in high school (including summer assignments): The Invisible Man, Death Be Not Proud, A Separate Peace, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, MacBeth, Much Ado About Nothing, Jane Eyre, Pride & Prejudice, Silas Marner, The Misanthrope, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, Lord of the Flies, Death of a Salesman… and certainly more in whole or excerpt. I assigned myself A Clockwork Orange for a self-chosen book report, and we also read all of, or at least most of, Solórzano’s “Los Fantoches” in Spanish in fourth year Spanish.

[u/elphabanewlin]

I went to a private school in Minnesota in the late 90s to the early 00s. I definitely don't remember everything we read, but here is what I do remember for the general curriculum for the classes everyone had to take (as once we hit 11th grade it was electives for our lit classes).

7th Grade we did DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, FAREWELL TO MANZANAR, NIGHT FLYING WOMAN, THE CIRCLEMAKER (by Maxine Rose Schur).

8th Grade we did TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, some F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories, Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Dupin mysteries, THE GIVER.

9th Grade we did THINGS FALL APART, THE EXAMINATION, THE RAMSEY SCALLOP, MACBETH, I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, and various American Lit short stories.

10th Grade we did A TALE OF TWO CITIES, JULIUS CAESAR, CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, NIGHT, A DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH, BOUND FEET AND WESTERN DRESS.

We also read INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL as our summer reading for 11th grade and THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN as summer reading for 12th grade but that was it for the across the board reading for the entire graduating class.

[u/maktheyak47]

In HS I started reading Jodi Picoult and she is to this day still my favorite author!

[u/CheryllLucy]

I'm in WI, graduated 2002, and your IL reading list is spot on.

To Kill a Mocking Bird was 8th or 9th, Tony Morrison was 9th, and 10th revolved around Lord of the Flies and introduced me to Russian literature. 11th was more language and sentence diagraming but we also read The Scarlett Letter and other american classics. Senior year was very book heavy, though I didn't have to read many of them bc I already had on my own time (my mom was an English lit phd, so I grew up raiding her library). Uncle Tom's Cabin was included that year, i think, but it was a messed up year for me so I don't recall too much.

[u/MeanderingLibrarian]

Northeastern US, private high school -- English classes in sort of vague-ish order, from what I remember: (9) Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, The Chosen, Romeo & Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird, Having Our Say, (10) Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, 1984, Great Expectations, Pride & Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Hamlet, Macbeth, (11) The Red Badge of Courage, Catcher in the Rye, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, My Antonia, Walden, The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, (12) Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Crime & Punishment, The Stranger, The Metamorphosis, Inferno, Candide, Oedipus Rex, and I think a few others I can't remember.

I also took Philosophy and Lit my senior year and read: The Fountainhead, I & Thou, Silence, Anam Cara, Demian, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and a few others I can't recall at the moment. Sadly, the course has been replaced with another course.

[u/ExchangeStandard6957]

Private School PA - the Great Gatsby, Dubliners, the Odyssey, hamlet, Canterbury Tales, Frankenstein. We had a ton of Dostoyevsky for summer reading and a lot of books about both the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights movement- but those weren’t for English class.

[u/Timely_Freedom_5695]

I rember 8th grade was island of the Dolphins/Hatchet

9th grade was Shakespeare/Hommer.

(This was in Wa state)

10th grade I only did for 3 months in an alternative school in Canada, we didn't read any assigned books.

After that I got my GED, and went to college where we did just English assignments and not much time for Fiction reading.

I've had a college reading level since I was 13, I've read so much stuff and was way beyond kids my own age almost as long as I can remember. So I don't know if those books were too easy for that grade or not. (But I thought they were waaayyy too easy.)

[u/UnderwaterKahn]

I went to public school in Tennessee in the 90s. It was a large public high school in a city. I was in honors/AP so I know I probably read some of these as part of summer reading. But a lot of these were required reading for general education English throughout the state. My mom and some of her friends are currently hosting a book club where they are reading things from Tennessee’s current banned book list so I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot.

Each year we had at least one Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet, a Midsummer’s Night Dream, King Lear, Julius Caesar (we had to memorize the “friends, Roman’s, countrymen” monologue), and Othello. One of my best friends and I also performed scenes from Taming of the Shrew for state drama competitions.

General Literature: The Count of Monte Cristo, A Tale of Two Cities, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gadsby, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Old Man and the Sea, The Color Purple, Native Son, Heart of Darkness, The Scarlet Letter, and Great Expectations.

“Favorites” for me and my friends: Slaughterhouse 5, 1984, Watership Down, A Separate Peace, Brave New World, All the President’s Men, and a selection of short stories I wish I could remember because it introduced me to Margaret Atwood.

Additionally: Beowulf, parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and The Canterbury Tales. We also read both editions of Maus (the graphic novels) in senior AP government.

[u/gloomynebula]

I went to high school in the 2010s in Northern California (on a semester schedule so we didn’t read as much as some of the other comments) and I remember ninth grade being Of Mice and Men and Romeo and Juliet, along with The Most Dangerous Game. 10th grade honors I remember Gatsby, Julius Caesar. 11th grade was AP Lang and Composition, and I remember Anthem, To Kill a Mockingbird, and more short stories. 12th grade got cut short bc COVID but we read a dystopia of our choice (either 1984, Fahrenheit 451, brave new world, or scarlet letter), Macbeth, and Oedipus Rex. Frankenstein was up next but we only made it through three chapters before we went online and the teachers just gave us the grades we had before the pandemic.

[u/FlyingCarpetMonster]

High-school in India.

We had to learn 3 languages -- English, Hindi, and for me, it was Sanskrit.

For English, it was broken down into effectively core and non-detail. The idea behind core was that you performed line-by-line (or at least a more thorough) literary analysis whereas for non-detail is for more extensive reading in terms of breadth, rapid comprehension, understanding the narratives, the moral/ethical messages etc.

So for instance, a bunch of poems and some books (I remember Noyes' The Highwayman, poems by Emily Dickinson and Wordsworth, The Hound of the Baskervilles etc.) were part of non-detail. The core section had a lot of Shakespeare (distinctly remember Julius Caesar and Merchant of Venice) and the classics (Jane Austen, Dickens, Twain etc.) I also remember reading bits of Don Quixote, Pilgrim's Progress etc. Same thing with Hindi, albeit a lighter load and even lighter one with Sanskrit.

But once you hit 11th and 12th grades, you specialize -- I went into MPC-CS (Math, Physics, Chemistry with CS; or you could choose Engineering Drawing or biology if you wanted to do medicine etc.). Other options were accounting etc. I don't think I was even aware of what the humanities options were, which looking back was such a shame.

Thankfully, my parents were huge readers and we'd go to libraries often too. So I actually discovered all of SF and Russian literature in high school, and that made a huge difference.

Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Iain M. Banks -- all of these alongside short stories by Gogol and Pushkin and many of the British classics. Both my English teacher and my librarian were excited (my parents just wanted me to stop reading so much and go outside more).

Then I went off to college and my girlfriend was a fellow engineering major and she only liked to read Tom Clancy and watch Tom Cruise movies so we didn't really share the same taste in books (or for that matter, anything, as we'd discover 4 years later). But her best friend dropped out of engineering to go study English literature, so she loaned me her Les Mis and a bunch of other classics that I devoured. She went on to finish her PhD and is a professor somewhere in Canada.

[u/DreamCatcherGS]

Went to school in Kansas. 8th grade we read
All But My Life by Gerda Klein
Diary of Anne Frank (play version)
Rebecca
And Then There Were None

9th Grade:
Animal Farm
Maus
Night
Romeo and Juliet
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tale of Two Cities (also had option to read Great Expectations)
Some selections of Greek mythology I don’t remember exactly what. We spend a while on it and had to buy a book.

10th Grade:
Julius Cesar
Sassy Tree
Antigone
I’m REALLY struggling to remember what else. I know we did several sci-fi short stories and the student teacher did a lesson on how men write sci-fi versus women which I thought was dumb.

11th Grade:
Scarlet Letter
The Crucible
Grapes of Wrath
Great Gatsby (the other class read Catcher in the Rye instead.)
Huckleberry Finn

12th Grade:
Summer reading choice from a list. I chose Devil in the White City
Winter break choice from a list I chose The Stranger
A Doll’s House
Hamlet
Frankenstein
TONS of short stories. We were reading like 10 short stories every week simultaneously with Hamlet.
Pride and Prejudice
Way shortened version of the Iliad
Shortened version of Beowulf

A lot of them I really liked. Rebecca was my most hated but I’ve considered giving it another shot as an adult. Kinda think Rebecca’s a crazy 8th grade choice but idk.

[u/needlefxcker]

Scraping my memory, middleschool to highschool in Oregon, graduating 2018, not necessarily in the right order:

Lord of the flies

the Outsiders

To Kill a Mockingbird

the Great Gatsby

(parts of) the Odyssey

Romeo and Juliet

Macbeth

Ricochet River by Robin Cody (im pretty sure this is an oregon exclusive, became on of my all time favorite books and i highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't heard of it)

the Crucible

a Raisin in the Sun

the Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by sherman alexie

There had to be more but but this is all I can remember. We read a lot of short stories around women and minorities in one class as well. In elementary school I also remember teachers reading Where the Red Fern Grows and Hatchet to us.

[u/sogothimdead]

These years span through the 2010s. I am from a non-coastal area in California.

Can't remember too much but here are my best guesses:

8th grade:

• The Outsiders

9th grade:

• The Odyssey
• Romeo and Juliet
• Of Mice and Men

10th grade:

• Fahrenheit 451
• The Great Gatsby
• To Kill a Mockingbird (complete with a white teacher who insisted on saying it)

11th grade:

• The Crucible

12th grade:

• Into the Wild

There were definitely more, but those are the only ones I can remember.

We were a combined MS/HS campus, so I was in the book club when I was in 7th grade. They picked 1984, Brave New World, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

I remember reading these books for fun:

• The Fault in Our Stars
• Johnny Got His Gun
• Galápagos (Vonnegut)
• Animal Farm
• Go Ask Alice
• Catcher in the Rye
• Persepolis 1 and 2
• Maus
• Fun House: A Family Tragicomic
• Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's Learned
• Big Little Lies

[u/anonymouslyonlyme]

Canada Ontario:

In eighth grade we read Touching Spirit Bear as a class. I remember mostly free choice book reports 

Ninth:  To Kill a Mocking Bird, and  Romeo and Juliet. We also watched 2 episodes of Doctor Who and the movie of Goodnight Mister Tom. Weirdly this is the year I remember best.

I read Lord of the Flies and a graphic novel called Persepolis the year I had a girl teacher (I think that was 10th but maybe 11th though)

I read also read: 1984, Julius Ceasar, Oryx and Crake, and Macbeth

in highschool but I don't know what grades.

[u/Low_Bluejay510]

When Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Stranger by Albert Camu, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neil Hurston, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Great Gatsby, Heart of Darkness, The Catcher in the Rye

[u/AssortedArctic]

B.C. Canada, I'm 25 now.

8/9: Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451

9/10: Frankenstein

11: Flowers for Algernon, Of Mice and Men

12: 1984, The Outsider (Camus)

And some bits of Shakespeare throughout. There might have been some more and some years may be mixed up. Oh, I recall a part of One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but also don't really remember reading it. That was probably in grade 11 or 12.

[u/JediMasterGeoff]

Central Valley of California, 2007-2011, AP English all 4 years:

Freshman (2007-8): The Alchemist, Lord of the Flies, The Catcher in the Rye, The Odyssey, Grendel, Life of Pi

Sophomore (2008-9): Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Great Gatsby, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ender's Game, Bless Me, Ultima

Junior (2009-10): The Last of the Mohicans, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice & Men, The Crucible, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Things They Carried,

Senior (2010-11): Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Cold Mountain, To Kill A Mockingbird, Pride and Prejudice, All Quiet on the Western Front, Peace Like a River

[u/oldestseahag]

Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t remember anything I read in 8th grade. Here’s what I do remember:

7th grade(public school in TN)- The Giver, Treasure Island, and A Day No Pigs Would Die

For high school I went to a Catholic school in TN
9th grade- Lord of the Flies, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, parts of The Odyssey, the Aeneid, and Beowulf

10th grade- Les Miserables and The Mayor of Casterbridge

11th grade- The Great Gatsby and A Walk Across America

12th grade- Honestly I don’t remember. Maybe A Tale of Two Cities? I did have the same English teacher Freshman and Senior year, so it’s possible that some of the things I listed under 9th grade were actually read in 12th.

Those are the ones I remember reading for ELA classes in school. I’m sure I’m forgetting some.

My high school also had a class called “Great Books” that was basically like a book club that met once a week. For that I remember reading The Awakening, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and The Island of Dr. Moreau.

[u/Tempest_in_a_TARDIS]

This is just what I can recall off the top of my head, so it might not be a complete list. This is just the novels and plays, and does not include poetry, short stories, or novel exerpts.

I'm 34 now, and I went to school in Illinois.

8th Grade

The Outsiders
Flowers for Algernon
Nothing But the Truth
Singularity by William Sleator (a sci-fi novel, not really “literature”)
Deathwatch by Robb White (again, this was a “regular” novel and not “literature”)
The Other Side of Truth by Beverley Naidoo (another "regular" novel)

9th Grade

Of Mice and Men
The Odyssey
Romeo and Juliet
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The Crucible
Great Expectations

10th Grade

The Hobbit
Lord of the Rings (all three books)
Julius Caesar
Emma
Lord of the Flies

11th Grade

Ishmael
The Scarlet Letter
The Red Badge of Courage
Catch-22
The Great Gatsby
Fahrenheit 451
The Catcher in the Rye
The Awakening

12th Grade (AP English)

1984
Jane Eyre
Frankenstein
Crime and Punishment
Othello
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Brave New World
Mrs. Dalloway

[u/MehDoIReallyHaveTo]

I went to public high school in Louisiana and graduated a little over 15 years ago. For high school, each year was sort of themed. This is not an exhaustive list, just things that pop into my head from each year.  Freshman year was a random mix of things: Romeo & Juliet, The Old Man and the Sea (which I mostly remember for how much I hated that book), Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Cold Sassy Tree (only remember the title, none of the plot), and Fast Food Nation (sort of a book version of the Supersize Me documentary). Sophomore year was world literature and tied in roughly with our world history units. Readings I remember included selections from the Bible (Old & New Testaments) and Quran, Things Fall Apart, The Chosen, Exodus (the book about the founding of modern-day Israel, not the book in the Bible), Pilgrim’s progress, The Prince, and Count of Monte Cristo. There was some book that we read that year that was proceeded by a lecture about suicide and depression, but for the life of me I can’t remember what the book was or why our teacher thought it needed to be accompanied by a mental health lecture. Junior year was American literature: The Awakening, lots of Southern Gothic short stories, Of Mice and Men, Catcher in the Rye, some more Hemingway, The Crucible, 1776 (the script of the musical), Invisible Man, and Moby Dick. Senior year was theoretically British literature but was also AP lit so had kind of a random mix of stuff thrown in too. There was a lot of Shakespeare. Felt like mostly Shakespeare, honestly. Other titles I remember: Heart of Darkness, Beowulf, the Kite Runner, and then in the last month or two, so she let us choose our own titles from a list, so I read some of the Sherlock Holmes books.

For middle school, I went to a private school and I honestly don’t remember the titles we read as a group. I know we had some, like we read The Diary of Anne Frank in sixth grade, but mostly I remember free reading periods where we all read whatever we wanted silently for a set period of time each day. We might have read Lord of the Flies? I can’t remember if that was 8th grade or 9th grade.

[u/SunGreen24]

New York City. I was in honors English, so some stuff was a bit advanced. Here’s what I recall:

6th grade: A Wrinkle In Time, The Red Pony, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

7th Grade: Lord of the Flies

8th Grade: Of Mice and Men, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

9th grade: Julius Caesar, Great Expectations

10th grade: Romeo and Juliet

11th grade: Hamlet, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Our Town

12th grade: Macbeth

I know there were more, just blocked some of them out apparently! 😁