Favorite Books You Read In School

What are your favorite and least favorite books you read during your years in school (ie, ages 9 - 18 or so)?  If you have more than one of each, make a list.

Favorites:
   Watership Down
   Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (first 3 of series)
   The Giver
   All Quiet On The Western Front
   Lord Of The Flies

Least Favorites:
   The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
   Song Of Solomon (Toni Morrison)

My favourites were (that I was actually forced to read) probably The Giver, Lord of the Rings, and A Seperate Peace.

I really want to read the Giver again sometime. Recently I was thinking about how wonderful it was. My 8th grade class had a big discussion about how interpretation of the ending but I never said what I thought: the main character was going towards a narrow light that kept getting bigger and bigger until he went through it (am I remembering this right?). I always thought of it as he was being reborn. Either actually being born and the entire book is written as a dream-type of thing he was having in the womb, or just metaphorically.

Most people always seem to hate A Seperate Peace. I read it when the rest of the class was reading Lord of the Rings, which I had already read, and I loved it.

I won't even get into my least favourite books. I can't even remember most of them as I have chosen to forget their existence.

Favorites:
   Watership Down (yay)
   Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
   The Redwall series - Mossflower and The Bellmaker are the best imho
   Slaughterhouse Five
   Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series of fantasy novels (still my favorite fantasies of all time)
   The Giver
   Lord of the Flies
   The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury)
   I Sing The Body Electric! (Bradbury)
   Anthem (Ayn Rand)
   1984
   Animal Farm
   A Clockwork Orange
   The So You Want To Be A Wizard series by Diane Duane
   The King Must Die
   Flowers for Algernon
   Iliad and Odyssey
   The Aeneid (in the original Latin - we had to translate the first book in class and I chose to read a good portion of the rest on my own)

I hated:
   A Separate Peace
   (That's all I can think of right now .O)

Yeah, I used to read a lot. Now I sit on my PC all day and read 4chan. I really need to get back into reading .(

I just recently re-read the Tripod trilogy, and while they weren't exactly literary masterpieces, they were better than I thought they would be, and still enjoyable.  The Giver was great when I read that in 5th grade or so - I'd like to read the sequel some time.  I'd hate to reread a book and ruin my childhood memories of it... like what happened with Darkwing Duck >_>

I have a friend who's read both of the sequels and she says that they're primarily children's novels. She's fucking obsessed with the first book, though.

wow, reading these posts reminded me of alot of my own favorites from way-back-when.  so what can i add that hasn't been posted?
CHRONICLES OF NARIA!!!  (C.S.Louis   these are awesome! just reread them too)
Great Train Robbery (Crichton)
Animal Farm (author escapes me)
most ambivilance for a book goes to Catcher in the Rye (Salinger).  i hated it, but i've read it 3 times...  what can i say?  it's a really good book.

I liked the Prydain series better.  The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, and The High King.  All quick reads, but the final book makes it all worth it.

>>6
Animal Farm -> George Orwell?

I liked Lord of the Flies pretty well, too. Also Macbeth had it's funny moments, but I have been mentally absent most of the time.

George Orwell's essays, specifically "Politics and the English Language", were the best things I read in high school.

Oh shit, I forgot about Narnia. That was my favorite series when I was 10.

My list is pretty dubious, should've read a wider rane of books at school!
Othello / Macbeth / Much Ado About Nothing
Lord of the Flies
Hitchhiker's triology thing (classic)
Birdsong / Regeneration
William Blake's poems
And a few margaret atwood books (Hand Maid's Tale is wonderful)

I can only least favourite (read: book whose pages I wanted to tear out, curl up into a home-made shiv and stab the author repeatedly in the eye with) I can think of is After The First Death by Robert Cormier. God, I hated that stupid book.

>>3
Why didn't you like A Separate Peace? I enjoyed it, but that might have been more in hindsight because it reminded me of Akari and Icchan's relationship in Battle Athletes.

Brian Jacques' Redwall series.  They were so awesome.

There is one book that I read way back in elementary school, that I've never been able to find again... the title was something like "Night of the Twisters" or such. Obviously, it was about a couple of kids in a small town that gets hit by a series or tornadoes. I probably read that book at least 7 or 8 times over the course of my 4th grade year.
Overall my favorite books from back then were The Last Herald-Mage series by Mercedes Lackey. Once I got over the fact that the protagonist was gay, they were pretty good. 

Favorite: "Love in the age of Kolera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Least favorite: "Lord of The rings" books 1, 2 and 3.

>>13
I was obsessed with the Redwall series from about fourth to sixth grade. I wasn't assigned any of the books,  but they were some of my favourite books read during grade school. I love the Outcast of Redwall.

And Then There Were None.  I loved it to death.. It introduced me to the wonderful world of Agatha Christie.
Other favorites: Puddn'head Wilson, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Millionaire Next Door (had to read it for high school Calculus, heh), The Tao of Pooh, 1984, A Clockwork Orange.

I didn't like Tender Is The Night and there was one Hemingway book which I wouldn't/couldn't read..

RL Stine books.  Goosebumps was the craze in middle school, but I preferred the "young adult" Fear Street series.

"L'étranger" (The Stranger) by Albert Camus
"1984", my favourite book
 

I take it you mean books read for a class?  I read many other books while I was a student for enjoyment, but here's some favorites that I read for class:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hamlet by Shakespeare
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Metamorphoses by Ovid (in Latin)
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Least Favorites:
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (let's just say I'm not a big Hemingway fan)
The Republic by Plato
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
Anthem by Ayn Rand (again, not exactly a big fan of Rand)

i dont remember reading too much but:

Favorites
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
A Canticle For Liebowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.
Demon In The Freezer, Richard Preston
Jurrasic Park, Michael Chrichton
Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck <- probably my most favorite :D
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

Least Favorites
Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Catcher In The Rye
The Chocolate War
James and The Giant Peach (so much win)
What We Talked About When We Talked About Love (Carver)
Girl in Hyacinth Blue- Susand Vreeland
And Then They Were None
Animal Farm
Charlie and The Chocolate Factory
Superfudge
Great Expectations

And a bunch of children's book/young adult books I forgot the title for. -_-;

Whoot: The Giver, Gathering Blue, Watership Down, Lord of the Rings Trilogy, My Friend Flicka, The Hobbit, ect.

Ugh: Summer of the Swans, Don't You Know There's a War On, ect.

Best: 100 Years of Solitude, The Stranger, Crime & Punishment, The Great Gatsby

Worst: Wide Sargasso Sea (eww), Their Eyes Were Watching God, A Doll's House, The Grapes of Wrath

Moby Dick isn't looking too promising, either.

all books

I was an English major. My book choices are significantly different from those listed above. (Of course I loved Redwall and shit too; I just thought the thread would be a bit more academic-leaning.)

In hgh school I remember being most affected by Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. Never mind, I'm too much of an ivory-tower prick to continue this, I'll stfu.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne was the worst book i have ever read. imagery is one thing, but to actually have the bad guy become enshrouded by darkness and get ugly is just too blatant. that book showed an amazing lack of talent, subtlety and story-telling.

here are books i did like in high school.

Neuromancer by William Gibson
Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson
The Discworld series by Terry Prachett, whom i believe to be an under-appreciated author.

Does this mean books we read that we were forced to read or ones chosen for personal enjoyment? I really hated most of the books that I had to read.

Favourites (conventional fiction)

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series - Douglas Adams
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Foundation saga - Isaac Asimov
numerous other Asimov books
1984 - George Orwell
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

Books I enjoyed for curiosity/controversy-inciting value
-Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
-The Satanic Bible - Anton LeVay
-Finnegans Wake - James Joyce
-Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley
-Various works by the Marquise de Sade
-Lolita - forget the author at the moment

Reading them and recommending them to other students was my way of passing the time - the school was a bit strict on morals and worrying about their "reputation" so a couple of them ended up being confiscated a few times but I got them back in the end so it was all good.

Least Favourite

Shane - forget the author but it was the worst book I remember having to read
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald - I liked it at first but then we had to analyse it to bits which took all the fun out of it
Anything by Shakespeare - so damn over-rated

Unfortunately I didn't really read too many books until my final years at school. 

>>28
Lolita is by Vladimir Nabokov.  I only listed books required through the class curriculum, but out of all the books I read during my school years, Lolita would certainly be my favorite (and it still remains as such).

I agree with >>29, Lolita was a great book.

Heh, I agree with >>28 too.  Books don't seem as enjoyable when you HAVE to read them.*  But I bet if I picked up Scarlet Letter again I'd probably love it.

*exceptions: Ethan Frome, 1984, Red Badge of Courage, Othello, Hamlet

Favorites:
Scarlet Letter. I checked this out every year since fifth grade at least three times. Only required to read it in eighth, though. ://
Sense and Sensibility & Pride and Prejudice. I love Austen.
Jane Eyre.
Little Women.
Gathering Blue.
The Giver. Of course.
Lolita.
Lord of the Flies.
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Tuck Everlasting. D:
Chronicles of Narnia.
Canterbury Tales
Alicia.

Least Favorite:
The Outsiders.
Diary of Anne Frank.
Johnny Tremain.
Night.
Julius Caesar. D:<


I declined to read anything by Ayn Rand, so my mind was spared that torment.

The Giver and The Glass Menagerie were the only two decent ones.

how can you hate Rand?

wtf are you all in 3rd grade or something? I read lik... gone with the wind and shit.

>>34
Who wrote "shit"? I hear it's a pretty good read.

>>33
Well if you’re a high school kid you probably don’t have much interest in philosophy, and if you do you probably understand the obvious epistemological flaw in objectivity. I myself actually like her though, her works are great for introducing complex ideas to people that wouldn’t normal have interest in them

6th grade read The Outsiders
8th grade To Kill a Mockingbird

Japanese are superior! US should have allied with them and kicked Chink & Soviet butt together until there be non left. Also with coupled effort of best US and Japanese scientist we could have developed all manner of nuclear and biological weapons before anyone else. Then we could have brought Germany to it's knees with nukes integrate it to our empire, stole their cool uniforms and make Swastika symbol of true freedom. Brits would be integrated to our empire with their noble elite executed. After all is done we should slave Africa, make our own empire into libertarian dictatorship and proclaim ourselves gods. Finally we should focus on making our superior white and Japanese races into immortal machine men, start conquering space, breed cat eared shota and loli sex slaves etc. It would have been most awesome and decadent nation ever. Superior to anything, even Ancient Romans and Greeks.

I rarely read the assigned ones, except for these:
The Runner, Anthem, A Separate Peace, and a lot of good short stories