[KappaWing]

1984 is a solid read all the way through.

Brave New World has the first half being kickass, but most of the second half is really dull when they're at the "reservation". Its a cool concept but the author spends way too much time there. I wanted more descriptions of the functions in the society like in the first few chapters.

I thought Song of Solomon was a really solid book. I understood the plot and found it very meaningful.

Other things i had to read: (I'm a HS Junior now)

The Great Gatsby was actually fun to read! Well written, exciting, and concise. Really gives you a good feel of the time period.

Things Fall Apart was the most retarded book I ever read. Blunt, superficial, impossible to follow, depressing, and stupidly written.

Of Mice and Men was boring. Until the end. Then I actually cried. What a miserable experience. Never read that book unless you have to, or are an emotional masochist.

Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea was ****ing insane. ****ing crazy book. Gruesome and intense. Really ****ed up characters.

Now were reading the depressingly nihilistic "Stranger", which main purpose is to showcase a character whose life is absolutely meaningless. How uplifting.

[CP5670]

Of Mice and Men was boring. Until the end. Then I actually cried. What a miserable experience. Never read that book unless you have to, or are an emotional masochist.

I had to read that in ninth grade or something. From what I remember, I thought it sucked ass the whole way through.

Actually, this is one problem I have with most of the books they assign, and something I noticed equally well in that literature class I did as an undergrad. The characters are often complete lunatics and don't behave even remotely like a normal person, which makes it hard to care about their actions or what happens to them at all. Many of these books contain a lot of characters that seem to have come straight out of an asylum.

[Solatar]

Senior year is British Lit (mostly) at my highschool, so (so far) we've studied:

Hamlet
Beowulf
The Canterbury Tales
Macbeth
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Various Shakespeare sonnets
Invisible Man
Emma
She Stoops to Conquer
Paradise Lost
Various things by Wordsworth, Dryden, Coleridge, etc.

At first glance it looks pretty boring, but there's a lot of good stuff in that list. With the right teacher it all applies to modern life.
I'm blanking on the rest...but things like the Great Gatsby, Huck Finn, and The Scarlet Letter were 11th grade. General European Literature was 10th, and ancient world literature was 9th (Epic of Gilgamesh, etc.)