In high school, the reading challenges were sufficient, as I recall. We read "Huckleberry Finn", "The Scarlet Letter", "Julius Caesar", "The Mill on the Floss" and "Tess of the "D'Urbervilles" in my 10th grade lit class.
I enjoyed them all, especially "The Mill on the Floss" (go figure). For independent assignments, I took on "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "Cry the Beloved Country."
11th and 12th grade English, as I recall, dealt with poetry and grammar and plays. There may have been novels (and I may be misremembering what grade I was in when I read the titles above). I also don't recall which grade it was that introduced me to Nathaniel Hawthorne, but for "Evangeline" I am eternally grateful.
My sophomore year in college saw me in a lit class I loved. My two favorite reads that year were "The Deputy" and "The Sound and the Fury."
As a junior, I read "The Stranger" in French (language and class...quite a challenging read, too!).
Like DR Pogue, I read all the Shakespeare there was, including the sonnets. And in the second semester of my senior year, I took a class on the analysis of great plays which, to everyone's surprise, had a reading list of 97 plays. How, we wondered, were we going to read and analyze that many plays in a semester? The trick was, we would not be meeting in class (i.e., NO analysis at all in terms of discussion and being taught anything). I managed to read only a handful as I was carrying 21 semester hours in my final semester. I thought for sure summer school -- or a longterm deferment (due to the draft) -- was in my future.
And yet....things worked out. There were nine of us in that examination room...all of us under extraordinary pressure, and none of us had been able to read more than a 10th of the titles.
At the end of the three-hour exam, a couple of the ladies were in tears and I was borderline. The professor (Dr. Evil!!) entered the room and said, "I have an announcement. I will say this one time and then all bets are off. If you get up and walk out of this room in the next 60 seconds, I'll give you a 'C' on this exam. Otherwise, you'll get graded on your answers."
We all made a dash for the door, his words eternally seared into my brain...and Dr. Evil roared with glee.
