Outside of SILAS MARNER and THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE, I cannot think of any required reading that I actually did like at that period of my life.
In grad school, I took a wonderful 20th Century French lit class which required me to read novels I would never have picked up on my own - St Exupery's NIGHT FLIGHT and Camus' THE PLAGUE among them - and several plays I had never read before: Anouilh's ROMEO AND JEANNETTE, Giraudoux' ELECTRA, Sartre's wonderful THE FLIES, and Cocteau's INFERNAL MACHINE. The instructor, the late great Stan Luce, was a really fine teacher, and I think it might have been my favorite class in grad school.