I love FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWED, both the book and the movie.
I did. too. Love the mini-series, too. And "The Mayor of Casterbridge," but not "Tess," "Jude" or "Return of the Native."
I was thinking the other day about how much we had to read for class in high school, and I think the book list for 9th grade alone was about 25. A lot of it was short (plays like "Pygmalion," "My Fair Lady," "Camelot," "West Side Story," "Romeo and Juliet" and "Julius Caesar"), but almost all of it was quite good. A few others I remember: Plato's Dialogues, To Kill a Mockingbird, Oliver Twist, Brave New World, Animal Farm, On the Beach, Ecclesiastes, The Death of Ivan Ilych, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and some poetry.
The teacher also encouraged us to read further, which was nice. She had a book rack of paperbacks of things that anyone in her classes could borrow. I remember reading a novelization of "Taxi Driver" and "The World According to Garp" from that rack.
They don't make kids read that much any more. And they don't really encourage it in the same way, either.