Required Reading That You Actually Ended Up Loving
The start of each school year brings a new round of required reading for students. Not every book speaks to everyone, but at one point over the course of your schooling, the stars align and you're assigned great books that were required reading. We all had weeks in middle school or high school when we primarily relied on Cliff’s Notes to prep us for our reading quizzes, but every once in a while you would actually have time to read the assigned books and maybe you found yourself completely engrossed.
For instance, you may have grumbled about cracking open your copy of The Great Gatsby, but after those first few chapters, you found yourself captivated by the destructive decadence of the era and the mystery surrounding Jay Gatsby and his past.
You knew To Kill a Mockingbird was an important book, but until you read it, you never realized how culturally relevant it was - not until you read words like, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
While The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird might not be a the top of your list of required reading books you enjoyed, one of the many books listed below might.
You can also find movies based on these book on this list of the best 8th-grade book adaptations.
- Harper LeeTo Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was immediately successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American literature. The plot and ...more
- S. E. HintonThe Outsiders is a coming-of-age novel by S. E. Hinton, first published in 1967 by Viking Press. Hinton was 15 when she started writing the novel, but did most of the work when she was 16 and a ...more
- C. S. LewisThe Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a high fantasy novel for children by C. S. Lewis, published by Geoffrey Bles in 1950. It was the first published of seven novels in The Chronicles of Narnia ...more
- George OrwellNineteen Eighty-Four, sometimes published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English author George Orwell published in 1949. The novel is set in Airstrip One, a province of the superstate Oceania in a ...more
- J. R. R. TolkienThe Hobbit, or There and Back Again is a fantasy novel and children's book by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the ...more
- John SteinbeckOf Mice and Men is a novella written by Nobel Prize–winning author John Steinbeck. Published in 1937, it tells the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who ...more