<p>A positive spin on school reading. What books did you enjoy reading in school? </p>
<p>For me, first place is The Stranger with a close second in Anthem and third goes to The Last of the Mohicans. </p>
<p>Hands down 1984. All day everyday. Second would probably have to be The Fountainhead, and third… I guess All My Sons</p>
<p>I enjoyed The Giver, Much Ado About Nothing, and a few more but I can’t think of them at the moment. </p>
<p>Number The Stars was a good one in 7th grade. Lmao. Um, To Kill A Mockingbird wasn’t too bad. </p>
<p>To kill a mockingbird by far</p>
<p>Native Son hands down</p>
<p>A tie between Fahrenheit 451, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Glass Menagerie. </p>
<p>The Things They Carried, The Great Gatsby</p>
<p>The Alchemist and Lord of the Flies </p>
<p>In 6th grade, Leap Day, a little risque for the grade level lol, but still my favorite book!!</p>
<p>Catcher in the Rye is great. </p>
<p>By far Lolita; Nabokov’s prose is very exquisite. </p>
<p>Second, while they’re not really books, the plays of Shakespeare have been the best of literature I’ve seen in high school: that is, Macbeth, Othello and Julius Caesar.</p>
<p>Also, I really liked Wuthering Heights, but not so much Jane Eyre.</p>
<p>To Kill a Mockingbird</p>
<p>1984 is so melodramatic. The subtlety of the oppression that Brave New World presents is far scarier.</p>
<p>One of my favorite books is the Moon Is Down. I also really liked The Old Man and the Sea, Lord of the Flies, and Brave New World.</p>
<p>To Kill a Mockingbird for sure. Night was pretty good as well, and also I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. </p>
<p>Brave New World
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Heart of Darkness
1984
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde</p>
<p>I really enjoyed reading Night.</p>
<p>Bah, if you want a real dystopian, read 1984 over Brave New World 
@micmatt513 I thought that it was way more subtle than Brave New World could ever try to be</p>
<p>@emenya - Lol, not even close. Orwell was beyond melodramatic and basically was shouting at the reader ever few paragraphs “See how terrible totalitarian governments are? SEE???”</p>
<p>It’s an overrated book. Re-read it a second or third time and you’ll understand why it’s not so great. I enjoyed it the first time I read it, but was a bit disappointed at Orwell’s heavy-handed writing. Although I’m an atheist, I found the society that Brave New World proposed far scarier. Orwell’s exaggeration of the importance of truth I also found a bit shocking and a bit characteristic of New Atheism. Does the truth matter? Certainly, but what does it matter if you say two + two equals four or five? You can’t change the underlying principle of the truth. We don’t breathe oxygen just because we can only breathe whatever the English language calls oxygen. We could call it helium, or nitrogen, or plutonium, or whatever you want to call it, and it would still be oxygen because its underlying principles make it oxygen.</p>
<p>Orwell failed to convey this, and spent most of the time talking about the mutability of perceived reality. I found both Winston and Julia to take two extreme sides on the matter. Julia’s apathy was extreme to the point of making her appear stupid. Winston’s obsessive nature made him seem even more neurotic than he might have been.</p>
<p>The last thing is that as a story the book is pretty weak. Nothing is particularly impressive about the writing, the plot, or the characters. The pacing of the book is average, and it’s merely a decent book if you ignore any of the ideology in it.</p>
<p>Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but I’d say that 1984 fails in a lot of ways. Just because a government tells me two and two equals five doesn’t mean it actually does. In Brave New World, everyone actually just ignores science and “progress” to go into a drug induced coma. No one can deal with stress or any kind of emotional/physical hardship, and instead retreat into a shell.</p>
<p>Yo know of any more books like Lolita? </p>
<p>LOVED Ray Bradbury and all the dystopian, dark, sci-fi, whatever novels and short stories we had to read–1984, The Most Dangerous Game, the Lord of the Flies, etc. Also recently enjoyed Grendel in my AP lit class.</p>