Assigned Reading

Note: the following text originally appeared on my (now defunct) Substack on March 3, 2026 

In my last major post, I talked a bit about William Shakespeare, and the works of his I was assigned to read in high school and college. After a bit of thought, I decided it might be interesting to quickly look at some of the other books and stories that I was assigned to read in my middle school and high school era, mainly focusing on English class.

The thing is, in middle school at least, we weren’t really assigned all that many books to read. As best as I can recall, in English classes we would usually have these big text books (usually illustrated with cover art depicting animals or nature scenes) that were actually compendiums of short stories, or edited/condensed versions of longer works, and the teacher would usually read these stories to us in class, and then we’d go off and write reports on them. There were some exceptions, some take-home books we had to read on our own time (like I remember having to read Steinbeck’s The Pearl in the 8^th grade), but for the most part, it was mainly short stories. Sadly, I can’t remember all that many of these stories, though there were a few from the 8^th grade that stuck in my memory, mainly “Different Cultural Levels Eat Here” by Peter De Vries, and “Examination Day” by Henry Slesar (the latter of which was later adapted into a Twilight Zone episode of the same name, in 1958).

Anyway, this “reading short stories from text books” thing extended into high school, for I remember reading Carson McCullers’ “Sucker” in the 9^th grade (over 20 years later, I was pleasantly surprised when, upon reading a collection of all of McCullers’ short fiction, coming across “Sucker” again and thinking, “Hey, I read this in high school!”), and “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury in the 11^th grade. But it was really in the 10^th grade of high school that we truly began to gravitate away from these short story assignments to reading longer books (and plays). I’ve already mentioned how in 10^th grade English I first read Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, but that same year we also read Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway (which I reread last year), and A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens (okay, I’ll admit, I didn’t read that one all the way, mainly just skim-read it). In the 11^th grade, along with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Macbeth, we also read Wharton’s Ethan Frome (I seem to remember being one of the few students in the class to actually enjoy that one), some Arthur Miller plays (The Crucible and Death of a Salesman), and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (okay, I admit I skim-read that one as well). And in my last year of high school, along with Shakespeare’s Othello and Hamlet, we also read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (which I really enjoyed), William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, and some Tennessee Williams plays (The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire). Actually, the summer before I started the 12^th grade, our class also had to read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (and I think I was one of the few people in the class to actually do so on good faith). Now that I think about it, in Senior year we also had to choose a poet to examine, and I vaguely remember reading Anne Sexton’s The Death Notebooks, which I enjoyed. I was kind of morbid back then, so I probably picked that one because I liked the title.

Although I can remember many of the above books fairly well (despite the long span of time that has elapsed since I last read them), I’m not quite sure how greatly they influenced me as a writer (aside from Shakespeare, that is), but all the same, I’m glad I was exposed to them. As I mentioned above, I did enjoy Brave New World, and The Crucible was pretty good as well. I really need to reread some of them one day, like the Tennessee Williams plays and also Ethan Frome, for example.

Of course, during the time period discussed above I was doing a lot of my own unassigned reading on the side, but that’s a story for another day . . .