Just as there were those books that we had to slog through in high school (I wrote about that a couple weeks ago, and it turns out people really, really love Beowulf), there were also those books that honestly reaffirmed our love for reading. In fact, though we complained incessantly about our nightly readings and analytical papers and the resulting grades from those papers, most folks that I came across in high school had to admit these works weren’t too shabby. Check out our list of 10 works that proved to be well worth our time in high school, and include your own in the comments below.
1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
With To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee brought us not one, not two, but three of the most beloved literary characters in history. From the heroic Atticus Finch to the genuinely innocent but wise-beyond-her-years Scout to the horribly misunderstood Boo Radley, Lee creates characters that we quickly grow to love (or hate, in the case of freakin’ Bob Ewell). There aren’t individual scenes that make To Kill a Mockingbird shine—rather, its brilliance comes from the novel’s overall tone, acknowledging that injustice and discrimination are out there, but we have to keep fighting the good fight anyway.
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
There are few books that you know everyone is going to read in high school, but this is one of them. With vividness and delicacy, Fitzgerald depicts the world of 1920s Long Island/New York, the love between the gorgeous Daisy Buchanan and the too-wealthy-for-his-own-good Jay Gatsby, and the beautifully broken nature of the American dream. The Great Gatsby is well worth a second read a few years after the initial high-school-English-class unveiling, because though its exquisiteness is visible even to a group of bored 14-year-olds, there remain new layers of Fitzgerald’s writing to discover reading after reading.
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
I don’t know how much this is considered a “high school book,” but I read it in high school, so there. Kundera explores Nietzche’s notion of eternal recurrence, which essentially says that if there are only so many ways the molecules in the world can reorient themselves, throughout all the billions of trillions of years in the universe, we will eventually find ourselves in this exact situation again. And that can be a pretty scary prospect for every decision we make. “Light people” don’t care and keep on living their lives, but “heavy people” take on every ounce of that burden. So what happens when light people and heavy people collide? Kundera makes us think about it through the story of womanizer Tomas and his nervous wife Tereza. And though Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis are excellent in the film adaptation, you really do have to read the book first: so much of the story is about how it’s told.
4. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
In this exploration of small-town life, newspaper reporter George Willard spends each chapter getting to know a new resident of Winesburg, Ohio, and quickly finds that they’re all battling their own demons. Each chapter is dedicated to a different townsperson and a different “grotesque” quality that each of them possesses—an idea that you believe in so much that it loses its meaning. Anderson’s characters are complex and vulnerable: there isn’t one hero or villain; they’re just regular people walking through life, trying to make sense of things. Winesburg, Ohio is more about illustrating these characters than it is about developing a traditional plot, but by the time the book draws to an end, we still feel like we’ve come of age along with George.
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