TGIF {18}

 TGIF is a weekly meme hosted by Ginger at GReads. Each week she poses a question and everyone is invited to join in and share their answers :]


This week's question: Required Reading: Which book from your school days do you remember reading & enjoying? Is there a book published now that you'd like to see in today's curriculum for kids?

To address the first part of the question: I didn't actually have a lot of required reading throughout my school years. We had to read The Outsiders in 8th grade, and I'm not going to lie, I hated it. The other half of my class got to read Tuck Everlasting and I'm still jealous!


We read Romeo and Juliet in 10th and maybe I'm a major cynic, but I hated it too. I simply don't see how meeting, doing it, getting married, and killing themselves all in the span of a few short days constitutes the best love story of all time. I give you permission to throw tomatoes at me now, but I shan't retract my opinion.


To Kill a Mockingbird and Night were our 10th grade requirements. TKaM was probably my favorite out of all my required readings, but I guess you could say I'm not really a classics gal. I've heard plenty of amazing things about Night, but I wasn't exactly a fan. I think that's simply a case of it not being my style of book though.


After that, I left for Running Start and surprisingly, I never had any novel-esque required reading in college. The only thing of note was the play Death of a Salesman. I thought it was a bit odd, but actually enjoyed reading it.

To address the second part, there's actually quite a few books published now that I think would make fantastic required reading. Thirteen Reasons Why and Want To Go Private? are two major ones that come to mind when I think about required reading. They both have great lessons that would be much better for the kids of today to learn than a lot of the old literature (not that those don't have merits too) they still require.