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I will list the books whose complete reading was mandatory for everyone in my English classes during my own education as a student in an American public school. Or at least, I think they were. My memory is a bit foggy.
William Shakespeare: Romeo & Juliet, Othello, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet.
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein.
Lois Lowry: The Giver.
Truman Capote: In Cold Blood.
Paulo Coelho: The Alchemist.
Elie Wiesel: Night.
Michael Crichton: Jurassic Park.
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter.
Albert Camus: The Stranger.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby.
Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis.
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities.
Pat Conroy: The Lords of Discipline.
Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman.
Aldous Huxley: Brave New world.
William Golding: Lord of the Flies.
Robert Cormier: The Chocolate War
Well, that's all I can remember. We read some books incompletely, such as Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. An optional AP Psychology book was Equus by Peter Shaffer. Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo was mandatory in French II. George Orwell's Animal Farm and John Milton's Paradise Lost were optional books in AP Literature. Alex Flinn's Breathing Underwater was optional for a book club (and extra credit). Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was optional for another extra credit opportunity involving a stupid school contest. I had to read Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildernstern Are Dead for my research paper. We had to read Flight to Freedom by Ana Veciana-Suarez in Honors World History (a communist friend of mine complained to the teacher that the book went against his beliefs, lol). When we finished we had to read another book; I choose Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (my aforementioned friend choose Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and scared the crap out of the teacher in the process). In AP European History, we had to choose a book from a list for the final; I choose Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World. Same deal for AP U.S. Government; I choose Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.
In addition, I recommend the following books as being on the same classic/must-read class as the best of the above.
Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey.
George Orwell: 1984.
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
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