“Far From The Madding Crowd” by Thomas Hardy. Didn’t like it at the time, but when I reread it many years later I loved it. The 2015 movie with Carey Mulligan is a good adaptation FWIW.

While I love books the books I had to read while I was at school and how we were taught about them put me off them. We had to read Shakespeare, Dickens and Thomas Hardy.

Fortunately I had seen and loved some of Shakespeare's plays before we started on him so the damage done to him at school was limited.

I still will not eben consider reading Thomas'Hardy/ s books but like his poem "The Ruined Maid', which I find clever and hilarious.

The the famge done to Dickens has been healed a little by seeing dramatisations of his books but I would not read any of them, if for no other reason than my "to be read' list will take me longer than my probable remaining years (I am 71).

Anything Mark Twain.

@Sacha799, is that a pile of your books?

I voted for 1984 which I actually did read in 1984 during my school days. But not for school. I did a 1984-ish serial as a writing project for school, though.

The one assigned book for school that impacted me the most at the time was Huckleberry Finn. Not for the content but for the language, and I don't mean the racial slurs. I loved Twain's use of the vernacular. I'd read the book out loud to myself just because I was so drawn to the sound of their speech. (A funny thing to say about the printed word.) To this day the Southern accent is my favorite accent.

I just realized I probably had to write a paper about Huckleberry Finn, but I can't remember what the topic was. Not the language, that's for sure. Otherwise I'd remember.

I do remember writing about Catch-22 and The Trial in high school. I got to choose those books, and they reflected my views on bureaucratic insanity.