To be perfectly honest, I've liked nearly every book I read when I was in high school/college/whatever.

However, one book that I read in high school that everyone else hated and I loved was The Great Gatsby. I liked it so much that I bought my own permanent copy and took it to college with me every year, even if I've never read it the whole way through since.

I'm weird like that - I very rarely, if ever, read books more than once, even if I love them.

The two that stick out in my mind are To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby.

On the other hand, I was forced to read Fahrenheit 451 and that was the worst book I have ever read. I'm still annoyed that I had to read that drivel instead of something GOOD. I understand the point of the book, but that doesn't make the actual writing/storyline any better.

To Kill a Mocking Bird, Dead Poet's Society, Grapes of Wrath. Going to bed maybe more tomorrow.

Just looked it up. The movie came first.

Some novelizations don't suck. :-P The Last Starfighter is one of them! Of course, it was written by Alan Dean Foster who is the man (according to Mike).

Yeah, I didn't know. We watched it and read it. I have no idea which order in.

The only one I can think of is Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman. Most of the rest, I never actually read, just browsed and BSed my way through papers by absorbing the stuff said in discussions. I couldn't stand Dickens (though I love the movie versions LOL), Shakesphere, Kafka, etc.

LOL, alas, I didn't do that either. Only thing I hated more than ripping a book apart to "analyze" it would be my fellow students. I was very much the odd social outcast loner in high school

Mine was The Scarlet Letter. Actually, I never read it in high school, but in college, my professor brought it to life.

Les Miserables was my favorite book that was assigned to me in high school. I loved the abridged version that I had. I also had to read a book from a list over the summer and I chose the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo, which took over my entire July that year. I loved that book (after I had finished it).

I also loved A Woman Who Walked Into Doors from Irish Literature in college, and I am SO glad I read The Fountainhead in American Lit in a community college class. That book was profound and I never could have gotten through it without the grade motivation. Actually, most of the books I read for that class were really good. In fact, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried may be one of the best books I've ever read, and I was surprised that I actually liked Hemmingway's A Farewell to Arms.

Last year, I hated the prospect of reading and teaching Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, but now that I've read it twice, I actually really like it and I giggle through some of the speeches, causing my students to give me weird looks. I also like Romeo & Juliet quite a lot and Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird are better each time I read them.

This year I also read Night for the first time because my students wanted to read it as a class. That is another REALLY good book.

I've had a lot of really good experiences with books I "have had to read" for whatever reason. :-)