Photo Courtesy of Maddison Waitt

Before we even walked into the doors of this high school for the first time, our reading journey began. We were assigned the book The House on Mango Street to read before the start of freshman year. We then went on to read To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet, and The Odyssey, all before the end of the year. But the stories didn’t stop there. In my sophomore year, we tackled several different genres of literature. This included books such as The Crucible, Into the Wild, The Catcher in the Rye, Behold the Dreamers, and The Great Gatsby. Then choosing to take AP Lang my junior year we tackled fewer books than the previous years but still quite a few such as Thank You for Arguing, The Color of Water, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Thankfully, choosing to take BCC English my senior year saved me from the torture of reading books I had no say in. However, they weren’t all awful. Some of them I even found moving, most of which came from the sophomore curriculum. Overall, it tends to depend on what kind of genre you like best. Below is my ranking for the books I’ve read throughout high school and the respective genres/topics associated with them.

Ranking (Best–Worst):

1. The Catcher in the Rye – realistic fiction
2. The Great Gatsby – realistic fiction
3. To Kill a Mockingbird – realistic fiction
4. The Crucible – play format
5. Behold the Dreamers – realistic fiction
6. The Color of Water – nonfiction/biography
7. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – nonfiction/biography
8. Romeo and Juliet – play format
9. Into the Wild – nonfiction/biography
10. The House on Mango Street – realistic fiction
11. The Odyssey – mythology
12. Thank You for Arguing – informational/nonfiction