Books I'm Glad They Made Me Read

Every student has mandatory reading. From elementary school through college, teachers assign novels that are (supposed to be) read by everyone and discussed as a group in class.

Growing up, I was an avid reader. While I absolutely loathed classics like Romeo and Juliet and The Grapes of Wrath (high school is generally where my love of assigned reading fell off), there were many mandatory books that I quite enjoyed and that have stuck with me over the years.

It wasn't until I started putting this list together that I realized how many of these reads center around social injustice; five of the ten relate to the Holocaust or racism in America. It makes me all the more grateful to have been assigned these books, because they really did have an impact on my life, and they imparted important lessons that continue to shape my worldview and passion for justice and equality.

Here are ten books I was forced to read and wound up loving.

1. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

As a kid, this tale of a brother and sister running away from home and finding clever ways to hide out in a museum captured my imagination and made me want to follow suit. I recently found a copy at Goodwill and am looking forward to seeing if it holds up all these years later.

2. The Giver

Today is the day I learned that The Giver was part of a series. I'm going to pretend that's not a thing, because I love this book as a standalone. This young adult dystopian novel both captivated and frightened me as a child, setting me up to love series like The Hunger Games later on.

3. Number the Stars

(I didn't even put together that The Giver and Number the Stars were written by the same person until I made this list and just happened to stack them on top of each other.)

I was fascinated by the Holocaust as a kid. After reading part of The Diary of Anne Frank in fifth grade, I wanted to learn as much as I could about this horrific part of history and how it could have happened. I was glad that a book like this was part of our mandatory curriculum.

Some of my other favorites were The Upstairs Room, Surviving Hitler, The Devil's Arithmetic, Hana's Suitcase, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and Behind the Bedroom Wall.

4. The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963

I love this book. The Watsons Go to Birmingham is masterfully told from the perspective of a child and centers around real historical events. I've always felt that this was a great story that really drove home racial injustice in a way that kids could understand and appreciate the significance and brutality of. It still breaks my heart every time I read it.

5. Hatchet

If my plane crashed and I was alone in the wilderness with nothing but a hatchet, I'd be screwed. But Gary Paulsen's tale of a teen's fight for survival brought out the adventurer in me and made me want to go it alone in the six trees in my backyard.

I also loved My Side of the Mountain, another assigned book about a kid trying to make it in the wild. Pretty sure I ran away at one point because of that one (to the park down the street in my suburban neighborhood).

6. The Book Thief

I sobbed. Then I made my mom read it, and she sobbed. Go read it. You'll sob.

7. The Westing Game

This fun murder mystery was one of those actually interesting books that didn't feel like assigned reading.

It took me years to find this book. All I could remember were chess pieces, an inheritance, and a twist ending, but for the life of me I couldn't remember the title or enough of the plot to track it down. But I finally found it, and I reread it last year. Still entertaining.

8. Night

Written by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, Night sent chills down my spine in middle school and has continued to haunt me all these years later. I haven't been able to bring myself to read it again, but I don't have to—the horrifying images conjured by Wiesel's masterful storytelling will stay with me forever.

9. Small Steps

Small Steps is the book that first introduced me to Peg Kehret, and she subsequently became one of my favorite childhood authors. This book is the true story of Kehret's experience with polio as a young girl.

10. To Kill a Mockingbird

I know a lot of kids hated this one. It's certainly not the most exciting or captivating book I've ever read, but for whatever reason, it stuck with me as a profound story of innocence and racial injustice.

I could go on and on. I loved reading, and I loved having my teachers pick out good books that I actually enjoyed. The Trumpet of the Swan, Ralph S. Mouse, Running Out of Time, The Kite Runner, Brave New World—I genuinely liked them all. I hope to go back and reread each of these classics to experience them as an adult and see which have stood the test of time.

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