High School Book Ranking and Reviews

Throughout my four years of high school, I’ve read thirty-six academic books for English class, so I ranked them from favorite to least favorite and reviewed them all. (This isn’t necessarily reflective of their objective literary merits, by the way. It’s just how much I enjoyed them.)

1. Hamlet – Hamlet is my favorite literary work. The protagonist is a hilarious melodramatic college student who enjoys messing with people, and the entire thing is really fun to read, including most of the deaths. At the same time, the story’s calamities actually bring me sadness for the characters. When’s the last time a Shakespeare tragedy actually made you feel tragic? (Yes, tragedy takes on a different meaning in theatre, but the question still stands.) Before reading Hamlet, I’d expected a glorified Macbeth. Actually, Hamlet is much more humorous, interesting, memorable, quotable, and relatable. Shakespeare is a god.
2. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – If you liked King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, you’ll love this. If you hated King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, you’ll really love this. I fall into the latter group. The book is basically a parody of King Arthur starring a 17th-century engineer who discovers that Camelot sucks. Unlike its source material, it’s actually interesting, and maybe makes reading King Arthur worth it for the sake of better understanding Connecticut Yankee.
3. The Book Thief – Markus Zusak is a master of establishing mood. The Book Thief is art more so than any other book on this list.
4. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – What Hamlet fan wouldn’t love a work titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? I loved this play before I even read it, and it still exceeded my expectations with its clever and eccentric humor.
5. Arcadia – This play is smarter than I am. Who would think to combine literature with advanced physics and mathematics? Tom Stoppard is a genius. Arcadia’s switches between past and present are impressively interesting and well-executed, and the characters of both periods are relatable and cleverly written.
6. The Last Unicorn – With a unique take on fairy tales, this is a pleasant book. Its subversions of traditional tropes are subtly innovative and entertaining. The Last Unicorn’s mood is best described as nostalgia, yet this story was unfortunately not part of my childhood.
7. Never Let Me Go – This book is a strange experience. Ishiguro builds a certain mood that I’m not sure exists in real life, but the strangeness is subtly interwoven with reality. The narrative voice is like that of no other book. I have a hard time deciphering what this book is about, but really, it’s about many different things without a cohesive central idea. It’s definitely interesting, and the characters are pretty great.
8. The Woman Warrior – Kingston combines early Chinese American history with fantastical elements in a story about stories. As someone who likes all of those things, this novel suits my interests perfectly and earns a place among my favorite literary books. However, I’m ambivalent about the overall mood, which I think stems from the somewhat somber narrative voice.
9. The Shadow of the Wind – This book easily surpasses the others in excellent prose. The premise—the protagonist finding a rare book that a dangerous man wants to burn—is definitely one of the more interesting concepts on this list. Unfortunately, this book ends up being accidentally misogynistic while trying to pass itself off as feminist-friendly. The protagonist’s girlfriend is the epitome of a “strong female character” only in name (read: plot device to be saved because she can’t take action for herself), and the other (three) female characters get unhappy endings, one of them apparently as justice for not being interested in the protagonist. Feminist failings aside, this book just has bad vibes. Zafón is great at establishing mood, but it’s not a mood that I want.
10. The Glass Castle – Since The Glass Castle is a memoir that describes various events in the author’s life, there’s always something interesting happening. Unlike Kitchen God’s Wife, this book has a balance of positive and negative moments (even though her childhood sucks) that get the reader emotionally invested.
11. The Importance of Being Earnest – Alongside Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde is the god of nineteenth-century satire. Is this entire play based on a pun? Considering Gnomeo and Juliet and Ratatouille, perhaps.
12. The Kitchen God’s Wife – Emotionally, this book is a roller coaster that only goes down. A varied balance of ups and downs throughout the storyline would have made Kitchen God’s Wife much more interesting, but it was still pretty interesting anyway.
13. Catcher in the Rye – Whether you like Holden or hate him (and whether Salinger wants you to like him or hate him), the strong narrative voice sets this book apart from other works, and the eccentric protagonist really makes things interesting.
14. Romeo and Juliet – This play is iconic with humorous dialogue and great characters, but there’s room for improvement. Although commonly overlooked, the side characters (Mercutio in particular) are really the ones who make the story. Taking the minor events into consideration and not just the main arc, the plot is pretty awesome.
15. Lord of the Flies – This was a good book with memorable characters, an interesting action-packed storyline, and accurate themes criticizing misconceptions that white guys are more civilized than those from other cultures. The details and nature imagery are nice when you really stop to absorb them, but this was made difficult by the fact that the writing style was pretty hard to follow.
16. Antigone – Antigone sets itself apart from other old-timey plays with a cool female protagonist and interesting feminist commentary.
17. Mythology – It’s difficult to compare literary novels to a book with no coherent narrative (then again, I didn’t have much trouble ranking The Road…), but I’d say that Mythology was overall effective in its purpose. I also have to credit Edith Eaton for sparking my continuing interest in Greek mythology, even though that interest stemmed from the fact that I had to take creative liberties with the Greek gods to avoid getting bored with her book.
18. Unbroken – With plane wrecks at sea and POW camps, Louie’s story is dramatic and action-packed. Hillenbrand keeps things interesting with a good amount of emotional investment.
19. Chew on This – I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the fast food industry, and things never got boring. But I actually don’t remember anything from this book. Sorry.
20. Macbeth – This story gave us many good things, including C-section baby Macduff, “What, you egg?” [He stabs him.], three pretty cool witches, and various ambiguously supernatural hallucinations.
21. The Great Gatsby – The plot is ridiculous in a good way, and the characters are pretty funny. Thanks to the images of Leonardo DiCaprio in my mind, I’d never expected Jay Gatsby to be such a loser. With a better understanding, I might’ve ranked this book higher, but I didn’t study it very intensely.
22. East of Eden – This book did not need to be that long. The emotional investment that Steinbeck expertly builds is offset by the fact that East of Eden is tedious to get through, namely because the author goes excruciatingly in-depth into every detail. I would have loved this book if Steinbeck had been more concise and focused on the main cast instead of trying to completely flesh out and get readers invested in every single background character. If you like detailed, slow-paced books, you will enjoy this; if you have to fill every single page with annotations, you will not enjoy this. The pain of reading and annotating six hundred pages aside, I still have to give Steinbeck credit for his unmatched character development. And it’s worth noting that he understands the importance of positive Asian American representation better than most modern writers (seriously, if a 1950s white man gets it, none of you have any excuse).
23. Ender’s Game  – Nothing in this book made sense to my freshman brain (I blame the hardcore sci-fi), but props for a pretty interesting concept. The story definitely didn’t get boring.
24. Night – Reading this book is an eye-opening experience. Wiesel’s story is one of the most staggering books on this list for obvious reasons, and it provides valuable insight regarding the tragedy of the Holocaust.
25. Of Mice and Men – By the end of this book, I could see why it was considered a powerful work. While the rising action was successful build-up for the climax, and the story is meant to be character-driven, it was difficult to get fully absorbed when nothing was really happening. The emotional ending couldn’t fully make up for that.
26. Beloved – This book is characterized by unanswered questions. Its frequent changes in perspective and time make Beloved difficult to understand, and the unexplainable phenomena are still beyond my comprehension. However, this was what made it interesting. Thematically, the book is well-developed and offers insightful commentary on the lasting impacts of slavery and racism.
27. To Kill a Mockingbird – This is a pretty solid book, but some of the parts about Scout’s daily life seemed unnecessary and tangential, probably because I’d expected the story to focus more on serious issues. Most of the book wasn’t super interesting, and the actual plot started relatively late in the book. I’ll give this book another try in the future.
28. Othello – Compared to Shakespeare’s other works, Othello is pretty bland. The storyline is only moderately interesting, and most of the characters and dialogue aren’t very memorable. I couldn’t really get invested in the main ideas of jealousy and trust. However, Iago is an awesome character, and his brilliant manipulation of Othello is one of the few gems in this play.
29. The Odyssey – If we were ranking books based solely on story, The Odyssey would be pretty high. Unfortunately, the text is indecipherable, and reading it is a uniquely terrible experience.
30. The Canterbury Tales – Chaucer has a classic charm and interesting humor, but I couldn’t bring myself to fully enjoy the process of reading his work. While its challenging text and unfamiliar historical context made for a few exciting moments of insight, I was very uninvested in the story and characters.
31. Wuthering Heights – This book was not enjoyable. Aside from its convoluted Gothic-Romantic prose, the story had the same problem that Kitchen God’s Wife had: an emotional downhill spiral, but even darker. I believe there were some lighthearted scenes and even a few humorous moments to balance out the dismal mood, but the book was still too gloomy to be interesting.
32. The Road – This book’s sole redeeming quality was that it was relatively short. The plot is like Candy Land, but the Candy Castle is the West Coast and the candy people are literally slaughtered and eaten. The number of roasted infants in this book is higher than the number of people that I know who enjoyed it. I also would like to put it out there that McCarthy does not use quotation marks for dialogue or commas where there should be commas, make of that what you will. I suspect that McCarthy is actively trying to make his book unenjoyable (it’s an apocalypse book). He succeeded.
33. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table – I can handle reading about an Arthurian knight randomly encountering, fighting, and killing another knight in the woods for no reason maybe, like, once. Almost every single knight in this book undergoes this exact same experience. Can’t relate.
34. Bless Me, Ultima – Alongside The Road, this is one of the most universally-hated books among my peers. A story full of exorcisms, magical owls, and death is great in theory, but something went wrong and it ended up boring. It doesn’t help that Bless Me, Ultima has a dark presence, which is probably inevitable when you juxtapose a six-year-old protagonist with an incredibly grim storyline and atmosphere. Why does this first grader have a coming-of-age story?
35. The Crucible – The Salem Witch Trials provide a moderately interesting premise, but this play was too difficult to follow. I remember exactly two characters. Admittedly, I was reading it quickly.
36. The Scarlet Letter – This book probably could have been under half its current length without losing anything valuable. At one point, I believe Hawthorne stopped to describe a trashcan, and I realized at that moment that he was purposely adding fluff to increase his word count. How did I know this? He wrote exactly how my twelve-year-old self did when word count was my sole objective (it was Nanowrimo, and my goal was to write a 50,000 word book, not a good book). A Google search confirmed my suspicion that he was being paid by the word. To be fair, I’d do the same if I were him.