This week’s Weekly Wednesday Blogging Challenge question is about those required reading books – the ones that get handed to you with a sigh and a syllabus, and you steel yourself for boredom… only to discover that, actually, you love them.

For me, there are three standouts:

📚 Oliver Twist – Dickens was supposed to be dense and dusty, or so I was warned. Instead, I found myself pulled along by the sheer drama of it all. The grime and grit of Victorian London felt so alive that I could almost smell the streets, and little Oliver’s insistence on asking for more remains one of my earliest memories of thinking, “oh, literature can bite.”

🐦 To Kill a Mockingbird – This one felt different. It wasn’t just a story I enjoyed; it was a book that made me sit with questions I hadn’t yet had words for. Atticus, Scout, Boo Radley – they didn’t feel like characters in a text, they felt like people who opened the world out a little wider for me. Even now, I think of it as one of those novels that quietly rearranges your sense of justice.

🎭 Shakespeare (but make it many) – We did a lot of Shakespeare in school, and honestly, I ate it up. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was pure mischief, a reminder that literature could be playful and enchanted. And then there was Henry V, all fire and speeches, with “once more unto the breach” hitting me square in the chest before I even knew what rhetoric was – and its one of two I can still quote! Shakespeare was supposed to be intimidating, but instead I discovered this sense of language as spellcasting — old words, yes, but still alive.

So yes, sometimes school gets it right. Sometimes they hand you a book that not only makes it through the gauntlet of exams and essay questions, but actually sticks.

What about you? Which school-assigned books surprised you by becoming favourites?