Books like this kill interest in reading in children and teens.

Have to kindly disagree. Books like this get teens thinking. It is too advanced for young children though.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men...These books are not only monotonous but they are downright depressing. I guess some time in the 1950s some masochists in charge of the school boards decided to inflict this stuff on students and it never went away. If teachers want to open a child's eyes to a wonderful world through reading, that definitely isn't the way.

Theyre all basically 20 years or older.

Harry Potter isn't a step up. The problem however is that teachers are lazy and don't want to do anything more than they have to. So they know that with a book like To Kill a Mockingbird that all the symbolism and questions have been neatly set out in a Cliff Notes book so they don't have to read the book themselves nor figure anything out. Though there are many more books that are forced on students far worse than this one. The Outsiders was required reading for me in school and my daughters had to read the damn thing when they were in school as well. That is a complete turd of a book that makes To Kill a Mockingbird look like the greatest book ever written in comparison.

In a perfect world the students would have a list of books they could read so that they were reading books that they had some interest in... instead they are forced to read the same book which guarantees that a large number of students will be bored shitless and hate reading every page. But hey, it makes it easy for the teachers and that's all that matter in schools in America.

This is one of my favorite books, but then, I had never read it until about seven years ago, mainly out of curiosity over it being hailed as "classic literature." Somehow I made it all the way through school without this ever showing up on a required reading list. A miracle, perhaps?

Had I been forced to read it in school, most likely I would have ended up sharing your opinion of it. This is a book for adults. Just because the main characters are children doesn't make it a story for all ages.

Well when I was in high school in the early 80s I hated it so much I didn’t pay any attention in my classes and never did any homework assignments including reading assignments. All I did was play AD&D and play with Rubik’s cube. I was pretty much failing everything. The only reading assignment I did do was to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” and I have loved the book ever since. I even recorded it on videotape at home and edited out the commercials so the teacher could play it in class. It is probably the inly single time in high school I showed any academic initiative.

Here's the link to SparkNotes

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/

Top Titles

1984
To Kill A Mockingbird
Catcher In The Rye
Lord Of The Flies
Dracula (Bram Stoker)

And I don't know if these other books below the "Top Titles" are up there because they are "Next Top Titles"

Beowulf
The Canterbury Tales
Heart of Darkness
Huck Finn
The Scarlet Letter
A Tale of Two Cities

I was in high school in the early 1980s and the only titles above that I don't think anyone was assigned were Heart of Darkness and Dracula.

If you spend your life reading the same fantasy books you liked as a child, you'll never mature as a reader. One of the goals of teaching literature in school is to introduce students to deeper, more complex, and ultimately more interesting fiction. Unfortunately, many people react, even in adulthood, the way most here do.