Oddly enough, we didn't read most of the 'standards' in my high school. This lead to some interesting scenes, such as the time my third-year English teacher wanted to talk to us about the symbolism in Moby Dick, discovered to her horror that we had not read any of it, gave us an excerpt, and very nearly had a stroke and died when we agreed, as a class, that the reason the whale was white was so that Ahab would have something easily-identifiable to obsess over. It turned out that she did her thesis on symbolism in Moby Dick, and we had to sit through 45 minutes of her trying to get us to say something else more meaningful (read: something that validated what was probably 100 pages of drivel that she wrote in her early 20s), which none of us did.

We did, on the other hand, read The Agony & The Ecstasy. I, and every other fifteen year old in that class, were sick and fucking tired of everything by that point in the year, and being a smart-ass, I flat-out asked where in the book the "controversial" parts were, so I could read those first. The humanities teacher obligingly told me what chapters those were, and the lot of us went home much happier knowing that we could skim about 75% of the book.