Native Son by Richard Wright. Just... ugh. Although, it does have a scene where a character plays Scrabble with himself in a movie theater. Some of us had edited copies and some had originals. We were sufficiently amused by that scene that I remember one classmate with an unedited copy reading it aloud in the cafeteria for the benefit of those who had the sanitized versions.
Sula by Toni Morrison. The theme of the book... friendship is really, really important. So important, that if your friend is a jerk who treats you like trash and plays Scrabble with your husband and gets you to help kill a kid, you should forgive her and still be her best friend, because friendship is the most important thing in the world. Or, at least, that's what my 11th-grade self thought was the author's theme. We had to read a zillion books by Toni Morrison that year, and we hated them all.
Love Medicine I don't remember much about this book, just that we all hated it and didn't see what the point of reading it was.
We read a *lot* of multicultural stuff that year, as that was that year's theme. It was sort of annoying, because we hadn't read any Shakespeare, Austen, or Dickens yet in high school at all. But we sure had to make sure we got our Toni Morrison in!
I'll second the others about Wuthering Heights. I love Pride and Prejudice, though, it's my favorite book. Basically everything by Jane Austen I love.
I found The DaVinci Code oddly interesting. The plot kept me intrigued and I wanted to follow the mystery. But at the same time, the author used the *cheapest* tricks to create suspense. Like, you'd have a character riding in a taxi. "If he'd only known that in 14 hours he'd be dangling from a single-propellor airplane over Mount Everest..." If the only way you can create suspense is to hint at action that's to come, you're doing something wrong.
