These are books that many of us may have read reluctantly while we were at school. And yet we likely came to better appreciate their merits as we matured, especially those of us that frequent the list challenges website. They make a worthy small life-time TBR of the classics.
The source (to further remind one of the former torment) was a list of the principal Sparknotes offerings, which was present on the last page of a library book.
To be frank, when I was at school, I enjoyed most of our prescribed texts including King Lear, The Tempest, Macbeth, The Tree of Man, Pride and Prejudice, Sons and Lovers, Tess of the D., The Guns of Navarone and Reach For the Sky. I didn't like Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice.