That sounds like good advice. Hopefully there were more relevant choices in there. I recall being given many reading lists which simply had nothing at all of any interest in it. Once I had a literature class which covered every short story in the book - except the one story I actually liked!

In retrospect, I think this is because most of my lit teachers, at least until college, were middle-aged women, and they tended to select literature which they found interesting. There being a world of difference between a middle-aged woman and a teenage boy (also a world of difference between an actual teenage boy and the common conceptions thereof, especially those held by middle-aged women), the selected literature simply wasn't all that interesting.