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This week’s prompt is about books I was assigned to read in school! I went to uni to study English so I have a lot of reading that falls under this category, but I’ll keep this to what I can remember from my school days and looking back on my uni reading will be a future post!
1. Holes by Louis Sachar: this must have been before Year 10 and looking back, what a weird books this is! I actually think I’d find it more disturbing now as an adult than I did at school age! Especially now I know more about the troubled teen industry. I loved it as a teenager for the surreal dark vibes.
2. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck: I think everyone read this in school and everyone had to fight back tears watching the movie adaptation in class! It’s a classic and an accessible text to study at GCSE.
3. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: I did enjoy this, Dickens is always great. It’s got clear themes too which again were easily accessible for teenagers at GCSE. I remember watching the movie in class and and seeing Mrs Havisham burn!
4. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee: I have memories of this book being handed out in class for GCSE but I do not remember anything else aside from character names so I don’t know if I ever read the whole thing! I also am sure I had a copy of A Catcher In The Rye by J. D. Salinger which must have been for school and I don’t think I ever read that either. I’ve got to be honest, except for Of Mice and Men which was alright, “Great American novels” have never captured me.
Now I think about it, it seems we had a weird amount of American novels on our reading list at my English school!
5. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks: I can’t remember when I had to read this – it’s quite an adult book (definitely remember cringy sex scenes) so probably A Level, but in any case I hated it. I couldn’t connect with the characters and just found it really boring, even with sex scenes which to teenage me would have been a thrill.
I’ve since learned Faulks is good ‘men writing women’ fodder which probably accounts for why I felt something was “off” about it. It’s the first assigned book I had to read that I really struggled to finish.
6. Wise Children by Angela Carter: I think this was for A Level English and I bloody loved it. My first introduction to magical realism and contemporary feminist literature. It’s weird, fun and a little bit fucked up. It’s really stuck with me and I really want to re-read it at some point.
7. The Miller’s Wife from The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer: I think this was A Level, and I remember being tickled by how adult this story about lust and jealousy is, plenty of innuendos!
The rest of the ones I can remember reading in school were plays .
8. Blood Brothers by Willy Russell: this was for GCSE and I don’t remember a lot about it, I don’t think I particularly enjoyed it. I think the story was simultaneously too simplistic and too unlikely! Tales of men fighting over the same woman have always been stupid to me. I also don’t remember ever seeing it performed as a musical, I think we only ever read it in class.
9. The Glass Menagerie by Tennesse Williams: I think this was GCSE, and I remember thinking it was pretty good and the idea of a memory play, and thus questioning the reliability of the narrator, was cool.
10. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night and Othello all blend together during school so I can’t remember what was when. I never minded doing Shakespeare but I’ve also never got particularly excited by it. Of the four, I liked Twelfth Night best because it’s comedy but I did also like the drama of Macbeth!
I’m interested to see everyone’s posts on this. I get the impression that the majority of bloggers are in the USA so I’m looking forward to seeing how reading lists differ.
Shakespeare was a staple in my high school English classes, but the rest of these I know I found on my own. Interesting! My list varied from elementary school to college.
Great list! I don’t think I’ve read any of these books, but I loved reading your reviews about them. I’ve heard about Great Expectations a lot, but till now the only Charles Dickens I’ve read are The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist 🙂
If you’d like to visit, here’s my TTT: https://thebooklorefairy.blogspot.com/2024/10/top-ten-tuesday-books-i-was-assigned-in-school.html
Thanks! Your list reminded me that we read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in class in Primary, and we did The Time Machine by H.G. Wells at some point in Secondary School.
I felt the same way about Shakespeare.
Of Mice and Men was a good read.
Here is our Top Ten Tuesday.
Lol at reading so many American books. We read a lot by British authors at my school. I totally forgot about Holes.
I’m having some trouble getting comments to go through, so you might get this twice…
It’s funny to me that you read so many great American classics in your English school. Other than Shakespeare, I don’t remember reading any British classics in school until I got to college. I do recommend reading TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. It’s excellent and very approachable.
Happy TTT!
Susan
http://www.blogginboutbooks.com
I read Holes as an adult, and enjoyed it. Surprisingly, as an American I never read Dickens or Steinbeck. And I remember reading some of the Canterbury Tales as a 13-year-old and cringing at the “adult” stories. I’m not sure how my teacher taught it without blushing.
Pam @ Read! Bake! Create!
https://readbakecreate.com/books-i-think-they-should-discuss-in-school/
You know what all the lists from this week have shown me, just how lacking my high school literature expectations were. We may have read one of Shakespeare’s plays (don’t remember which one because I was also an English major in college/university so that stuff kind of blends together), but I think we also only read one book each year, if that.
I hope you have a great week.
Here’s my TTT if you wish to visit – https://justanothergirlandherbooks.blogspot.com/2024/10/top-ten-tuesday-books-i-was-assigned-to.html
I remember Holes! I really loved that one
I can understand why the Great American novels failed to capture your interest. Many have to directly or indirectly with the consequences of slavery. No one wants to read about that sad page in our history. That said, some of these, like To Kill A Mockingbird, should be required reading here imo. Instead some factions are trying to ban such books.
It might be something I’d get more out of now but as a 13-21 year old they didn’t do much for me.
Ooh, I picked The Glass Menagerie for one of my summer reading titles in high school – mostly because it was short and I was out of time, having spent all summer reading books I WANTED to – and to my surprise, I loved it. So much so that even writing a paper about it was barely even a hardship…almost fun??
I can understand that. The memory play idea definitely captured my imagination!