Books you HAD to read at school

[marcosgt]

I did English Literature (O level, so a while ago!) at school and read a number of books.

I hated most of them, everything by Thomas Hardy especially, but I did recall enjoying 'Cider With Rosie', by Laurie Lee enough to get 'As I walked out one midsummer morning' (the follow up) from the library.

About a year ago, I bought all 4 of his autobiographical books.

To be honest, I found 'Rosie' a bit of a slog, but 'As I walked Out' was very enjoyable and I'm just about to start 'A Moment of War' about his time in the Spanish Civil war, which is listed some places as the end of his Autobiographical Trilogy, although I also have "I can't stay long', so I don't know what that is about!

So, were there books you were forced to read at school that left a last impression, good or bad?

M

[HTP99]

Not a reader here, never have been, I just struggle to get into books, I think have far more distractions elsewhere.

My daughter was fantastic at English literature and language at school, her teachers couldn't fathom why she was so good at it and yet she didn't read.

[plasticpig]

Lucked out on when I did English Literature:

Did 1984 as the book. Macbeth as the play and the war poets (Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon)

[Stick Legs]

GCSE Lit:

In Spectacles (An Inspector Calls)

Of Mice & Men

Romeo & Juliet

Lord of the Files (Lord of the Flies)

To Kill a Mockingbird (but we used to insert names of different animals for fun.
To Kill a Mockingmole stuck so well the teacher started using it)

Solid books all which I actually enjoyed.

[Type R Tom]

Lord of the flies and Animal Farm are two that come to mind.

Mum used to buy the audio books for us to listen to on the drive down to Spain in the summer holidays

[OMITN]

Bloody hell - this is going back (and I have GCSE and A Lever English - and should have read it at university).

Can’t think about before secondary school. Can’t think much about that either..! Here are a few:

Lord of the Flies
Catcher in the Rye
1984
Brave New World
Middlemarch
Oscar and Lucinda
Hamlet
Anthony & Cleopatra
Macbeth
Poetry: Seamus Heaney, John Donne, Andrew Marvel

For French A Level the literature included:
L’Étranger
La Symphonie Pastorale
Les Mains Sales

I loved reading and read a huge amount more outside this (and there must have been more in 5 years of education). At my prep school we had to read a lot and we’re tested for comprehension. But we could choose from a range of books - I don’t recall anything being compulsory as such.

I have to say that the study of Shakespeare has given me a life-long love of his plays, especially Hamlet.

[valiant]

The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

Complete pile of dirge that probably cost me a decent GCSE grade. Gave up with it and just got a mate to give me the highlights. Had the brilliant idea to watch the movie instead and couldn’t finish that either.

How that book is celebrated is beyond me.

[Pickled]

For O level (lit) it was

Macbeth
Jane Eyre
Canterbury Tales - more akin to leaning Latin!

Remember also having to read, a lot of Shakespeare: Julius Caesar, Romeo & Juliet, and the Merchant of Venice

Also did Cider with Rosie, Winslow Boy, some Keats, Wordsworth, Kipling

[williamp]

Macbeth at gcse. I have never got shakesphere. Never understood it. And he invented something like 10% of the words he used. Imagine getting away with that tgese days...


...for our own reading, I used to read Spike Milligan. Got sent to the headmasters office for laughing too much wnilst reading Puckoon...

[brickwall]

Primary school
- Of mice and men
- Animal Farm
- Lord of the flies
- 12 Angry Men

Secondary school:
- Romeo and Juliet
- Jekyll and Hyde
- Journey’s End
- To Kill a Mockingbird

Call me a philistine but on balance I preferred the primary school texts!

And I had to read L’etranger in the summer between years 10 and 11.

Edited by brickwall on Wednesday 26th January 10:35

[GliderRider]

I thought our class did quite well on our book selection. We had:

• My Family & Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
• Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Four Modern Story Tellers - Short stories by Scott Fitzgerald, W Somerset Maugham, William Sansom & Doris Lessing
• The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

The first three books I enjoyed, however the Woman in White a Victorian 'mystery' was a complete pile of poo, reliant on coincidences and very dull. Despite it being televised by the BBC at the time we were reading it, I still couldn't remember the characters when it came to the English Literature exam.

I keep meaning to get a copy of Four Modern Storytellers as 'The Lotus Eater' by Somerset Maugham was very good. It concerned a British bank manager who retired early to Capri for an idyllic of leisure whilst living off a fixed term endowment. His intention being to kill himself himself when the money runs out.

Edited by GliderRider on Wednesday 26th January 00:50

[Brooksay]

One book my English teacher 'suggested' we read was 'The Machine Gunners' by Robert Westall..outstanding stuff.

[Paul Dishman]

I took an Open University History degree when I retired, one of the early modules was a multi-disciplinary humanities module with English, History, Art History and Music. As part of the English group work component we had a week to read Dicken’s Hard Times and write an piece on it. Never was a novel so aptly named.

[Wacky Racer]

Cider with Rosie

The wind in the willows

I also read Health and Efficiency but that was in the bogs.

[Sheets Tabuer]

Henry V
Romeo and that bird
Lord of the Flies
Huckleberry Finn

[46and2]

Two of the best that I can remember are;

Brother in the Land
Animal Farm

[Flip Martian]

The play was Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Not particularly grabbing me as a 16 year old.
The novel was Wlkie Collins' The Woman In White. A book so dreary I never finished it. I couldn't even force myself to read it (and I loved reading as a kid and ALWAYS had my head in a book). School managed to turn me off reading at that time. Quite some feat.

[WyrleyD]

Waaay back in 1962/3 the only two I can remember are Ray Bradbury "The Golden Apples Of The Sun' and George Orwell "Animal Farm" for english CSE exam.

[XCP]

O level Eng Lt and A level English here.

Can remember Hamlet, Henry V ( including a trip to the cinema to see the Olivier version)
Hardy, Austen, Lawrence.
A lot of poetry, from Marvell via Hopkin, Auden and Eliot, to Hughes and Heaney.

Also wrote 2000 word essay on Arnold Bennett for O level.

[smithyithy]

I only did a few (didn't do A-levels):

• Macbeth I absolutely hated
• Much Ado About Nothing was actually pretty good
• 1984 was fantastic. Almost feels like a cliche to talk about how good that book is now, but to a teenager that was already interested in that genre and the ideas and themes it represented, it felt revolutionary.

I can't remember any others that we had to read... We did parts of the first Harry Potter book in our first or second year though..