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What did you read at school?


Michelle

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In my first year at secondary school we did Emil and the Detectives, with Miss Chorley who was a very old-fashioned English teacher and made it more boring than it should have been! But we also did Alison Uttley's Country Child which is beautiful.

For O level I did Macbeth (it's been on the syllabuses for centuries:D) and Keats. We went to see a production of Macbeth at Wigan Little Theatre which was dire, all the swords were bent and one of the actors came on stage so mincingly he got catcalls from all the boys in the audience (there were at least three school parties there, so you can imagine:roll:).

For A level I did Chaucer, Richard II, Antony and Cleopatra, Return of the Native and The Spire which I absolutely hated, it's put me off Golding ever since.

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When I was in elementary school, I remember reading Bridge to Terabithia and The Outsiders. I don't remember a single thing I read in my three years of middle school, except the John Saul and Dean Koontz books I read on my own. I of course read a ton of things in high school, especially since I was in honors English classes:

 

Crime and Punishment

The Baghavad-Gita

The Tao te Ching

Romeo and Juilet

Macbeth

The Bell Jar

Heart of Darkness

A Prayer for Owen Meany

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Invisible Man

Short Stories of Hemingway

The Great Gatsby

The Grapes of Wrath (hated it)

Huck Finn

A Separate Peace

selections from the Bible and the Koran, and all sorts of poetry by Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Emily Dickinson. I probably read more, but it was so long ago!

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Unfortunately we did not get to read many books in school that i can remember the few that i do remember are:

 

The Outsiders

 

Of mice and men

 

I did (and still do) most of my reading in my own time. We did not do a lot of diff books at my school, we would spend months on the same book.

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Oh is that by Susan Hinton? I read that a couple of years ago. It was really good.

Yes it was! :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsiders_(novel) is a link to more info for anyone else interested. I enjoyed it very much at school. Probably why it stands out in my memory and the rest of the books we read generally dont.

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Thanks for the link!

 

"Hinton was 15 when she began writing the novel and 18 when it was published."

 

I didn't realise that, I'm impressed!

 

And I see she also wrote Rumble Fish! Didn't know that either - its a great film. I'm going to have to read the book now.

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I loved SE Hinton books when I was a teenager. I discovered The Outsiders when I was going through my brothers school books. It was such a breath of fresh air, compared to the books that I was reading at the time. :) My other favourites of hers are Tex and That Was Then, This Is Now. I read them over and over. :lol:

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When I was eight, I remember the teacher reading a story to us about some children who went into the sea and found another world beyond the 'white horses' of the waves, a bit like the Water Babies but the sea not a river. I was ill the day she finished it and never got to the end, and now I can't remember anything else about it. It is really frustrating, and even now I would love to know what happened at the end!

 

Hey, Debbie. That book your class read reminds me of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis. The characters and adventures are great in that one! I think I remember the description of the waves like you said.

 

I only read three-quarters of any of his Narnia books when I was younger, than in 2005 I read all seven in about two weeks!

 

The part about another world is throwing me off, though. If this doesn't ring a bell, at least we'll both know a new great kid's book.:lol:

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I thought I stood alone in this. Anyone else dislike Tolkein's works:an8: ?

 

i thought i was alone for many years. until the films came out and the amount of people who, like me, [don't like it] is huuuuge. believe me

 

Nope, I find Tolkien impossible to read - I refuse to wade through 16 pages describing a field before having another hobbit song & only THEN getting 5 minutes of action - it's just not on! [...] I couldn't even read The Hobbit - I got 3 chapters in & threw it across the room - & this was in preparation for a theatre production of it - LOL!

 

Whereas, we read The Hobbit at school.. and I loved it. I also enjoyed it when I re-read it not long ago. LOTR, however, I gave up half way through book 2.

The Lord of the Rings series IS admittedly hard to get through. It's kind of sad that people our age today enjoy classical books that were written for children in their time, huh? I applaud patient readers for their effort!

 

I read The Hobbit once voluntarily and once in school and loved it both times. The cartoon movie was funny! I suppose it's the intoductory material for Fellowship that got to me. --Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf, and Sam are so dear, though! (I only read the first fifty or sixty pages, and then I had to give it back to my uncle.)

 

I plan on trying the trilogy again. For now, however, has anyone who can't stand Tolkien's verbose tendencies in his Middle-Earth books tried his translations? Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was very entertaining and well-styled, all in rhythmic prose. Worth a shot for such a little story, right? I think Tolkien also did a translation called The Pearl or something like that, but those days in my British Literature class are a little fuzzy.

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I'll write as many as I can remember from seventh to twelfth grade.

 

Seventh Grade

Book: (nonfiction) Let God be God by Assoc. of Christian Schools

Comments: -

Book: (nonfiction) Wise Up! by ?

Comments: A summary from a home school website: "You've wanted to say it, and now you get to tell your students to 'Wise up.' Middle school youth need to get biblical wisdom for relationships, character family, friends, leadership, and decision-making. This study in Proverbs helps your students get wisdom."

--I doodled a lot in this one, but I especially liked the part about building friendships.

 

Eighth Grade

Book: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Comments: Sweet! My teacher read it aloud to us each day in English. We watched the old cartoon movie afterward; I wish Peter Jackson made a movie of it instead!

Book: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Comments: Actually, I read this one myself for a book report.

 

Ninth Grade

Book: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Comments: We didn't actually read this as a class; I moved up to ninth grade English in the second semester, but still had to write a couple of book reports.

 

Tenth Grade

Book: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Comments: I had read an abridged modern adaptation of this book by Jim Reimann two weeks before we started this one in class! I guess having a birthday late in the summer and having a grandma who gives books for presents sometimes is not as wonderful a mix. I can't remember which movie we watched after the final exam for the book.

Book: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Comments: Another re-read book! My English teacher knows much about it, however, so I learned much more than I did reading it by myself.

 

Eleventh Grade

Book: Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Comments: -

Book: Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Comments: -

Book: Various American literature excerpts

Comments: Much of them were sad! We were taught how to recognize the talent of but argue against Ralph Waldo Emerson's and Thomas Paine's humanist essays. I have always enjoyed Emily Dickinson's sweet (or bittersweet) poems.

 

Twelfth Grade

Book: Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Comments: Interesting, memorable story. I would not want to be Viola! There's a movie with Amanda Bynes that borrows names and some of the plot from this play.

Book: *something about Sir Thomas Kent or Ken*

Comments: I'll think of the name and author later. Sorry for leaving you hanging on a pretty good book!

Book: King Lear by William Shakespeare

Comments: I think I liked Hamlet the best of the tragedies:drama:, but King Lear's daughter Cordelia and servant Kent were super. Nine seniors went on the trip to England, Scotland, and Normandy and saw the play with Sir Ian McKellen... he was naked for a few minutes.:D

Book: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by J.R.R. Tolkien

Comments: It was fun writing poems in this style. The story was good, although I can't remember the ending =-/ .

Book: various excerpts from British literature

Comments: I liked The Three Strangers by Thomas Hardy; The Canterbury Tales By Geoffrey Chaucer; Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift; most of the English Romantic poets like Lord Byron and John Keats ("To Autumn" is BEAUTIFUL!); and others I don't recall at the moment.

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We read a wide variety of things, books and plays. If memory serves me correctly, I read these, among others (titles are correct but I may have confused the authors):

 

An Inspector Calls (JB Priestly)

The Machine Stops (EM Forster)

Androcles and the Lion (GB Shaw)

Midsummer Night's Dream and Richard III (Shakespeare)

To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) - my favourite.

 

Kerri

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Ooh, we did An Inspector Calls too - I'd forgotten that one! We also did Death of a Salesman and Spring and Port Wine, neither of which impressed me like Inspector did.

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I don't remember much at all of my time at school, but the book I remember most of all was My Family and other Animals by Gerald Durrell - I actually won a copy of this in a creative writing competition - I got second prize. I still have it, and although I have seen the film, have not read the book at all since I left school in 1982. Perhaps that will change soon though.

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