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What did you read at school?


Michelle

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I graduated from high school (secondary school) nine years ago, but I actually remember every book we read as a class and ones that we got to pick from a list. Freshman year I read Romeo & Juliet, The Great Gatsby, Mr. & Mrs. BoJo Jones (uugg), Jane Eyre, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, To Kill A Mockingbird, and Where the Lilies Bloom.

Sophomore year was ridiculous because all we read was The Pearl, and some Mary Higgins Clark books.

Junior year I read The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, and Of Mice and Men

Senior year was Wuthering Heights (my fav), Hamlet, Crime and Punishment, Anthem, and Their Eyes Were Watching God

 

Well, needless to say I had the same English teacher for freshman and senior year.

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I read:

Animal Farm - George Orwell

Twelfth Night - Shakespeare

How To Kill A Mockingbird

Othello - Shakespeare

King Lear - Shakespeare

The Woman in Black - Susan Hill

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Mansfield Park - Jane Austin

Macbeth - Shakespeare

The Turn of the Shrew

Paradise Lost

 

There were probably more but I can't remember

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Not sure if I can remember them all and I only left school last year... This is the list of stuff I can remember studying in [roughly] chronological order; I did English Literature up to A-Level.

 

Plays:

The Granny Project (Anne Fine)

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare)

An Inspector Calls (J.B. Priestley)

Macbeth (Shakespeare)

The Browning Version (Terrence Rattigan)

Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)

Translations (Brian Friel)

King Lear (Shakespeare)

'Tis Pity She's A 'lady of the night' (John Ford)

 

Novels:

The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (Penolope Lively)

A Pack of Lies (Geraldine McCaugrean)

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Mildred D. Taylor)

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

Emma (Jane Austen)

Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)

The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)

 

Poetry:

Seamus Heaney New Selected Poems 1966-1987

The Nun's Priest's Tale (Chaucer)

 

We did unseen poetry for GCSE and some other stuff I can't remember, as well as a collection of short stories that focused on the role of women. We also studied La Chateau de ma Mere during French A-Level. I feel I've forgotten some things, so I'll edit the list if I remember anything else...

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The book we all hated, and persuaded our teacher to drop was 'An Inspector Calls'.

 

I thought that was a great play. I'm surprised you didn't like it. It was Agatha Christie-esque in that it was a closed room whodunnit, except in this case they alldunnit. I loved it at school. We also did A Man For All Seasons (mainly because my school was St. Thomas More. Novels - at O'level Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies and A' Level; Wuthering Heights, Hard Times. Shakespeare was A Winter's Tale & Anthony & Cleo.

 

I can tell you the biggest GCSE titles today. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies & Of Mice and Men. The website has them all on CD and unabridged. The amount of each and particularly Of Mice & Men sold in April is quite staggering as the exams approach. Easily 150 copies of the Steinbeck in 6 weeks.

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My class loved An Inspector Calls too, although we disliked writing essays on it. I remember one tiresome task we had was to write the essay "What does the character x contribute to the play?" and I chose Sheila - needless to say, it was a bit half-hearted. In any case, I still thought the play was really good and the ending had us all wondering.

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You know what, I lie!:roll: It was Far From The Madding Crowd that we didn't like.. (I don't know what was going on there!)

 

I've not read that, but I loved Tess. I missed that off of my A'level list, but there was also the film with Nastasjja Kinski (sp?). We were all taken to watch it at the cinema at the time.

 

I'm an early riser (no jokes please) and recently on Radio 7 there was a dramatisation of Tess that brought it all back. I could even recite to my wife the last lines.

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  • 3 weeks later...

GCE - Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen - a bit dull for a fifteen year olds :)

Henry IV Part 1 - desperately dull and irrelevant at the time. :D

 

Tennyson poems - I really liked the Lady of Shallot.

 

I was cross with my English teacher at the time because she could have chosen a different selection. My sister 2 years earlier studied 'Brighton Rock' by Grahame Green - how good was that? She also studied modern poets and a much better Shakespeare play.

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Measure for Measure, Macbeth and bits of Midsummer Nights Dream

Silas Marner by George Eliot

An Inspector Calls

The Go-Between by L.P Hartley

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

There must have been more but as others have said I read so much at school they have all merged and I cannot remember what was what! At primary school we had the Roger Ret Hat etc but again like others have said I was way past that and onto adult novels by year 5 and 6 which my teachers didn’t like very much. I don’t remember the process of learning to read, just remember always being able to do it and loving it more than anyone else in the class!

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In NSW, we do the HSC, and I studied (if memory serves):

 

Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta

The Harp in the South by Ruth Park

 

Now that I think about it, they're pretty basic texts to study compared to the classics that the rest of you did.

 

We also did poetry by Robert Frost and another Robert whose surname escapes me at the moment.

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Animal Farm - George Orwell

 

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

 

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare

 

Lots of Australian bush poets - Henry Lawson, Henry Kendall - which I absolutely hated, and never ever want to read again in my life time.

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I remember reading Wuthering Heights, and having the whole experience be pure agony (I think I even cried a little over it) until the night before the test I was trying to finish the book and found that the last four chapters made everything right. Although Heathcliff and Catherine and Linton screwed things up so badly, it still turned out okay. After my test that day, I immediatly went home and started reading Wuthering Heights all over again.

 

I also read:

A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee, twice: in 7th and 11th grades.

The Outsiders by Susan Hinton: Loved it.

There were many others, but these were most memorable. Me went in depth on at least half of Shakespeare. I also remember some short stories that I liked: My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn by Sandra Cisneros, and The Birds by Daphne Du Maurier.

Edited by Amanda
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I took a Shakepeare class and read and studied all of his works. Hamlet, I loved and Othello I liked.

 

These books also stood out in High School:

 

Lord of the Flies

 

The Good Earth

 

A Separate PEace

 

SHANNA by Kathleen Woodiwiss (sp) LOL, not on the req reading list -- a romance my friend handed off to me when she was done with it. MY FIRST romance, and she'd covered the cover with a brown wrapper! Oooh, we thought we were so clever...

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I can't remember specific books I read but I do remeber getting the Scholastic Reader which was an order form for books and I remember getting tons of books from them, mostly scary stories

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Oh, I remember those Scholastic orders!! That was always an exciting day for me! I loved getting new books, even as a kid. I think I got a lot of Babysitter's Club books that way. :gl:

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We had something like that too. And I think ours was also Scholastic. Ooh, I used to love getting the brochure to look at, and then collecting my order of a small stack of books. <sigh> Those were the days.

 

Speaking of the Baby-sitter's Club books, I found a report card from Year 5 the other day. My teacher wrote a lot of nice comments about me and how I obviously loved reading. She then wrote: 'I would like to her reading less Baby-Sitter's Club books'. I cracked up laughing when I read that :gl: That was pretty much all I read when I was younger.

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I remember reading

Julius Ceasar,

The Merchant of Venice, (My favourite Shakespeare play)

To Kill A Mockingbird,

An Evil Cradling, by Brian Keenan about when he was kidnapped in Beirut with John McCarthy and Terry Waite (roughly anyway, it may not have been Beirut and he was only kidnapped with one of them but I can't be bothered finding the details now!)

 

I must have read more seeing that is 7 years of high school in 4 books, but I can't for teh life of me remember them now. The above were obviously my favourites.

 

Anna

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