Required Reading in School

[beautifuldisaster7]

I had many memorable reads in school some being:

 

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Macbeth by Shakespeare

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare

Night by Elle Wiesel

 

I took a Child Development course which changed my English reading to go along with the class so I didn't do regular English class reading. I feel it was better though because most of the books were worth reading in school and other kids didn't get to read them.

 

(Pink are the ones for Child Dev. classes only)

[Nicola Booth]

Two memorable reads at school for me would be: -

 

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

 

 

Incidentially I noticed that To Kill a Mockingbird is being sold in Tesco and Asda at the moment in their chart section!

 

Discovered yesterday in another book shop that it is 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, it all becomes clear!

[ian]

they were talking about "To kill a Mockingbird" on Radio 2 last night at 10pm. I heard about 5 minutes in the car, but unfortunately, I got home, so couldn't listen to the whole programme. Does anyone know if it will be repeated?

 

Ian

[Ooshie]

I have just checked and it's available on their online "Listen Again" service, ian. I think I will listen to it myself! http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t0cvt

[pip]

I always used to hate reading in secondary school.I always read too fast for the pace of my class, and would usually be finished before they were even half way through. I don't remember much of what we read, but it was usually things like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, which unfortunatly (as I know they're classics so I hope I don't get crucified for saying this!!!) I've never enjoyed! Even now when I've tried to re-read them! A Level was a different story though, I joined late and my class were reading The Great Gatsby - which I adored, 1984 and The Handmaids Tale. Aswell as plays like Death of a Salesman and Measure for Measure. We even read some Chaucer, and I loved them all!!!

My English Literature teacher was a huge influence on how much I enjoyed that lesson, and the choice of books just made it even better

[Kreader]

Some of my most enjoyable School books are;

The Pearl, John Steinback

Miguel Street, VS Naipaul

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare

King Lear, Shakespeare

Beka Lamb, Zee Edgell

The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer

 

The one's I hated were

Howard's End,EM Forster

Cleopatra, Shakespeare

The Caretaker, Harold Pinter

 

My siblings and I are close in age, older sis is a year older than me and my younger bro is a year younger than me. Little sis is two years younger than me. We all read each other's school books.

 

From my siblings my favourites would be;

 

Animal Farm, George Orwell

Of Mice and Men, John Steinback

 

I couldn't take Lord of the Flies.

[TheNinthWord]

I'm going to struggle to remember my reading now.

 

Secondary School:

 

Skellig, David Almond

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (although we only watched the film, then got given extracts from the novel)

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Macbeth

Romeo and Juliet

 

I'm certain there was more, but I really can't remember now.

 

A-levels:

 

King Richard II

Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

Don Juan, Lord Byron

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge

Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks

A lot of WWI literature.

 

Chosen by me for my A-level comparative essay:

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

The World According to Garp, John Irving

 

And I won't go into what I've been reading for university. A mix of really really amazing books and terribly awful drivel (I'm looking at you, Howard's End, Pamela, and Joseph Andrews.

[vesolka]

We had to read literature. It was a part of the program in Slovenian classes.

We went through all the periods in the history of literature; starting reading with for example Sophocles (Antigone), Middle Ages, Protestant Reformation, baroque, etc..

We stopped at each period and put out main subjects, authors, thoughts, impacts...

We read 3 books per year, each time carefully chosen by our teacher, who wanted our lives to become miserable (and from the period we were discussing it). We were reading classics, but not World's famous must-reads, but more Slovenian literature, authors who were mostly writing about their pathetic rustic lives...

 

I hated it!

 

At the end of our secondary school we had our final exam (so called Matura exam), where we had a list of all the periods and a list of authours. 3 randomly selected were yours and you had to discuss it with the board of examiners.

I have pushed my Slovenian classes deeply into my subconsciousness.

 

As far as I remember, we read:

-Sophocles (Antigone)

-Shakespeare (Hamlet)

-Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

-Dostoyevsky (Crime and punishment)

 

I would recommend one book from the list of Slovenian authors, which I really really enjoyed: Alamut by Vladimir Bartol.

[Brida]

I think we read enough in high school, given how many classes we had, and how many times a week we had them.

Similar to what vesolka wrote, we studied the periods in lit history, and read a few books from each period.

We read Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Homer, Dante, Boccacio, Petrarca, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Flaubert, Balzac, G. de Maupassante, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Hemingway, Salinger, etc...And a whole lot of our our ''native'' literature, and a fair amount of poetry.