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(May have been done before on the old board, but ...)

Stuff you had to read at school: which did you like, which did you hate, and why?

'King Lear' - Immense!

'Pardoner's Tale' (From 'Canterbury Tales') - gibberish to my adolescent eye. Favourite bit: "Filthy music from both ends".

'Paradise Lost' - Nah.

'Sons and Lovers' (DHL) - Vivid evocation of working class family life from someone who doesn't belong.

Wilfred Owen - Devastating.

'Candide' - Volta Voltaire!

'Die Physiker' (Dürrenmatt): My German was crap, so I didn't get much from this, but it seemed interesting.


.

Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe) - Excellent book, nice and easy to read too.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn) - Very bleak, but this appealed to my teenage self. Also it had swear words in it.

Billy Budd (Melville) - thankfully only a novella. Hated it. Allegory which didn't convince as a story. Characters all represented something rather than existed in their own right (e.g. The Captains's name was Vere = 'truth' - get it? Get it? GET IT? For fuck's sake.) Overwritten too.

Richard II - Once I got through the Shakespearian language to the actual story, I got more than a bit obsessed with it. The language is/was a barrier at first though.

The Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy) - Thought this was absolutely brilliant. Ok, so in Hardy you tend to skim past whole paragraphs of over-description to get back to the story. But the story and characterisation had me absolutely hooked. We had to read it about 3 times, and I liked it better each time.

Z for Zachariah - Rubbish.
Romeo and Juliet - Tedious.
Animal Farm - OK.
Lord of the Flies - OK.

Can't remember anything else. I didn't enjoy fiction much when I was at school.

Julius Caesar- A bit pompous, I remember thinking. My class developed an ironic obsession with the word 'twixt, however, and would drop it into conversation in various lessons (eg "Mr Wright, the gauze is 'twxit the bunsen burner and the flask").

Journey's End- Tedious stiff upper lip fuckwittery. I desperately wanted something conveying the horrors of war, and this wasn't it.

The NEAB Poetry Anthology- Carol Anne Duffy= lesbian who looks like Hitler (but we all secretly loved her poems). Wilfred and Siegfried pretty good.

Henry V- My teacher hated patriotism and hated teaching this. I hated patriotism too, but the character studies made it alright, like.

Of Mice and Men- Short, economical. A "tour de force". A Great American Novel.

"Now what the hell you s'pose is eating them two guys?"

The best thing was being introduced to Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm).

The worst was having to read The Hobbit.

Macbeth: rock and roll.
R&J: love it now, but not what I wanted at the time.
Collected works of Keats: ditto, really. Though I can now quote lines like "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken/Or stout Cortez tum-ti-tum wild surmise tum-ti-tum silent upon a peak in Darien" and wish I had that older-generation facility to do that with a wider range of poets.

Also, stuff like To Kill a Mockingbird. Meh.

I liked Journeys End. Given that the officers really copped it in WW1, I thought it did get to the heart of the horror. Stanhope was a good character, and I liked The Colonel who showed up and said it would all be OK because they'd get medals.

Didn't like Billy Budd either.

Macbeth brilliant though found the first scene a bit ridiculous. But the second scene "Doubtful it stood like two spent swimmers" got me into the language as well as the plot, even if it was difficult.

Paradise Lost (books 1 and 2) brilliant too.

Was something of a non-reader of set books at that time. Didn't read Jane Eyre or Decline and Fall.

Macbeth. Badass.

The Merchant of Venice. Pretty good.

Silas Motherfucking Marner. Kill me now. Just kill me, please. Now. Please.

At 6th Form:

TS Eliot's Selected Poems. Great, if a bit etiolated. Having already consumed the lyrics of Manic Street Preachers and the cut-ups of William Burroughs for a couple of years, the fragmented, referential form and apocalyptic tone were easy to get on with.

Larkin. Wet.

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice. Just get on with it and say what you fucking mean: I'm nearly 17, I don't have much time left. (I hoofed this book across the room on a couple of occasions.)

Virginia Woolf - The Waves. Stream of consciousness. Nice idea; we get it. Could the stream perhaps be a bit shorter and racier please? And less congested with unbearable posh children? (University lecturers later told us to avoid this book like herpes.)

Mayor of Casterbridge - hated it. Poorly written, episodic dirge. Completely ruined Hardy for me,

Animal Farm - Loved it then, still love it now. Served as a gateway to Orwell for me, for which I'm eternally grateful.

Cat's Eye - I can't abide Atwood. A lot of it is to do with this book, but more of it was down to the teacher who made us read it. Like a lot of literature I would probably otherwise like, it'll forever be tainted by the foul stench of dull Friday afternoons.

Measure for Measure - I still use 'Tickling for Trout in a peculiar river in everyday conversation. No one knows what the fuck I'm on about. Nowt changes.

Macbeth - what they all said.

Of Mice and Men - One of my favourite books. When my sister named her rabbit George, I assumed it was a nod to Steinbeck. It wasn't.

Volpone - Total shit. Fuck off.

Wyatt - I read To Kill A Mocking Bird quite recently. Someone left a copy in the pub, and didn't come back for it. So I nabbed it and used it to pass the time on the N89. I really, really enjoyed it.

Volpone fucking rocks you madman. "Your parasite is a most precious thing, dropped from above, not bred 'mongst clods and clodpoles here on Earth! I muse the mystery was not made a science, it is so liberally professed. Almost all the wise world is little else in nature but parasites or sub-parasites."*

As true today as it's always been.

(*I've been in it y'see.)

I'll try and reread it I guess. But back then (1996/7?) I hated it.

Crime and Punishment. Fantastic. Went on to read all of Dostoyevksy, a chunk or Turgenev and Gogol. But then again, I was a miserable fuck back then.

Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, As you Like It. Prefer tragedies to comedies.

The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies. Bilgewater, required Canadian content (EIM, I seriously doubt you'd enjoy Atwood much more outside of school...even her sci-fi is pretty dull).

Paradise Lost, Books 1 and 2. Loved it. Am possibly alone in the universe on this point.

Things Fall Apart. Meh.

Madame Bovary Would have preferred to scratch my eyes out than read this.

Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey. The former is OK, the latter only slightly better than Bovary.

Oediups Rex. Couldn't he just have read some Flaubert as punishment instead?

The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies. Bilgewater,

Wha.....?! The wrongest thing you've ever posted on OTF AG.

I have only vague memories of books we did for 'O' level back in '64: The Cruel Sea 'cos of the sex scene. Well not really a sex scene, more the implication the act has recently occurred, but we took what we could get back then.

Priestley's The Good Companions, the brilliant justification for football as art in the opening chapter won me over, otherwise it was pretty blah.

Lark Rise to Candleford No real memory of it from school but I read it years later and thought then — still do — that it's perhaps the finest book about rural England that's ever been written.

Sir: the finest book about rural England ever written is that containing maps of the principal roads to London. Or something.