Which books are on the English Literature A-Level syllabus?

To be fair to Ian McEwan, I thought that Atonement was a good read: it has a plot driven by believable characters and has lots of layering and themes that you could analyse to death. The book is, of course, much better than the film. Films never do justice to the inner-working-of-the-mind that books do so brilliantly.

DD had In Cold Blood by Truman Capote which was excellent.

Macbeth is brilliant. You could read and reread it and get something new from it each time. Same with King Lear.

I did English A level decades ago.

We read: Othello (brilliant) and Winter's Tale (meh); Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale & prologue (very funny); Shaw's St Joan (notes more interesting than the play but the notes, which are as long as the play almost, really are fascinating), Fielding's Joseph Andrews (tedious), Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (her only boring novel!) Dickens' Hard Times (one of his best and shortest novels) Hardy Mayor of Casterbridge (good). I can't remember which poetry we did for A level and which for GCSE but we definitely read Eliot's Prufrock poems & Wasteland at some point (loved them all)

Weird, because looking back on that list, I loathed half the books and yet loved the course. I just loved analysing literature and finding out there was more to it than first appeared. Like being a detective.

DS did 2 Shakespeare plays (Macbeth again in great detail) and I can't remember the other one, many poems and Angela Carter, Silvia Plath and Wuthering Heights.

Well done on giving up on it Senua - the ending is even worse than the rest. Though it was so bad it was almost funny. Not read anything he's written since. Life is too short and there are plenty of male bores knocking around without having to pay a tenner for the privilege of listening to them drone on in detail about nothing. Your poor DD.

Sadly, I'm not joking MrsM. DD had to do it. I tried to read it too so I could discuss it with her but couldn't finish it.
"Dull, clumsy and pompous" just about sums it up but probably wouldn't get an A* at A Level.

Senua please tell me you're joking about Saturday. They don't really inflict that dull, clumsy, pompous novel on A level students do they? It's not worth a quick read, let alone intensive study.

2 Shakespeare plays, some poetry (usually Romantic like Keats), a twentieth century play such as Waiting for Godot or The History Boys, a Victorian novel such as Jane Eyee, something Gothic such as Frankenstein and a twentieth century novel such as Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Atwood's Handmaid's Tale or Hartley's The Go Between - oh and Angela Carter... These seem to be a reasonably typical range over the last decade.

Ds is doing 1984 and dystopian literature, Life of PI, The Canterbury Tales, Great Expectations for A2 . Jane Eyre, Othello, various poems for AS ( there was more but I can't remember!)

The books (and plays and poems) chosen for study seem designed to put people off reading for life eg stuff like Mrs Dalloway or Saturday.
I'd stick to the BBC Big Read list which contains mostly (imo) corkers*. Enjoy!

• oops. I don't think 'corker' is a term much used in literary analysis.