Top five teenage books of all time

[Bink]

Here's mine:

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding [cheating by doing two]
Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Julia Strachey, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
Jack Kerouac, On The Road
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Funny how many of these are American, whereas our children's books (on the other thread) are very Brit-centric.

(Otherwise, I've got a bet on how many times the Brontes come up.)

Another one who read heavy stuff as a teen. I think my favourites aged about 15-16 were
Dr Zhivago,
Crime and Punishment,
War and Peace,
Jane Eyre,
A tale of Two cities.

Then a load of Sartre.

flowers in the attic was that not some fully chavtastic trash???

l shaped room
backwardshadow etc

indeed

Marina! How could I forget Love for Lydia?

Do you remember the tv series with Christopher someone and Mel Martin?

Daphne du Maurier's quite teenage, isn't she?

(I got to her by thinking Love for Lydia ... Demelza ... Poldark ... Jamaica Inn ... )

What do you think our mothers' generation read as teenagers? I think we should ask them.

It will have been Angela Brazil, won't it. And M R James.

In one of the Chalet School books a girl got into trouble for having a copy of Forever Amber. And I remember in another, one of the senior girls going into a bookshop and buying 'the new Angela Thirkell'. So that is probably what my mother's generation were reading (I'm quite fond of Angela Thirkell myself.)

tissy, I believe it gave a nonentity called Jeremy Irons his first break too.
The shock of seeing Mel Martin as Queen Elizabeth in Richard III a year later and realising she had flyaway blonde hair and not that mesmerising black bob
Was it Christopher Strauli, I wonder?

M R James - and E M Forster - A Room with a View. Also Saki - and I developed an obsession with doomed young men of WWI, galloping through Goodbye to All That, Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man and the anthology Up the Line to Death after seeing Testament of Youth

Oh Testament of Youth. Loved it.
And has anyone mentioned Dusty Answer?

What about Solzhenitsyn (all the books)? I too read through Camus, Sartre, De Beauvoir and other poncey authors.

Marina, Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man was one of mine too! - I thought of putting it in the start-off list on this thread and then I thought, No, everyone will think I'm a Big Fat Nostalgia Ponce.

Issy - thank you - and the other one - I FOUND IT - it's Esther Hautzig's The Endless Steppe (I found it by googling "children's book siberia lilac" - if you read it you will understand why. If you haven't come across it, do read it - though it seems to be out of print in this country.) PS it isn't a story, it's a memoir.

Oh, and All Quiet on The Western Front

But could not make head nor tail of The Good Soldier Schweik

... which reminds me, oh god ... Gunter Grass (esp. Tin Drum), Aldous Huxley, Glass Bead Game, Knut Hamsun ... there was some really corny stuff in there. For that sort of thing, I severely blame the Sixth Form Library, which was a kind of isolated oubliette of angst. With comfy chairs.

We had an ancient English teacher who was quite possibly in at the tail end of WWI, and I blame him for Siegfried Sassoon, not to mention a dirty little Edward Thomas/John Masefield/Ford Madox Ford habit.
We read The Endless Steppe at school, goodness that takes me back.
Our school library was full of novels like this - informative, well-written, slightly quirky. This one was a standout and well worth uncovering in this year above all others if you can track it down

How could I forget Hermann Hesse. The Glass Bead Game! Teentastic!!! I brooded over it for positively months.

I tell you what bink, at that time I was resolutely anti-American man fiction. I had friends devouring Heller, Salinger & co but I preferred my Americans female and my angst European for some reason. Even my very racy friend producing a copy of Portnoy's Complaint failed to entice me...
The same school library introduced me to Mary McCarthy's most revealing The Group...for example

Here's mine:

Good Behaviour or Time after Time by Molly Keane (surely the best teenage girl read ever)
Dusty Answer or The Whispering Grove
Raymond Carver short stories
Middlemarch

The Girl with Green Eyes

I liked E.M Forster too, especially Howards End. I still like Howards End.

They're all about repressed sex my books I realise. I have countless more titles at my fingertips.

I read lots of Satre and The Russians and things, but the repressed sex/lonely misunderstood yet intellectual girl did it for me every time.

Not talking to yourself a100times. I too had myopic angst to keep me company through my teenage years.
Molly Keane, check
Dusty Answer, check.
Middlemarch, check
Raymond Carver, check and doublecheck
Wasn't wildly keen on Edna because I looked down on the Oirishness of it (she came from my home county, and I felt she was putting it on a bit.)

Ah yes. But then I went quite heavily for the middle-aged angst for some reason. Anita Brookner and Margaret Drabble, and all those women in bed-sits in Hampstead writing poetry and being in love with their cousin.

God, I could have done with something more bracing I think.

Lilymaid, definitely Solzhenitsyn too.

Marina, one of my dds is named after Saki's ambisexual toddler-devouring hyena.

Another dd has a name from a Margaret Drabble novel, and the third from Margaret Atwood. But those authors would be on my 20-something reading list. Not tortured and long winded enough for my teenage years.