A level English set books - clutching at straws for help!

[tobee]

My 16 year old son is on long summer break after GCSEs. He wants to do English lit for A level and just been sent a compulsory reading list from school of 3 books for the summer for the AS part.

He's very good at the subject but is a slow reader for various sen reasons. We thought of audible (and whisper sync) . It's surprisingly hard for teenager to get into the habit of audio listening.His dad is planning to download the first book and they can each read a chapter or two a day and then compare notes.

The books are Jane Eyre, A Room With a View and Wide Sargasso Sea. He's mostly read modern novels and Shakespeare for GCSE.

How can I encourage him to not been downhearted if he finds them girly or alien (especially Jane Eyre being Victorian) ? Part of me realises it might just be tough luck!

That's the point Bertrand. Men are not expected to read books by women and about women - it might gay them. Women are fully expected to read books by and about exclusively men - and to accept that that as the norm. Men don't read books by or primarily about women and that's wrong.

If I look back on my A Level set texts we had Shakespeare, Chaucer, F Scott Fitzgerald, Byron, Gerard Manley Hopkins, LP Hartley, Oscar Wilde.....and Jane Austen. One out of eight. And that was unremarkable and normal to me. If I can read bloody Byron (tedious as hell btw) an English student can get to grips with reading two books by women over two years.

I'm not sure if it's a simple male/femaleness of texts, I think it's maybe that boys just aren't expected to read by their contempories. Girls maybe more so. It's like girls colour within the lines etc. This is obviously from my very limited experience and I'm prepared to be shot down in flames if necessary.

It brings up the question of whether you should choose A level subjects you enjoy versus subjects you are good at which often aren't the same thing. It seems such a shame (my favourite emotion of the thread!) that what seems to count is getting a B or above to push on to university rather than just doing the subjects for their own enjoyment. I don't think this is a fault of teachers, but the governments' education policy for the last 20 odd years. Everything now is about value; value for money, value to the school's league tables, close down or rebrand the school if it doesn't get the right percentages. That's a pretty depressing thought to be shoved down your face for your entire education. There's plenty of that misery and cynicism to go through in adult life!

Delores, thanks for the info about breaks. Fortunately my son has an excellent sen teacher who I'm sure would respond favourably to any enquiry I may make.

Sorry to harp on but there are boys and men who read - and they read men. I think boys tend to read less than girls anyway but when they do read they read men whereas girls read both. That's the problem.

I always scan those little bits in the Sunday supplements where people list their five favourite books and regularly men will choose 5 books by men whereas the women choose across the genders.

That's why I really think it's important for children to be actively introduced to a range of writers - particularly at A level when they are capable of reading more than just something about someone like them. I know this isn't the feminism board but this is exactly why women's writing and by extension women's lives aren't taken seriously - because women's stories are seen as optional for men in a way that men's stories are never optional for women. In fact men's stories are the canon in literature and therefore compulsory.

Here, here!

"hat's the point Bertrand. Men are not expected to read books by women and about women - it might gay them. Women are fully expected to read books by and about exclusively men - and to accept that that as the norm. Men don't read books by or primarily about women and that's wrong."

I absolutely agree. But I think it's also more complicated than that. Back later when I've formed the words to explain why I think that!

I agree completely with preminstreltension.

I've mentioned this on another thread, but for A-level French, we studied four texts, all by male authors:

Terre des Hommes by Sainte-Exupery (no female characters)
Trois Contes by Flaubert (three short stories, all good, I guess, but not terribly female-friendly)
La Symphonie Pastorale by Gide (rather creepy novel about a vicar who falls in love with his young adoptive daughter)
Les Femmes Savantes -by Moliere (satire about women wanting a proper education, ho ho)

There were five students in our A-level class, four of us female. You couldn't have come up with a set of texts less likely to inspire us if you'd tried.

Jane Eyre is a spectacular novel and if your DS just sees it as about girl stuff he will miss the point - I hope he finds more in it. It's a novel about Jane's struggle to find a place in the world - not love as such, but a place to be accepted for who she is and to feel at home. It's one of the reasons I think it speaks to teenage girls but with not too big a stretch it could just as easily speak to a teenage boy - that sense of not fitting in is a quintessential teenage feeling! Jane's issues are just as much to do with her slightly odd social status as her gender - as a governess she was not a servant but neither was she family - often in the Victorian home she might have eaten with the children not just because it was her job but because there was no one else with whom it was suitable for her to eat.

It's worth your son having a look at the great Victorian novel, how many of them are either by women or have a female protagonist, or both, and having a think about why that might be. The role of women was changing so rapidly that in order to comment on society, an author was almost compelled to include a female perspective in a way they might not have done before.

Worthwhile extra reading to complement Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea would be Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. It's quite an easy read and is an early 20th century retelling of the Jane Eyre story, but with a more modern twist. It would be well worth thinking about how the telling differs from the original, and how both Rebecca and Wide Sargasso Sea complement the original.

Yes I'm forever boring on to my kids to read "Rebecca". Finally got them to watch the Olivier and Fontaine film anyway.

Ooh I never thought of Rebecca as a rebelling of Jane Eyre. LOVE that

Retelling not rebelling.