50 Book Challenge 2017 Part Six

[southeastdweller]

Welcome to the sixth thread of the 50 Book Challenge for this year.

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2017, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, it's not too late to join, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read.

The first thread of the year is here, the second one here, the third thread here, the fourth one here, and the fifth one here.

What are you reading?

Last studied English for Higher at school, my degree was Physical Education!

History would be my choice too now. No idea why I chose Economics (Well I suppose it was because I enjoyed the A level but there is so much more maths at degree level and it was always the social/historical side that I really enjoyed).

Returning to books, as suggested busy Cote, I'm half way through Lee Child - Worth Dying for from DH's pile of Manly books.
It's ok so far.

Antony and Cleo, The Tempest, Emma, Paradise Lost, Dr Faustus, John Donne, Wordsworth and Keats were my A level texts.
We had a class vote on whether to do something from the 20th century. I was the only one who voted in favour.

English Lit at A level, philosophy and theology at university for me. It's a good thing I always read for enjoyment anyway, otherwise the GCSE and A level set books might have killed off my love of reading. The only thing I really loved was Hamlet. Otherwise there was Thomas Hardy Far From The Madding Crowd, George Eliot Middlemarch, Charles Dickens Bleak House (and Great Expectations too but that might have been lower down the school. If only Magwitch had drowned Pip in the marshes at the beginning of the story.), Romeo and Juliet, and poetry of the 1930s, although most of the poetry was okay. Loathed all of the novels and haven't read Eliot, Hardy or Dickens since. Romeo and Juliet both needed a good kicking too.

54. The Wicked Boy by Kate Summerscale

Another exploration of Victorian true crime from the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. This one isn't a whodunnit since in 1895 Robert Coombes, aged 13, confessed to having killed his mother as soon as the crime was discovered, although that wasn't until several days after he had stabbed her. During the intervening time, their father being at sea, Robert and his younger brother Nattie went to Lords to watch the cricket, went to the theatre, and recruited a man from the docks that they knew through their parents to look after them, telling him that their mother had gone to visit family in Liverpool.

The book covers the brief investigation and trial of Robert, Nattie having been discharged, followed by an account of the regime at Broadmoor, where Robert spent the next 16 years, and of his later involvement in the First World War. It's only a flavour of Coombes life, with the years after the war being very much a summary, but it's interesting for the contrast between the boy and the man, so something of a tale of redemption as well.

ChillieJeannie completely agree about Romeo and Juliet, particularly Romeo! I studied it at A level and then again at degree. My university tutor was not impressed when I suggested that maybe Shakespeare meant this one as a comedy rather than a tragedy.

I'm an English Lit graduate - surprised to be in the minority.

We did Mansfield Park for A level FFS.

Keith - Mansfield Park here too. Plus Great Gatsby, Sons and Lovers, Paradise Lost, Poetry of the 30's, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear. Hated Poetry of the 30's and Romeo and Juliet. Loved King Lear and Gatsby. Pretty indifferent to the others.

Macbeth at Standard Grade, Romeo and Juliet, Sunset Song, Larkin and Norman MacCaig at Higher. CSYS: Othello, Measure For Measure, A Winter's Tale, Far From The Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Doll House and I think another Ibsen but supply teacher fucked up and only covered 2 instead of 3, which we only discovered during the exam. Had to write third essay on bloody Robert Henryson instead (Scottish Chaucer).

Oh and I forgot The Prologue to Canterbury Tales - Chaucer.

As well as Jane Eyre we did Wuthering Heights (loved), Alan Bennett's Talking Heads (also loved), Macbeth and Othello. For poetry we did Betjeman and started with Sylvia Plath but switched to Seamus Heaney after our English teacher declared her "too depressing"!

I did English Lit/Lang A-Level, both came fairly easily to me and overall English was far and away my favourite subject. Though for some reason I decided to do French and History at uni, I did love the History too though, the French was just so I'd get the year abroad!

I can remember covering Othello, Edward 11 by Christopher Marlowe, and The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin. For the life of me I can't think what novels!

Ooh - actually maybe Jane Eyre was one of the novels, snatches of memory coming back to me here!

@southeastdweller - nearly time for another new thread!

New thread up here 📚

I studied Julius Caesar, Great Expectations and Brighton Rock for GCSE. The first two were okay, loved the third (although my favourite Graham Greene is now The Power and the Glory) - so I would have joined your side of the vote, Best!

No English studied past GCSE here.

The only pre-second world war text I remember studying at school was Romeo and Juliet. I tend to agree that the pair of them needed some sense shaking into them. Also that priest who thought it'd be a good idea to give Juliet a drug that made her look dead. He was presumably a grown man rather than a silly infatuated hormonal teenager.

I did lit/Lang A-level and adored it, having been a bit lukewarm about GCSE but got an A so did it for A-level!
I got my best A level grade for English but by then I had already applied to music college and carried on ahead with that. I regret it and wish I had gone on to to English.
For A-level and GCSE I studied 'The diary of a nobody', 'Othello', 'Romeo and Juliet', 'The Handmaids Tale', some Carol Ann Duffy poetry and some Auden poetry. Loads more but these all stuck with me.