50 Book Challenge 2021 Part Five

[southeastdweller]

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

The challenge is to read fifty books (or more!) in 2021, though reading fifty isn't mandatory. Any type of book can count, and please try to let us all know your thoughts on what you've read. Could everyone embolden their titles and/or authors as well, please, as it makes the books talked about easier to track?

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

How're you getting on so far?

I can't put my Lit A Level texts in case one of you was in my class. I was a right swot and got an A and was fairly unpopular

Someone needs to show this thread to the English exam board so they stop inflicting it on poor A Level students I thought it might have been my age to because of the fact I was studying it (although we also studied The Handmaid's Tale which is one of my favourite books) but no it's just because it's boring, impenetrable shite.

My Lit A-Level books were Sense and Sensibility and Paradise Lost. Pretty sure the teacher hated us. Or herself

I had to read Nostromo for A level - funnily enough, I've never felt the urge to read anything else by Conrad

I did:
The Secret Agent - dire
Tess - loved it at the time but now it annoys me
The Tempest - still love it; my favourite Shakespeare
Philip Larkin - swoon
Emma - still love it
Antony and Cleo - hated it
I feel as if there would have been more, but those are the ones I remember.

I've always wondered why some books are in bold, can someone enlighten me please?

If the book is in bold in a list its a favourite.
In general conversation we bold the books so people can see easily what book is being discussed.

Mine were
Nostromo (enough said)
Dr Faustus (loved)
Volpone (loved)
John Donne / Metaphysical poets (loved)
Othello (not my favourite Shakespeare but fine to study)
The Nun's Priest's Tale (mixed feelings - interesting in concept, painful in the practice)
Milton/Comus (my classmates hated so we skipped over it)
Overall I really like that we studied a lot of things I'd never have read otherwise, unlike say Austen / Hardy. Nostromo was the exception to that!

Remus - did you do some Chaucer? I feel you're maybe around my age, & I think it was compulsory (or maybe just the board we studied)

I also studied these:
Measure for Measure - ok not my favourite Shakespeare
She Stoops to Conquer - didn’t enjoy
Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale - enjoyed
Wordsworth and Coleridge Lyrical Ballads - preferred the Coleridge stuff but not wild about either really
Robert Frost poetry - loved

We did:
Hamlet, Wuthering Heights, The Duchess of Malfi, Wife of Bath, The Wasteland - Loved

Return of the Native - really wish he hadn’t returned

The teacher once walked in and started teaching us Wide Sargasso Sea, even though it wasn’t on our list

@Sadik

Mine were Nostromo (enough said) Dr Faustus (loved) Volpone (loved) John Donne / Metaphysical poets (loved) Othello (not my favourite Shakespeare but fine to study) The Nun's Priest's Tale (mixed feelings - interesting in concept, painful in the practice) Milton/Comus (my classmates hated so we skipped over it) Overall I really like that we studied a lot of things I'd never have read otherwise, unlike say Austen / Hardy. Nostromo was the exception to that!

Remus - did you do some Chaucer? I feel you're maybe around my age, & I think it was compulsory (or maybe just the board we studied)

Yes! Hated it and obviously tried to erase it from my memory. I think it was the Pardoner's Prologue/Tale. And Lyrical Ballads - loved Coleridge and loathed Wordsworth

I did

Heart of Darkness
Hard Times
Othello
Richard II
The Handmaid's Tale
The Duchess of Malfi
The Changeling
WWI poets

@Matilda2013

If the book is in bold in a list its a favourite. In general conversation we bold the books so people can see easily what book is being discussed.

Ahh thank you! I got that in general conversation the book being talked about was in bold, but wasn't sure in the lists what books in bold meant

I was trying to recall all our Eng Lit texts only yesterday. I’m sure I have missed some..

King Lear
Much Ado About Nothing
King John (really, why?)
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Passage to India
Playboy of the Western World
The Rainbow
Yeats
Dylan Thomas
The Franklin’s Tale

I’ve never gone back to Chaucer and I loathe DH Lawrence but the rest were all enjoyable to study although where on earth were the women and the contemporary authors and the non-white authors?
Perhaps we did Pride and Prejudice too. Don’t think that would have been a GCSE book.

@MamaNewtNewt

I did

Heart of Darkness
Hard Times
Othello
Richard II
The Handmaid's Tale
The Duchess of Malfi
The Changeling
WWI poets

Very similar. But not identical. Late 90s?

I am also really struggling to remember my Eng Lit A Level texts . I did quite well in that too and it wasn't THAT long ago...

I think we did Emma and Pride and Prejudice, which sounds a little Austen heavy... but I'm sure we did both. I want to say we did Antony and Cleopatra, but not sure. We did the romantics for poetry.

I can only remember a few, I was too busy gallivanting around with my first proper boyfriend

Othello (liked it)
In Cold Blood (loved it)
The Return of The Native (he should have stayed away)
Henry IV Part 1 (boring as hell)
The Canterbury Tales (have blocked it out I hated it that much)

@PepeLePew

I was trying to recall all our Eng Lit texts only yesterday. I’m sure I have missed some..

King Lear
Much Ado About Nothing
King John (really, why?)
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Passage to India
Playboy of the Western World
The Rainbow
Yeats
Dylan Thomas
The Franklin’s Tale

I’ve never gone back to Chaucer and I loathe DH Lawrence but the rest were all enjoyable to study although where on earth were the women and the contemporary authors and the non-white authors?
Perhaps we did Pride and Prejudice too. Don’t think that would have been a GCSE book.

I did Pride and Prejudice for O level. I've also taught it at GCSE in the past.

Another A Level Eng Lit student here; we did King Lear (loved), The Merchant's Tale (didn't really get - it was not until Uni that I learned to love Chaucer), Mansfield Park (hated).... There must have been a fourth? How have I forgotten what it is?

Oh, Book 1 of Paradise Lost I think:

Which way I fly is Hell; Myself am Hell

1 Hilo Waking the Monsters by Judd Winick
2 The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami. Translated by Allison Markin Powell
3 Hilo Then Everything Went Wrong by Judd Winick
4 Three Apples Fell from the Sky by Narine Abgaryan. Translated by Lisa C Hayden
5 Hilo All the Pieces Fit by Judd Winick
6 Days of the Bagnold Summer by Joff Winterhart
7 The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold
8 Serpentine by Philip Pullman
9 Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot
10 Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
11 Bright by Duanwad Pimwana. Translated by Mui Poopoksakul
12 The Politicization of Mumsnet by Sarah Pedersen
13 The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré
14 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
15 The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
16 If Not, Winter. Fragments of Sappho. Translated by Anne Carson
17 Freedom Bound: Escaping Slavery in Scotland by Warren Pleece
18 The Abyss Surrounds Us by Emily Skrutskie
19 Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
20 On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden
21 Black and British by David Olusoga
22 The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Translated by Deborah Smith
23 Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez. Translated by Christina MacSweeney

Currently reading Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea by Teffi which I'm loving so far. After a slow start I seem to be getting more enthusiastic about the books I read!

Tristram Shandy is wonderful and funny and not in any way comparable to Ulysses. Possibly one of my favourite books ever. I do have a fairly high tolerance for the classics though and did read TS at work which meant I read for half an hour every day which did help.

Trying to remember my A level texts. I think:

Wuthering Heights (loved)
Pride & Prejudice (also loved)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (my favourite)
Comedians by Trevor Griffiths (great to study, so many things to write, would like to see it performed some day)
Hamlet (can't really argue with that tbf)
The Wife of Bath (meh)

It is possible there were more. I am old. I can't remember.

So I didn't study Heart of Darkness but I have read it since and genuinely thought it was a work of genius. That said, I'm never reading it again. It's a really dark work of genius.

I didn't do A-level but I did do Cider with Rosie, Macbeth and Jane Eyre for O-level (#oldgimmer)

I did Russian lit at Uni, so can tick off War and peace, Crime and Punishment, quite a lot of Chekhov. Remember virtually nothing about them though. I quite like Solzhenitsin though (in a grim kind of way)

The thing I remember LOATHING at school which is actually a good book is Of Mice And Men - it wasn't the book it was the teacher who insisted on reading it out in a dramatic and phoney US accent in a Northern comprehensive

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit mid 90s for me, also in a Northern comp with a Catholic upbringing