50 Books Challenge 2024 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 2024, 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.

If possible, please can you embolden your titles and maybe authors as well of books you've read or going to read? It makes it much easier to keep track.

Some of us bring over to the new thread lists of the books we've read so far, but again - this is your choice.

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

What are you reading?

For French A'level (in 1993) I studied Thérèse Desqueyroux de Mauriac, Les Quinze Contes de Maupassant and (I think) Becket de Jean Anouilh.

At uni I then discovered Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Tahar Ben Jalloun, Colette, Camus....

During my placement year, when I asked my French colleagues for a recommendation for a gripping, easy read while I was working in Paris they suggested Le Rouge et le Noir de Stendhal. I never finished it!!! I still have my copy and WILL go back to it at some point 😂

For GCSE English I studied A Midsummer Night's Dream, Silas Marner, Animal Farm, The Color Purple and ???? mental block. I fervently wish I had taken A level English but I chose not to because everyone in authority was telling me I should 😬

My girls have studied (and I have caught up on!) Wonder, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Romeo & Juliette, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Outsiders, Lord of the Flies, A Christmas Carol, Of Mice & Men, The Pearl, Featherboy, Flowers for Algernon, The Great Gatsby, The Handmaid's Tale, Things Fall Apart, Intimate Apparel, A Doll's House, MacBeth, The Tempest, A Streetcar Named Desire...
And in French too many mention: Le Petit Prince, Cyrano de Bergerac, Les Fourberies de Scapin, Boule de Suif, Les Misérables, Thérèse Raquin, L'Assommoir, Les Fleurs du Mal, Le Malade Imaginaire, L'île des Esclaves, Olympe de Gouges...

I've read the first few chapters of Middlemarch a lot of times, but always got stuck by about chapter 11 or 12.

I really enjoyed Middlemarch. They must have gone around again with the syllabus, @Sadik, because I did my A-levels before you!

I'm useless at sticking to readalongs otherwise I'd start one. It's about 20 years since I read it.

Irish too. I repeated a year so read two sets of texts as the syllabus changes every two years. I remember Macbeth and Hamlet, Hard Times and Emma, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Playboy of the Western World. A poetry anthology from John Donne to Emily Dickenson, Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh and Gerard Manley Hopkins. I liked all of these, especially Macbeth.

For Irish as a subject, there was the story of the morose and unfortunate Peig on her Blasket Island rock (God forbid do not go fishing on Sunday lest a big wave carry you away). Scothscéalta (short stories) and poetry in Irish. The poetry was hard, the rest I liked. Even Peig. So sad that today's youth don't read her book any more.

We didn't study literary texts in French or in modern languages in school, but there were comprehension passages taken from novels on exam papers, so ideally we should have studied one to get used to the passé simple and other stylistic features.

I dif my O -levels in 1975 and we studied Much Ado about nothing, Wessex Tales and a poetry anthology Poems of the Sixties.

We did a great poetry collection for O level. Robert Graves, Louis Macneice, Patrick Kavanagh, Ted Hughes and R.S.Thomas. I still have the book.

I have a memory of doing both Twelfth Night and Great Expectations twice, for GCSE and A levels? Or was it Macbeth twice? Also Catch 22 and the poetry of Seamus Heaney.

@AgualusasLover I also did Hamlet, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Color Purple for A Level (WJEC 1997). The others I can remember were Six Women Poets, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, The Wife of Bath and Comedians. I loved Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Wuthering Heights, The Color Purple and P&P, found Hamlet annoying, didn't see the point of the Wife of Bath, quite liked Comedians and most of the poetry.

I never really got Dickens until I read Bleak House, which I absolutely love.

The biggest turnaround for me has been Virginia Woolf, who I couldn't stand as a teenager. I now count To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway among my favourite books. I just wasn't ready to read them before I was 40. * *

PS I read Heart of Darkness in my 30s and thought it was brilliant, but sounds like it's just me! * *

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit I remember us having a conversation once about whether we might have gone to the same school as our texts were so similar and I think you also went to a Catholic school up north (we managed to determine we weren't at the same school).

Like others I also did WWI poetry at A Level and then later as part of my history degree along with other literature including Goodbye To All That which I loved. I'm not a huge fan of poetry generally, although I do love books written by poets (esp Patti Smith), however I have a soft spot for the WWI poets esp Wilfred Owen.

Yeah I remember! I didn't do the horrendous Heart Of Darkness til uni though so I got a reprieve.

I also did Heart of Darkness at university as part of a module on black writers and slavery memoirs. I can’t for the life of me remember what I did at A level though. Possibly because I rarely turned up.
I am currently rereading a lot of the books that were on my uni syllabus as I skimmed (at best) the first time. Picked up A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius last week so may give that a bash as I definitely didn’t make it past the first page the first time round.

I did GCSEs in 1990 and remember reading Chaucer’s Prologue, North & South, a Hardy but no idea which one, Romeo & Juliet and King Lear. Plus Larkin and Stevie Smith for poetry. I must have read some contemporary novels but don’t remember which.

A Levels was Much Ado About Nothing, The Color Purple and Oranges are not the Only Fruit.

GCSE early 90s, the days of 100% coursework and hands off teaching. Most lessons consisted of the teacher suggesting we continued with our coursework before they settled down at their desk/disappeared off on some mysterious errand to return sometime later. I think we read at least parts of the texts aloud. We must have discussed them although i cant remember it. We definetely watched videos of lots of the texts on the big TV on wheels (a central part of my secondary education).
Texts i think - memory is fuzzy.
Animal Farm
War Poetry - Sassoon et al.
A Taste of Honey (play) - kitchen sink drama
Of Mice and Men - was incensed by the female potrayal - perhaps suggests my immaturity when reading it. Not returned to it as an adult. DP who isnt a reader remembers studying it at school and liking it.
Macbeth - for me * *it was challenging - i was keen to do well and remember struggling over it at home. The trees moving sticks in my mind.
To Kill a Mockingbird (play) - i'd read and enjoyed the novel before. No idea why we did the play version.
The Moonstone - this was my wider reading option. You chose your own text and wrote your own essay question. I chose this in a sad attempt to impress my English teacher. I thought he'd be impressed by my grown up literary choice 😳. I almost instantly regreted it, but felt i should stick it out so not to loose face. Ended up surprising myself by not only understanding what was going on but actually enjoying it and being quite gripped by the story.
So glad we got to do coursework - it really suited me. I know there are lots of problems with it and reasons why it is our of favour now, but i liked writing those long essays and not having to memorise loads if quotes.

GCSE english

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Romeo and Juliet
Hobson’s Choice

I did A-Levels in 2005 but studied quite a few of the same texts that have come up - wonder what this says about the curriculum. 20th C. American lit (mostly Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Plath and Rich); metaphysical and WWI poets; Emma and postwar dystopian novels; The Tempest and Merchant of Venice for Shakespeare.
Also remember reading and loving A Place of Greater Safety on History teacher's rec (French revolution module).
However, I managed to avoid studying Middlemarch despite doing Eng Lit through to MA. Coincidentally (ahem) it remains probably my favourite English novel, reread every few years. @Sadik treat yourself!

Lucked out for German A-Level with Katharina Blum and Der Besuch der alten Damen (also Zonenkinder with Goodbye Lenin! on film) by taking it early; friends ended up with a new (but very oldschool) teacher trudging through Kafka and Brecht with throbbing renditions of Heine as a treat.
For Latin the exact same bits of Ovid, Virgil, Catullus, Tacitus and Livy that seem to be on this year's syllabus.

I was just at an old schoolfriend's wedding over the weekend, and was feeling cheesily nostalgic for those days 🥹 but I guess adult life has its compensations. (Goes back to obligatory work-related reading...)

At school we did Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Great Expectations. Haven’t read either book since although I keep meaning to! At A level we did Mansfield Park (which I have reread and enjoyed much more as an adult than I did as a teen), and I also did an essay comparing Northanger Abbey with The Mysteries of Udolpho (now that is a beast of a book to get through!). At some point I also did A Midsummer Night’s Dream (possibly for both GCSE and A level), King Lear, A Streetcar Named Desire and Yeats for poetry. I’m sure there must have been other books too, including more modern ones, but I can’t remember them.

So I have thought about my English A-levels a few times and concluded I didn't study a single text by a woman, which seems inconceivable as it was only 2005 - perhaps particularly surprising that none of us noticed at the time? I'm pretty sure it was:

Streetcar Named Desire (LOVED this)
The Winter's Tale
The White Devil
The Great Gatsby
Some Chaucer I think
Tennyson
Enduring Love (unusually contemporary)

But then that list seems light on both modern poetry and 19th century novels, so perhaps I have blanked something out! I know for a fact I didn't read Austen, Eliot or the Brontes at school though so wouldn't have been any of those.

I think we had this conversation a couple of years ago because I rootled out the fellow Scots who remember doing Sunset Song. I didn't read OMAM until I was 27, I think!

We also did at various stages the poetry of Burns and House With The Green Shutters and Macbeth which really isn't Scottish but was as close as they could get!

When not being all Scottish, did Miller , Lord of The Flies, Animal Farm (but way too young so avoided politics and probably thought it was dry as I had a great but rather humourless teacher), lots of poetry but when I got to uni I realised we hadn't been taught anything about meter or rhyme ( I think that was an 80s /90s ting - even at uni we didn't discuss it much) , Romeo and Juliet , and then in the final year Hardy, Brecht (I did German A level so did him twice!), Lear . We did whole authors , rather than just books. We had a coursework element and I did Shaw. He really never gets done at school these days.

I loved all the books I did. Probably LOTF least and yet my user name shows I love it as an adult!

Old school teaching - reading around the room, a sentence or a paragraph at a time and writing chapter summaries.

By the way grannie, you can still get through the entire AQA A level spec without studying a female author or anyone non white, the odd token poem aside...

In fact, come to think of it, A level has got worse on women. I just read back and saw reference to Six Women Poets which I sued to teach and was great. It's gone back to being ultra 'canonical' or predictable after a more 'fun' phase . Probably Gove. AQA seem to view Streetcar as their 'feminist' text.. Chaucer no longer very studied . Handmaid's Tale has entered chetsnut territory but otherwise it's same old same old really. Hardy, Eliot (sp?) and Austen but, especially Hardy have vanished, although Tess still appears at A level. Keats , sadly, seems to have gone. But otherwise it stays the same. I always tried to carve the alternative route so I have taught White Teeth, God of Small Things, Corelli. I loved teaching all of those, especially Corelli.

Lots of students get to English degrees now never having really read anything very long or demanding.

That's so depressing @Piggywaspushed

Dd1 has just started her GCSE course and the first two things she needs to buy are An Inspector Calls and Frankenstein. At least there is a woman, but those two could have been set any time in the last 70 odd years. I do think they need to mix it up a bit with some more contemporary authors.

I was surprised n one had mentioned Frankenstein yet!

I think a lot of it is to do with teacher and examiner workload and their own schooling.

Ever so often the boards introduce new texts at GCSE but no one teaches them.

But I cannot excuse AQA's lack of imagination at A level. That said, there are two pathways and I deliberately did the one that was more diverse. The trouble is that most teachers go for the War path (LOL) which will, of course, be dominated by male voices. Still, I'm sure the board could replace Birdsong with Atkinson, for example. Atonement vs Tess is a year 12 choice. Both are good for thinking about women , I guess and are great texts but still male filtering of female experience. Gatsby is the other book that won't go away ever!

The representation of non white voices is really really poor.

I totally agree about contemporary writers. My DS isn't fond of English, and it definitely didn't help to give him books that appeared old and irrelevant to him (he did Jekyll and Hyde and An Inspector Calls for GCSE).

I remember studying Brighton Rock for GCSE, which I loved and I don't think anyone else has mentioned? Also Romeo and Juliet and Great Expectations. I then did maths and science A levels which I know makes me a bit weird on this thread!