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?

Ah yes, I did Frankenstein too!

Actually I think I did Frankenstein too @Piggywaspushed as have just found my old book which I'm wondering if Dd1 can use.

My babysitter chose Home Fire as one of her A level choices which I was very happy about but she said she was the only one in her class - I can't remember what the other option was but think it was a white male 🙄

The GCSE lack of variety is also about money. It costs a lot to change text. Also, to be fair, a lot of contemporary texts are either too complex, plot light, or a bit YA shit! I certainly wouldn't be swapping out LOTF for Never Let Me Go

I just remembered I also taught Beloved at A level. Again , that disappeared and yet it's brilliant.

Film Studies is waaaay more diverse. And more fun.

My DD did In Cold Blood and The True History Of The Kelly Gang among other things - In Cold Blood is excellent.

I remember The Color Purple and a section of The Wasteland for A Level.
Can’t remember the Shakespeare text, might have been Othello as we went to see a production of it set in the context of a modern day conflict - after seeing Iago in my mind’s eye as small and ferrety it was a revelation to see him depicted as a tall, balding, bluff army Corporal!

GCSE was dreadful. The Crucible, until our English teacher left under a cloud, Romeo And Juliet, The Wife Of Bath and the poetry of Robert Frost. The only thing that has stuck in my mind is having to design a film set for a Frost poem - absolute tedium for me, who prefers a good old fashioned essay. There was a Hardy too but I appear to have wiped that from my memory; it was long and reading it at class pace was awful.

I think my A Level set texts were:

Shakespeare Plays:
Anthony & Cleopatra
Cymbeline

Novels:
Tess of the D’urbervilles (Hardy)
The Power & the Glory (Greene)
The Wife of Bath (Chaucer)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)

Poetry:
Gerard Manly-Hopkins
Keats (I think, maybe a romantic poets anthology. Poetry not my thing!)

I did go on to do Literature and History at Uni where it was several different modules with seemingly a different book to read every week for each module so it does all get a bit blurry.

I do remember hating Heart Of Darkness - despite it being a short read, but really enjoying dissecting it in class afterwards.
And certain bits have really stuck with me .... 'The horror! The horror!'

Quite a lot of James Clavell books in the kindle daily deals today

It's vaguely coming back to me now that we also did Pope's Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot and The Winter's Tale. Funny I’d forgotten those.

@Tarahumara I also did Further Maths A-Level, and to this day some of the most avid fiction readers I know did STEM. OTOH only a minority (<1/4) of my BA Lit undergrad cohort were the kind of readers-for-pleasure that post on these threads - many just liked/suited a particular style of textual analysis. Most still seem to read very little now, or exclusively trash (in their own words). All the Serious Literature readers I know seem to have studied either Fine Art or something very sensible and vocational, or skipped uni altogether😁

Interesting to hear of how differently the same texts have been taught, though blood thicks with cold at idea of a class readalong of some popular ones! IME, at A-Level, classes were for seminar-type discussions and presentations, lectures on historical context and critical reception, some staging of scenes for drama or analysis of previous stage/film adaptations (memorably, Prospero's Books 👀). We wrote analytical essays, blind close-readings, and occasionally fanfic pastiche (loved doing those for Austen). Creative writing was a separate option which I didn't take, though remember a friend submitting a pornographic Miranda July-inspired story.

Carol Atherton's Reading Lessons was also depressing on the current state of English as school subject (definitely seems to have regressed since My Day), though enjoyable as bibliomemoir.

Oh @GrannieMainland's post has reminded me that we also did The Changeling by Middleton and Rowley and The Duchess of Malfi which some of you may remember I read again recently as a palate cleanser after an inadvertent smutty read 😊

O level 1976. We did The Moon and Sixpece, Pride and Prejudice and Far From The Madding Crowd.
I have never felt the slightest desire to tackle anything by Thomas Hardy ever again.

For GCSE I did Silas buggering Marner (shudder) and Macbeth.

A-level was:
Wuthering Heights
Return of the sodding Native
Hamlet
Duchess of Malfi
The Waste Land
Six Women Poets
Our Country’s Good (play)
Wife of Bath

The teacher did come in and start teaching us Wide Sargasso Sea once, but he’d muddled us with the upper sixth.

Wales, late 90s.

You sound like a great teacher @Piggywaspushed! In fairness I had two good English teachers, both women and would have considered themselves feminists, and I think they were trying to choose creative options within the syllabus hence the McEwan and the Webster instead of more Shakespeare. It's depressing that the options were and still are so limiting.

Aww, shucks! Thanks!

Just remembered I also read The Crucible at some point at school.

Trying to remember what DD studied for a level English, pretty sure it included Jeanette Winterson (Oranges), and then something contemporary for a comparative essay with that.

I was in The Crucible at school. The rather dull Elizabeth. Would have been much more fun to be Abigail.

I finished Susie Dent's first novel today. As with these more intelligent celebrity writers, it's a murder mystery ( sort of). Set in Oxford at a bewilderingly renamed OED, all about words, as you'd expect. It starts slowly but got better. Too many characters and too long by 100 pages. Not enough death.

Currently on the new Jackson Brodie. Already a good deal better.

86. A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms by George RR Martin (Audible)

Dunk an aspiring knight and Egg an aspiring squire with a secret team up.

Read by Harry Lloyd who played Viserys on Game Of Thrones

Only read this because of the forthcoming series. Wasn't that impressed, YA and not in a good way !

Was really repetitious. I was willing him to stop saying "Dunk The Lunk thick as a castle wall" by the end !

There isn't that much material to do more than one series so it could suffer from the same problem as ASOIAF where they just have to make it up as they go.

No English A level here. I’ve sometimes wondered about trying to do one as an adult - and I did do a few seminar-like literature ‘day courses’ when a local-ish uni used to run them - but equally I wonder if it would suck the joy out of reading for me. I think I learn more from you lovely lot, and mumsnet let you write essays for free!!

@EineReiseDurchDieZeit @GrannieMainland – yes! Absolutely infuriating for the parents. So upsetting.

@Welshwabbit – well done! That reminds me, I read Agatha Christie in French as a teenager. I haven’t read any novels in French since then. Maybe a French audio book might be a good start for me.

@nowanearlyNicemum – I’ve still to read Hamnet. Dreadful that it has been on my Kindle for so many years. Well done on whittling down that TBR list.

@Piggywaspushed – yes! I forgot that I did Sunset Song for O Grade/Higher English! I do remember Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, Macbeth, WW1 poetry and Norman MacCaig. There must have been another play, but I just cant remember it. In my defence, it was 1985/1986 lol.

81 The Crow Trap – Ann Cleeves – Having languished on my Kindle for ten years, I’m shocked at how much I enjoyed it. Why didn’t I start this before? Need to carry on with DI Vera Stanhope. I’ve never watched the tv series as Brenda Blethyn’s accent finished me off.

@Tarahumara same, and then a science degree!

I didn’t do English A-level either, partly because I like reading for fun and - for me at least - doing proper literary analysis does indeed suck all the joy out of it! Less of a problem with foreign language A-levels as that was more a case of understanding the language the texts were written in, rather than having to go into great depth.

Like a lot of you, I also did The Crucible and Macbeth at GCSE! Quite enjoyed them both. Meanwhile, I can confirm (via DD1 and DH) that here in France, Year 7-equivalent set texts are the same now as they were 37 years ago 😂

My work here is done! 😂

So ,am I the first to read the Atkinson? I'm never first!

I romped through it. Se has written a locked room type Christie esque mystery with some meta aware winking.

I liked it a lot. Refreshing to read something well paced, well plotted and knowingly silly.

Too many characters at first but I got used to them and very attached to a couple of them and their stories.

I think you are first Piggy

has written a locked room type Christie esque mystery

I saw this by reading the first page and backed out because it wasn't what I was looking for at the time. I will read it though.