What books did you read at school?

[OneUmberJoker]

mice and men and blood brothers

Oh I think we might have had Hound of the Baskervilles - not as a set text we discussed in class but just as a book that was given out to read. We had a volume of sci fi short stories too. I think we also had Animal Farm at some point. I did read Brave New World and 1984, but I think that was on my own initiative, not as a school book.

I'm now vaguely recalling reading Alice in the first year - Yr 7 now.

Animal Farm
My Name Is David
The Endless Steppe
To Kill A Mockingbird (this was for O level)

For O level Eng. Lit. we had several poems and I could say 'Ulysees' and 'My Last Duchess' off by heart because I had read them so many times.
We had 'Theatre of Varities' - Huxley ? -and I remember the words 'and roses are smiling(?) in Picardy and never a rotting corpse in all its earth' (WW1).

We remember so many lines from everywhere in our lives, don't we? Such richness. A friend of mine lived to be 100+. When she was in her 90s she told me she tried to learn a few lines of something off by heart every day.

1st year: The cave (Richard Church), The magician's nephew, The hobbit.
2nd year: The old powder line (Richard Parker), The Pit (Reginald Maddock), The Red House mystery (AA Milne - still love it), The Otterbury Incident, Chocky (John Wyndham). We were also required at one time to read any biography. I read LTC Rolt's biography of Brunel and got into trouble, because two other people chose it as well and our English teacher wrongly suspected a conspiracy to choose a short book (which it isn't). Another time we had to read any science fiction. I know nothing about sf but a friend lent me one. This was kind, but the book bored me and I gave up half way through. Luckily the year was nearly over by then and we were never asked to write about it.
3rd year: The pearl and The red pony (John Steinbeck - both insufferable), The land God gave to Cain (Hammond Innes), Joby (Stan Barstow, who became one of my favourite novelists), The merchant of Venice, 1984. Possibly others I've forgotten - a peculiarity of this year was that several of these we never finished.
O level: Lord of the flies, Journey's end, The lost world of the Kalahari, The mayor of Casterbridge, Julius Caesar, Portrait of the artist as a young dog, a nondescript poetry anthology.
A level: The franklin's tale, King Lear, A handful of dust, The return of the native, some modern poets, HG Wells short stories and a book on the history and use of English. I managed to avoid answering a question on Wells, who I found unreadable, by choosing an optional language question instead.

What impact have the O and A level books left? King Lear and some of the poetry still reverberate in my mind. Journey's end interests me because our treatment of it shows the limitations of school criticism. We did not really get beyond platitudes about the 'horror of war'. I now see that it is about the failure of the officer class and its education. Stanhope, the hero of the school rugby field, goes to pieces and becomes an alcoholic when faced with a real shooting war. A similar backhanded compliment might be paid to Hardy. I was not over-keen on either of the novels we studied, though The mayor of Casterbridge was easy enough to read. But I now think I might have got more out of them if we had been enabled to see to the heart of their theme rather than taking character and incident piecemeal. So I have thought more about them in the years since, and have given Hardy another go by reading Far from the madding crowd. The style still does not quite suit me, but I won't stop turning all three books over in my mind, and I might read still more of him.

year 7- can’t remember the title but it was about this society where the elders basically decided your life. Bright people were medics or teachers. And the not so bright bred children. All got the same meal delivered. And it was about this lad who tried to break the mold.

year 8 - Adrian Mole 13 3/4
year 9 Animal farm - we were also doing communism in history so went with the theme.
year 10 - old man and the sea( bloody hell that’s a dull book) and Jane Eyre - felt I should like it but didn’t

GCSE - the ones I can remember are Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Telltale Heart, To Kill A Mockingbird

A Level - loads and loads but ones I can remember are The Color Purple, Hamlet, the war poets, Philip Larkin, Doctor Faustus, William Blake, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Birdsong, The Handmaids Tale

@CrushingOnRubies was it The Giver by Lois Lowry you read in Year 7?
I read it as a teenager and a lot went over my head.
I re-read it as an adult and I was amazed by it. Some children's books are wasted on children 😂

I'm pretty long in the tooth (61). We read some very odd stuff in the lower years of secondary school.
The Endless Steppe
Lady Precious Stream
Cranford - hated it at age 12 read it as an adult and realised it is a comedy.
David Copperfield's Boyhood - found it cloyingly sentimental, but read the whole book as an adult and loved it (the first wife still sticks in my craw)
For O level we read the war poets, Macbeth, The Browning Version, Pride and Prejudice, Brideshead Revisited.

Lord of the Flies
Wind in the Willows
The Day of the Triffids
Merchant of Venice
Romeo & Juliet
Midsummer Night's Dream
Of Mice and Men
Animal Farm
Alice in Wonderland

I can't remember all but To Sir With Love in yr 7(slightly scandalous) The Red Pony, Shane, The Solid Mandala by Patrick White and Emma in 6th form that almost put me off Austen forever. (Analyse the use of the seni colon in the Box Hill Incident)

O and A level :
Rogue Male - Geoffrey Household
Henry V part 1
Othello
1984
A poetry book with war poems
Testament of Youth - Vera Britain
Schindler’s Ark - Thomas Keneally (film was Schindler’s List)
wife of bath - Chaucer

Kes
Z For Zachariah
The Children Of Dynmouth
The Mayor Of Casterbridge
The Crucible
Robert Frost’s poetry
The Color Purple
Romeo And Juliet
are just a few I remember.

For GCSE, Lord of the Flies and Romeo and Juliet.

At other points, I also read Holes and Macbeth and probably others I’ve forgotten.

English Lit O Level : The Pardoner's Tale by Chaucer, Macbeth and Jane Eyre. The only one I slightly enjoyed was tbe Chaucer and that was more because I was fascinated about how similar the English was to German. (German was my autistic special interest).

Other books/plays I can remember reading at school but not for external exams - Anne Frank's Diary, Fiddler on the roof, Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies.

After a quick google it might well be… might put the movie on my watchlist to double check

The movie changed quite a lot apparently. Made the main character older and fans of the book generally don't like it (I've not seen it).
There's 3 more connected novels.
The 4th one called Son gives more insight into the community.

Biff, Chip and Kipper was notoriously boring until they got to The Magic Key and started to have adventures. (I was reminded of this when I became a teacher and they were still using the same reading scheme!).

As I'd read the entire reading scheme, plus the extra ones, by Year 3/4, I was sent off to the school library by myself to choose something to read. I loved doing that!

I tended to like the books that we read at primary school, like Charlotte's Web, any of the Harry Potter books that were out at the time, and Goodnight Mister Tom.

At secondary school, it went from The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas to Blood Brothers, Of Mice and Men, Pride and Prejudice, far too much Shakespeare (with Romeo and Juliet on repeat for three years solid), books that I've probably obliterated from my mind and some terrible poetry.

I am an avid reader in my free time, but even I had to have a break from reading anything after having to read many boring books and dissecting GCSE texts too many times. The fear of being put off reading for life was partly why I didn't choose to do English Literature at A-Level! I was annoyed that my friends at another school got to do their English Literature GCSE based on books that I'd read for fun in my free time...

I read it over 20 years ago so my memory of it is sketchy about age and things of the characters and things

The ones I remember

Lord of the flies
Wind in the willows
The Chrysalis
The pearl
Of mice of men

Wish I could remember more but it was a very long time ago

Oh yes I remember reading the long and the short and the tall at school. Thanks for the reminder

The main character is Jonah.
All children are allocated their role at age 12.
Couples are arranged into marriages and they are only allowed two children - one boy, one girl which are born via surrogacy (so some girls are basically told at age 12 they are only good enough to be breeders).
This book has so much more of an effect on me reading it as an adult.

GCSE: Of Mice and Men, War poetry, An Inspector Calls, Macbeth
A level: Jude the Obscure, The Rivals, A Winter’s Tale, The Color Purple

i enjoyed everything except The Rivals which I loathed.

I think GCSE was:
An Inspector Calls
To Kill a Mockingbird
Macbeth
Lord of the Flies
Poetry by Simon Armitage and Robert Browning

A Level was:
Macbeth (again)
The Great Gatsby
Wuthering Heights
The Bloody Chamber
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Poetry by Keats and Tennyson
The God of Small Things

Maybe Google it. I googled it myself but they are several including the, tin drum, it's okay to be different, the lion inside, I am enough,
Wonder

Yes I read read animal farm too. Thanks for the reminder. I'd forgotten