Books You Studied at School - do you hate them now?

[Rob McCow]

What books/plays did you study at school? And do you hate them now?

For myself, I studied the following, among others:

Animal Farm (GCSE) - I appreciate George Orwell's writing, but he's a hard author to actually LIKE. We were told not to say that Squealer was a propaganda machine, because Squealer is a pig. It's an allegory, you see. Yeah, that was drummed in quite hard.

Wuthering Heights (A-Level) - OK, I'm a big sop. I loved this book, possibly because I was one of the few in the class who actually read the damn thing. It's got an interesting structure, with the build up in the first generation mirroring the decline of the second. Or something.

Lord of The Flies (GCSE) - One of the best things about studying Lord of the Flies at school was that you immediately identified the characters. That's right, we identified our Ralph, our Jack and more importantly, a large number of chubby, bespectacled Piggies. Who got 'beats'.

Paradise Lost Books 1-3 (A-Level) - This needs to be studied, it's virtually unreadable at a first glance. But once someone points out the poetry and genius of the structure, it's fine. I say fine, I mean tolerable. I did chuckle when Moloch and Belial turned up, because if you swap round the first letters it sounds like 'Bollock'. Oh yes!

So which school books would you keep in your Paradise and which ones do you wish were lost?

[SiHart]

We did Wuthering Heights at A-Level in such minute detail that it sapped all that was good out of the novel and made it such a chore to study. I never want to read the novel again, sadly. I'm sure it's great, but my main memories are of the sheer tedium of lesson after lesson discusiing Chapter 10 in far too much detail.

In contrast, most of the other texts we did I love: Talking Heads, Jane Eyre, Twelfth Night, Tony and Cleo, the poetry of Seamus Heaney... I'd enjoy any of them again.

So it's yes and no for me!

Si xx

[Andrew Curnow]

I didn't do any Lit at O-Level (our school had a weird 'French or English Literature' option, and I plumped for French) but I do remember some of my year-mates moaning about the tremendously dull Autobiography of Thomas Telford. At A-Level though we did...

Translations I can remember little except that it was an Irish play, about an English Army survey of Irish land (set in the 1700s I think). The class, unanimously, hated it, but bizarrely our tutor considered it the best of that year's crop of books!! We ended up reading it aloud in class, and I had a momentary burst of fame (not to mention surprising the tutor) by being the only one who put on an Irish accent!

The Wife of Bath's Tale Again, my main memory is of my tutor being something of an 'olde Englishe' buff and reading passages of this aloud, with the correct pronunciation, etc. It's all about sex mainly, and I do occasionally like to quote "A long preamble to a tale" and "I was a lusty oon".

The Taming of the Shrew The Moonlighting episode is more entertaining and makes at least as much sense. It starts off as a play within a play, but Shakespeare obviously either forgot that or got fed up with it partway through, and it's never mentioned again. Can you imagine any modern writer getting away with such lazy work!!!

Death of a Salesman It was interesting, and again certain lines ("I still feel kinda... temporary about myself") have stayed with me. I think it would probably have come across to us better if we'd seen it performed, as the script is very technically-detailed and lacks the emotion. For my money, the first series of Reggie Perrin is just as powerful a presentation of a man's decay.

The Colo(u)r Purple This was a year 2 book (ie, of the 2-year course) which we had to read during the Summer holiday between the 2 years. It's an unpleasantly frank and at times really shocking book, but ultimately a very uplifting one.

The French Lieutenant's Woman Interesting (more so than the film, which dragged rather) and I quite enjoyed the analysis of the work of writing. "It was a faintly foolish face" is a line from it, so there.

Selected poems of TS Eliot Interesting, but I have to admit I don't think I totally 'got' a lot of it. The Wasteland went on for (p)ages but didn't make one bit of sense to me. Like Twin Peaks.

We also did French Lit, on our French course, including a book called "Le Grande Meaulnes" which was (unless the memory cheats) pretty damn good. So there!

[Jon Masters]

The War of the Worlds - done in first year I think - of course, a great story and I got kudos for copying a picture from the Doctor Who Weekly strip of a war machine to use in the display of our work (a common trick with me and English - if in doubt, draw a good picture. Perhaps it helped that my English teacher was also an Art teacher)

To Kill A Mockingbird - third year I think; OK as a book until you had to start picking it apart, much better as a film

Lord of the Flies - a very good book we did at the start of fourth year, until we were told it wasn't one of the set texts and we'd wasted nearly a term on it !! Another one where the film made more of an impression on me than the book "And that's why they call it Cam-ber-ley"

Real O Level texts
Tale of Two Cities - I've already expressed my feelings elsewhere; suffice it to say I knew the plot from the film and had learnt by heart all the quotes and examples of "resurrection" in the book (sadly that wasn't the question ) Having said that, I just don't really like Dickens except Christmas Carol. I think all teachers should remember that he wrote them as a kind of soap opera in installments, and get people to study them as such.

Macbeth - hurray, the only point of interest in English Lit for me. A cracking plot, great characters and lots to write about. Got to see it live at Stratford too.

A selection of War and School poems - dear God; how to put someone off poetry for life. Give me a copy of Dolce et Decorum Est and I can probably circle every simile and metaphor blindfolded. The rest are a nasty blur

I only did Sciences and Maths at A level, so that was it. However, I have to say if it wasn't for the sterling work of Uncle Terry et al, and the burning desire I had to read at home (I so loved my local library I used to go every day in the summer holidays) I don't think I would love reading so much as I do today. Without that, I don't think English at school would have made me want to read another word.

[Paul Monk]

Just trying to remember my GCSE ones.

We did Merchant of Venice and Macbeth. Hated them at the time but quite like them now. I think Shakespeare works so much better when performed on stage. Its much easier to understand and I didn't really get an appreciation of his work until I saw them performed. And Macbeth is a classic AIP Roger Corman movie in play form and written hundreds of years earlier. Don't tell me that you can't see Vincent Price in playing Macbeth in glorious Technicolor!
We also did Lord of the Flies. It must have been a popular book to study. I loved it it. I did get tired of examining in depth the religious imagery (some of which I'm sure isn't intentional. A lot that is) but overall its great. A bloody good adventure romp and study of society and human nature.
I'm sure we also studied 1984 at some point which I liked but actually find difficult to read and get into now. And at one point I studied Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep which was fun.
There was a book called Rogue Male which we studied and I loved. Its a thriller about a botched assassination attempt on some dictator and the subsequent efforts by the assassin to evade his pursuers. Like Day of the Jackal in reverse. Good stuff and I also learnt from this book that the best thing to do if you're in a fight with a guy, is to pull his trousers down. That way he can't run after you and will be too busy worring about his twinkle being out, that yuou can escape.

[Paul Clement]

GCSE

Macbeth
The Long the Short and the Tall
Animal Farm
To Kill a Mockingbird

I enjoyed all four works that I studied at GCSE level. The Long and the Short and the Tall I especially enjoyed, although I've never came across another person who's studied it. It's by Willis Hall and is set in the jungle during WWII, with the group of English soldiers having captured a Japanese soldier and having to decide what to do with him. It's an engaging play, with the empathy going to the Private who at first seems to be a trouble maker but ends up being the only man who tries to save the prisoner.

A LEVEL

It took me three attempts to finally complete my A level English, having left college after 1 year and having had to leave Adult Education after starting a job that required hours of travel, so there are a lot of plays, prose and poetry in this list.

The Tempest
King Lear
Charles Causley - Secret Destinations
Hamlet
The Franklins Tale
Lyrical Ballads - Wordsworth and Coleridge
Frankenstein
Beloved
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Talking Heads
Great Expectations

I loved Great Expectations as a novel to read, but found it hard to study as I didn't really want to go too in depth into it and possibly tarnish my enjoyment of it. I also enjoyed the Shalespear plays, the poetry, Talking Heads and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Frankenstein has to be the worst novel I've had the misfortune to read and bored me to tears. Beloved, a circular narrative with a dash of stream of consciousness, went by in a blur of dissatisfaction and I have no wish to ever read the novel again. The Franklins Tale is typical Chaucer, some people love it but I loath it.

[cullsoft]

I recall we did a load of Shakespeare's plays rather than books when I was at school... sacrilegious as it may sound, I'm not in a hurry to read them again. Well, maybe The Tempest.

We read Goodnight Mister Tom either at the start of secondary school or the end of primary school... I keep wanting to read that again, and am annoyed that I missed the first half of the audiobook version that was on BBC7 over the last two weeks.

I don't remember any of the other books I read at school... so they can't have had much of an impression (I vaguely recall there was one about some 70's equivalent of a chavish girl with a whingier life than Adrian Mole, but no idea what the title was). My IT/Computing teacher kept recommending we read 1984, though I've never got round it...

[Stuart Wallis]

I'm hard-pressed to remember what I did as well. I remember reading Wind In The Willows, because at the time we were asked to recite a few paragraphs so that the teacher could see how we could read aloud, and the teacher got me to read most of it (I think because she was even more tired of most of the class talking like a bored Dalek than I was - I was the only one in the class who read for a hobby anyway). Similarly, when we did An Inspector Calls in the last year of O-levels*, I played the Inspector, and the teacher pointed out to everyone else who had a part that not only was I reading it properly, take note class, he's also taking the effort to act! Proud moment in my school career, that!

Otherwise I only remember the Taming Of The Shrew, which put me off of Shakespeare for life, and a bowlderised version of Day Of The Jackal. One day I shall read the full version...

*-It makes me feel old to even admitting to knowing what they were!

[Anthony Williams]

GCSE

The Merchant of Venice - This rapidly became my favourite Shakespeare play when we studied it, and it remains so to this day.
Educating Rita - I wasn't too sure of what to think of this play at the time, and I'm still not 100% certain. It certainly wasn't bad, but I wouldn't say that it's a work of literary genius.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience - I love this collection of poems by William Blake. I loved them at the time, and I still love them now. The man was obviously completely insane, but an absolute genius at the same time.
To be honest, I can't remember much else that I did at GCSE.

AS-Level

The Tempest - A lot of people in my class seemed to hate this play. To be honest, I really didn't mind it. It's not one of Shakey's best, but certainly not one of his worst.
Dracula - I absolutely loved studying this book. I had a fantastic teacher for this book, who really made it come alive for me.
Shakespeare's Sonnets - unfortunately, I had a teacher who utterly destroyed Shakespeare's Sonnets for me, just as she had done so with A Midsummer Night's Dream for me in Year 9.
Translations - the same teacher taught me this, and again, destroyed it for me! I didn't think the play was terribly good to begin with, but she made it particularly dire.

Ant x

[Andrew Curnow]

Translations - the same teacher taught me this, and again, destroyed it for me! I didn't think the play was terribly good to begin with, but she made it particularly dire

Seconded!!