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Books you were forced to read in school.
Flamethrower100
Posts: 14,106 Forum Member
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Which ones did you enjoy, or dislike. Or make fun of in class.
Death of a salesman, play. I hated it. most boring thing I've ever read. And people used to laugh when we had to read out scenes, about Biff and Happy
The crysilids. I actauly quite liked it. I think it's by the same guy that wrote the midwich cookoos AKA, children of the dammed.
Macbeth, play. It was ok. I guess.
Roll of thunder hear my cry.... It's a book about racism. The other class read A more famous book about racism, which was made into a film, and I can't remember the name.
Any way it was allright I suppose.
Boy, by Roald Dahl. Brilliant, I'd still read it again now.
Of mice and men. Didn't really like it very much at all.
Stone cold. A book about homeless people being murdered. Read it in primary seven. I can't remember it much.
The cone gatherers... Boring :sleep:
Death of a salesman, play. I hated it. most boring thing I've ever read. And people used to laugh when we had to read out scenes, about Biff and Happy
The crysilids. I actauly quite liked it. I think it's by the same guy that wrote the midwich cookoos AKA, children of the dammed.
Macbeth, play. It was ok. I guess.
Roll of thunder hear my cry.... It's a book about racism. The other class read A more famous book about racism, which was made into a film, and I can't remember the name.
Any way it was allright I suppose.
Boy, by Roald Dahl. Brilliant, I'd still read it again now.
Of mice and men. Didn't really like it very much at all.
Stone cold. A book about homeless people being murdered. Read it in primary seven. I can't remember it much.
The cone gatherers... Boring :sleep:
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We did Twlfth Night for the Shakespeare , which I quite enjoyed . I remeber struggling with it, but then a schools actors group came and put on a performance and brought it to life for me.
I remember we also read Watership Down when I was in the second year ( year 8 now?) I seem to remember that everyone in the class enjoyed that. I have memories of taking turns to read a page and everyone being silent and behaving because the story was so engrossing ( even though it was just rabbits!)
The Chrysalids is one of my favourite books ever, I LOVE it. I love John Wyndham anyway, but I think that's my favourite.
We did Death of a Salesman too, I quite liked it.
For A level I think I did Othello (can't remember much really, but it's not my favourite Shakespeare) and Emma (stupidly, I HATED it and hated it and hated it until about a week before the exam, when I read it through in a day in the sunshine, and suddenly realised that I LOVED it and that was the beginning of a lifelong love of Austen) and Larkin's Whitsun Weddings (very interesting, if depressing sometimes). I can't think of anything else, but surely we must have done a moden novel? I can't think what it could have been, but we must have done?
For GCSE I think we did Romeo and Juliet (meh, it's ok, again, it's far from my favourite Shakespeare) and I can't remember the others.
I remember that we read some Thomas Hardy short stories in Year 8, which I HATED with a passion, argh, they were awful! I hated how grim and depressing they were - people always died or had dead babies, or lost all their flocks, or their houses burnt down and killed their granny, or they were wrongfully imprisoned and their mums died while they were in prison... I don't think anyone in the class liked them at all.
In my first year at uni I did an elective module in English lit (I was doing politics really) and we did Oliver Twist (hated it) and Orlando (loved it) and Slaughterhouse Five (AMAZING book - would be in my top 5 ever, it's stunning), Hamlet (definitely my favourite Shakespeare, I probably know it well enough to write an essay right now), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (I found that really hard without seeing it performed, I didn't really understand the Scots/Dialect bits), and a few that I never got round to actually reading - Sunset Song was one, but I can't even remember the others. It was very different to school - we didn't do any reading in class, we were told to go away and read these 15 or so books and then discussed them having assumed we'd read some/most/all of them.
"101 Dalmations"
"The Kingdom Of Carbonel"
"The Fellowship Of The Ring"
"The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole"
"The Runaways"
"The Eagle Of The Ninth"
"I Am David"
"A Midsummer Night's Dream"
"The Seed And The Sower"
"Things Fall Apart"
"Wyrd Sisters"
"Macbeth"
"Animal Farm"
"Z For Zachariah"
"The Roses Of Eyam"
"A Man For All Seasons"
Thank you! We did Z for Zachariah in about year 9, and Animal Farm for GCSE.
Hated it, and have never touched Dickens again. I can't even get into the tv or film adaptations.
The House With The Green Shutters was almost as bad, but not quite.
I forgot "Oliver Twist". Thanks for reminding me.
It is a shame you don't like Dickens. I love him but then the Kent coast is absolutely peppered with places he lived in and wrote about.
Apparently he wrote "Little Dorrit" in Folkestone.
Flight Of The Doves - I hated that book.
Of Mice & Men - We read it for GCSE. I liked it.
Roll Of Thunder Hear My Cry - I thought it was really sad.
There must be more, but those are the only books I can remember.
We also read some short stories for GCSE. I can't remember who they were by now. We also done Romeo & Juliet and Dancing At Lughnasa for plays.
I HATED "Death of a Salesman', "The Long and The Short and the Tall" and an awful Liverpool story called "A pair of Jesus Boots".
Apart from "Of Mice and Men" I used like them to have happy endings! But poor Lenny imagining his rabbits really struck me.
Went on to read everything by D H Lawrence I could possibly get my hands on after that. Not sure I could really bothered with him now though.
Two great plays were Julius Caesar and the Long the Short and the Tall . (Hated absolutely every minute of a Midsummernights Dream.)
other books i rememebr having to plough through without much enjoyment were Lord of the Flies and the Hobbit - the problem for me with them was I'd already read them, and couldnt get into them again for school.
...and I can still recite Scots Wha Hae, having being made to learn it off by heart in primary seven....
Kensuke's Kingdom, Waiting for Anya and others by Michael Morpurgo:
Hated them. They were boring. The sad thing was that all Morpurgo's books had a good premise and could have been very very interesting, but because he wrote them they were all completely emotionally dead. I don't know what it is, but Morpurgo seems to just suck all the life out of his books without even trying. Kensuke's Kingdom for example, was so repetetive and slow to get going at the start that by the time anything interesting happened you'd stopped caring.
Shadow of the Minotaur: (I think that was the name of it, anyway. Can't remember the author.
Not my thing. Good book, but I personally couldn't care.
Various Shakespeare:
Bah. OK in their own right, I suppose, but I've never seen a Shakespeare play that I've wanted to sit and dissect and discuss in depth.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding:
It was quite good, but we spent about two terms on it. By the time we were done I was so fed up with it I never wanted to see it again.
To Kill and Mockingbird by Harper Lee:
As a rarity, I found I loved it. A work of genius. One of my favourite books.
SONS AND LOVERS! That was our A Level modern novel, thank god for that! It was driving me crazy trying to remember. God, I hated that novel so much. Urgh.
Already mentioned:
The Silver Sword
Of Mice and Men
Death of a Salesmen
The Chrysalids
The Machine Gunners
Z for Zachariah
Animal Farm
Various Shakespeare plays
One not so far mentioned that was really dull is "The Caucasian Chalk Circle".
About the only one I didn't dislike was "The Silver Sword", probably because I was still in Primary School, and we didn't have to write an essay about it afterwards.
I particularly remember "Z for Zachariah", because when we'd finished it, we were set the task of writing an extra chapter for it as classwork. My mind went blank for the duration of the lesson and I handed in an empty piece of paper at the end. (I have absolutely no imagination for story writing).
I think being forced to read books takes all the enjoyment out of it.
Macbeth (Shakespeare) - the story was fine but the poetry too much for me at 14.
Brighton Rock (Greene) - fantastic
Waiting for Godot (Beckett) - moderately amusing
The Rivals (Sheridan) - yawn
Tennyson poems - I liked his style
The War of the Worlds (Wells) - great
My Family and other Animals (Durrell) - dull
Prester John (Buchan) - so so
Lord of the Flies (Golding) - great
The Machine Stops (Forster) - great
The Merchant of Venice - interesting
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit - still read
To Kill A Mockingbird - real eye opener
Philadelphia, Here I Come - good play
How Many Miles to Babylon - boring
Also made to read many poems which were rather boring
One book that will remain in my conscience for far longer than i'd like it to is "Sunset Song" by Lewis Grassick Gibbon. I swear that book was so tedious to me, it felt like we read it for the whole six years of secondary school!
I looooved Equus and had to read Brighton Rock by Graham Greene for an essay once. Not so keen either...
pride and prejudice - quite liked
romeo and juliet - quite liked
inspector calls - did my head in
Of Mice and Men
Macbeth
Hamlet
Lord of the Flies
Julius Caeser
King Lear
The Great Gatsby
That's all I can remember I liked them especially Lord of the Flies, I just hated having to write essays on them. I never saw the point in it.
I particularly hated Pride & Pejudice and Lord of The Rings and every Shakespeare play!
The Mayor of Casterbridge :sleep:
Animal Farm..excellent
The Crucible...
Macbeth...good
Brighton Rock..my all time fave book
To Kill A Mockingbird - got into it eventually, but wouldn't read it again now.
Macbeth - liked.
The Crucible - liked.
Village by the Sea (Anita Desai) - hated.
Handles (Jan Fine I think) - really enjoyed.
My school LOVES Michael Morpurgo, but I agree with you that his books are extremely boring. :yawn:
Another book I've read at school before is Brother in the Land by Robert Swindells, great book but so depressing.
No I didn't get it either, nor the Clockwork Orange!