Books and school
May 18th 2006 08:26
Hating Alison Ashley, by Robin Klein
When I was at school my favourite subject was, without a doubt, English. During high school the only books I read outside of school were Doctor Who books, I read hundreds and hundreds of them... I have a whole bookcase full of them. But I still enjoyed reading for English... most of the time.
Some of the earliest books I read were 'Hating Alison Ashley' and a book called 'Captain Moonlight' - or maybe it was 'Captain Thunderbolt'? I can't remember, nothing really comes up when I put either name into google.
We also read 'Goodnight Mr. Tom', that was one of the more memorable ones. Most of the books were decent, most of them were books you could follow. It wasn't until Year 10 that we had to start doing Shakespeare.
Ah yes, Shakespeare. How I detested thee.
o art thou thine jest do thy cuckold in thy pantaloons?
Anyway, moving on, I also remember, year after year, asking each English teacher if we would be doing 'The Hobbit' but alas it was never to be. The three best books we did at school were 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'Wild Swans' and 'Lord of the Flies'. Classics, all three of them. The worst books, Shakespeare aside, were without a doubt the dreadful 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Tess of the 'd'Urbevilles'.
'Pride and Prejudice'... I struggled through this for the best part of a term. It was so infuriatingly dull. No one got into fights, no one had sex, no one even argued (aside from a few heated letters). I only managed to convince the teacher I had finished reading it (I hadn't) after hiring out and watching the BBC miniseries starring Colin Firth.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
"Er... she fell asleep"
"No, he raped her"
Wha...? Everyone quickly read back over the paragraph.
"...Where does it say that?"
"Read it carefully" and she then proceeded to explain some of the arcanely subtle language to us. How can something so pivotal to a book be so hard to come by? If someone described 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' to you and said "It's about this chick who gets raped and is then sinned against by the world for having a kid" you'd be like, 'sounds cool' and then you'd go and read it and you'd be like 'what the fuck... where did this kid come from, when did she get raped?!'
I realise I'm probably being a bit too contemporary here, but I can't stand all that stuff. I try and I try and I'll probably try again to read through some more of the classics but I just find it too removed from modern reality and too bound by the conventions of the time it was written in.
Oh, and I also read 'Great Expectations'. That was okay, I suspect Dickens doesn't date as badly as most other 'classic' writers and I'll probably be able to read more of his stuff as I get older. Hardy and Austen though... I doubt it.
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Comment by Cibbuano
Hunt Famous
Orble Post of the Day
Fat Cult
Techbreak
I liked Merchant of Venice... how can you not like a crafty Jewsih merchant, trying to take a pound of flesh from an Italian?
Comment by amy
How bizarre - *I* read Captain Moonlight - didn't think it was particularly brilliant (in my 11yo opinion) so I'm shocked and astounded to hear it was taught at more than one school!