Last week's Sunday Salon at My Friend Amy was about required/assigned reading in school. While answering her I found my answer to be so long I decided to re post it here for anyone wanting to know more about me plus it makes it easier to find again should I want to remember what I said.
Anyways, I mostly enjoyed assigned reading too. I didn't like having to analyze characters and write essays on the books but I love the actual reading of them and finished them within one or two days usually. Even in grade school when the teacher just read to us (and then we studied it) I loved it.
I don't remember them all but I do remember The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. In higher grades and high school I remember (in no particular order) Lord of the Flies, Holes, A Separate Peace, Othello, Romeo & Juliet, Death of a Salesman, The Great Gatsby, Macbeth, Brave New World and Hamlet. I was in advanced English which did a LOT of plays.
Out of those, I now own personally The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Holes, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World and I want to get A Separate Peace.
I think those who liked analyzing it in school are probably now into book clubs. I'm not into book clubs because other than writing a review, I don't want to analyze the books. Like Natasha said, everyone else took a month to read the book and I was done in two days. However this meant I had more free time during class.
Since this is so long, I'm going to post it on my blog too.
I don't remember them all but I do remember The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. In higher grades and high school I remember (in no particular order) Lord of the Flies, Holes, A Separate Peace, Othello, Romeo & Juliet, Death of a Salesman, The Great Gatsby, Macbeth, Brave New World and Hamlet. I was in advanced English which did a LOT of plays.
Out of those, I now own personally The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Holes, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World and I want to get A Separate Peace.
I think those who liked analyzing it in school are probably now into book clubs. I'm not into book clubs because other than writing a review, I don't want to analyze the books. Like Natasha said, everyone else took a month to read the book and I was done in two days. However this meant I had more free time during class.
Since this is so long, I'm going to post it on my blog too.
*Photo from flickr user JRSpix
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3 comments:
I liked most of the books assigned to me in school too. I especially loved it when I was given a list and told to select a couple of books off of it to read at some point during the semester. I would often read more than just the two allotted books. Like you, I usually finished the assigned reading assignments ahead of time.
I don't think I was ever very good at dissecting books for hidden symbolism and meaning. I do enjoy talking about books though with other readers, something I think can be done in a book group without it feeling like a class. And most readers, I've discovered, feel similarly as us so it can make informal book club discussions all the more comfortable and fun.
I ended up loving most of the books I was assigned in hs and grade school. I would say there are a very small handful that I didn't enjoy (most notably: "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens. Hated that book). I was an english major, so I did a lot of faking it when I wrote essays on the books I read. It was all about drawing parallels and teasing a connection out of points with no connections! :)
I always read the assigned reading really fast too. I didn't mind the analyzing. I found it to enrich my experience or in some cases appreciate the novel even if I didn't particularly like it (A Separate Peace). I don't do that with my own reading now, but I do enjoy book clubs for that. I don't want to analyze and discuss every book I read, but there are some books that give so much food for thought and in those instances I do wish I had someone to discuss with.
In school I really liked Brave New World, The Good Earth and reading Shakespeare.
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