Theme day - Required reading that shouldn't be required

[vic_vega66]

I have three books in all, all of them were set books for O'level English (UK 1980's ish) I really don't want to start any controversy here but I hate these books with a fiery passion and have never read anything else that these authors have written

Comments

[elettaria]

Shaw's kind of the same all over. Brilliant man in some ways, of course. Very prolific. I read through his plays once or twice as a teenager, and that was about it. Er, if we ignore the embarrassing stage where I was absolutely crazy about My Fair Lady at the age of seven.

Owen's a perfectly good poet, but I couldn't imagine any poem of that length standing up to that sort of scrutiny. At least, not at that age, where you haven't learnt how to protect yourself! Britten wrote a fantastic oratorio, the War Requiem, which uses a lot of Owen in the libretto. Though not that particular poem, possibly because even back in the sixties everyone was already sick to death of it from school? I'm rather fond of it by now, it's been long enough since I had it mauled in school that I've forgotten, and there's a rather nice bit in Pat Barker's semi-historical novel Regeneration where Siegfried Sassoon helps Owen edit the poem, and Owen is all young and has a crush on Sassoon but doesn't dare say anything, of course.

I am dying to know what the third one is, but I don't think I've read it. It sounds a bit like the plot of the opera La Traviata, which is based on Dumas' La Dame Aux Camelias, but it's been years since I've gone near the opera and I haven't read the Dumas at all, and indeed am not quite sure whether it's a play or a novel. Does it cheer you up at all to know that TB (consumption) tended to be code for STIs?

[elettaria]

It really is surprisingly cheering, isn't it! I mean, it makes a difference when it changes from:

*angst* *mope* *angst some more* *mope poetically*

to:

*angst* *mope* *angst some more* *nose falls off* *mope poetically (and noselessly)*

It also explained how all those 19th century opera heroines could belt out lots of fancy high-register stuff just before dropping dead of *ahem* consumption. Especially since they were all meant to be Women Of Loose Morals (ooh la la).

I don't think I've reread any of the poetry I studied at school either, unless I had it shoved down my throat at uni. They really know how to kill it. Plus I was never going to get on with Wordsworth, and Coleridge just sort of tagged along with him. To be honest, I'd take a nice pissed-off fuck-the-establishment anti-war poem over Lyrical Ballads any day. Well, up to a certain point of grisliness...

[gehayi]

You never sang "Adeste Fideles"?

[elettaria]

In rounds? Not the Pergolesi, then?