Comments | bookfails: Theme day - Required reading that shouldn't be required

vic_vega66 in bookfails

Theme day - Required reading that shouldn't be required

May 31, 2012 16:55

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 ( Read more... )

required book reading failure day, revision fail, !themed

Comments 7

elettaria May 31 2012, 16:15:44 UTC

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 ( ... )

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elettaria May 31 2012, 16:58:34 UTC

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...

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Thread 7

gehayi May 31 2012, 18:22:34 UTC

I had to analyse every darn line of this, every darn line. There are only so many times you can read and re-read descriptions of mustard gas and world war two battlefields.

World War ONE battlefields, actually. Wilfred Owen died on 4 November 1918.

The third book is almost certainly La Dame aux Camelias; it fits the description in almost every respect. The only thing it doesn't have are turnstiles. (Maybe you were conflating it with Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence? That features turnstiles and lanterns.)

elettaria May 31 2012, 18:31:13 UTC

(Maybe you were conflating it with Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence? That features turnstiles and lanterns.)

Trauma can do odd things to memory, you know.

alienfish May 31 2012, 22:43:13 UTC

I thought it sounded like Edgar Allen Poe's biography.