I took the girls with me to the library on Thursday after school. We had been so busy in the run up to Christmas that library visits fell off the map, and one of my New Year’s resolutions is to put them firmly back on.
Oscar was too poorly to come with us, which was actually quite nice. He is very good in the library, but it is a fairly large and busy space with lots of places to hide, and he does zoom about a lot, which means I spend more time making sure he hasn’t been kidnapped than I do looking at books. The girls just get on with things and know enough to make an enormous fuss if someone tries to kidnap them, so I have more freedom to wander while they pick what they want.
I hit pay dirt as soon as I walked in, spying Jeffrey Eugenides; ‘The Marriage Plot’ on the new release shelves. This has been on my Amazon wish list for months. I loved; The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, and was beginning to get depressed that he didn’t write more prolifically, so I was thrilled with this. Then I rifled the ‘classic’ shelves and came up with Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, which I have seen but never read, and A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines.
I stopped after this. My obsession with borrowing and buying books is outstripping my ability to read them (as usual), and the piles of books surrounding my bed are beginning to look more like walls than piles at the moment. I am sure it is all part of my deep seated need to hibernate until Spring, but it is beginning to get dangerous, so I looked no further.
I was mulling over ‘A Kestrel for a Knave’ as I was driving back from the library. It is one of those books that most people read at school, but I never did. It led me into a train of thought about what books people are forced to read at school and why, and whether the titles have changed much over the years.
When I was at high school I was put in the top set for English, thus sealing my fate forever. As the top set we were not encouraged to read popular novels at all. I am amazed when people tell me what they read for GCSE and A Level. Most of it totally passed me by.
My research has shown me that most people passing through the school system will have read:
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I never read any of these at school. Somehow I feel cheated by this. Lots of people seem to hold these books in great esteem, and look back on them with some fondness, even though most of them are utterly miserable. I have now read them all apart from Kestrel, which I am soon to remedy.
I didn’t like any of them except for; ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘The Great Gatsby,’ which I consider to be works of genius in every way, and which are thoroughly deserving of the classic status they have, although I do prefer Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender is the Night.’ I also love Orwell, particularly ’1984′, but not ‘Animal Farm’ which annoys the snot out of me.
I can see why the other books were picked. They are reasonably short, and there is quite a lot of meat on the bone if you need to write endless essays about them, but I do wonder why children can’t be given things to read which are a little more upbeat and cheery. I also wonder if I would have liked these books more, had I been forced to read them at school.
No wonder we grow up warped.
I cannot recall much that I read at school that I look back on with fondness.
We did a lot of Shakespeare. We were being trained. We did Romeo and Juliet in depth at GCSE. It is a play I hated. It is a play I still hate, despite having seen it performed well, and on film, and being able to quote large chunks of it. At ‘A’ Level we did The Merchant of Venice, which I also hate with a passion. We did Hamlet, which I hate less, but still, it wasn’t love at first sight. We also read a lot of the comedies and a few of the other tragedies.
I struggle to recall if we read any novels. I have a vague recollection of reading two awful books; ‘The Snow Goose’ by Paul Gallico, and ‘A Kid for Two Farthings’ by Wolf Mankowitz. I think we may have read those in middle school. I do remember being upset by both of them, and taking a passionate loathing against them.
I think in high school we read; ‘The Pearl’ by John Steinbeck. This was horrific and miserable, and cemented the foundations of my life long aversion to Steinbeck. I have tried to remedy this in recent years by revisiting Steinbeck, but I still loathe him. I recommend, if you have to read anything of his, that you read Mice and Men. It is short, it is extraordinarily well written, and it is Steinbeck in a nutshell. You will never have to read anything else of him again, essence of Steinbeck already having been ingested.
We did read short stories. We had an anthology of short stories we had to read and memorise at GCSE. These included works by D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dylan Thomas. They were all miserable. There was a lot of death, quite a lot of disappointment, a lot of shattering of illusions and much drink taken. I vividly remember the image of a dead fox on a dung heap. I think that sums up the entire anthology, frankly.
I have read novels and plays by all these authors in later life, and loved them, but I don’t know whether I was too young to appreciate a decent short story, or they just weren’t great short stories. I just remember my heart sinking on short story days.
For GCSE we also did a lot of poetry. We did Tennyson, Keats and Shelley in large quantities. I still get the giggles when I think of the poem Mariana of the Moated Grange. My friend had to recite it in front of the class and opened with the title: ‘Mariana of the Groated Mange.’ We wept. She wept. The teacher could not restore order for at least twenty minutes.
I remember the poetry with more fondness than anything else we did. Most of it went over my head at the age of 15, but I have a deep fondness for the poems Tithonus and Ulysses by Tennyson and quite a lot of Keats. I thought, and still do, that Shelley was a bit of a twit.
For ‘A’ Levels they wheeled out the old chestnut of the First World War poets. We did the obligatory dash round Siegfried Sassoon and then spent the rest of our lives immersed up to our necks in Wilfred Owen; ‘Rocking purgatorially in the twilight.’ My dad was of the opinion that we won the First World War by dint of copying out Owen’s poems translated into German, wrapping them round bricks and then heaving them over into enemy lines. The Germans would then read them and fall on their own bayonets in despair.
It may have some truth in it.
I was very envious of my friend, who was in a different set to me, and who got to do; ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett, ‘Richard II’ by Shakespeare, and ‘The Wasteland’ by T.S. Eliot, which seemed much more progressive and modern. I studied these at university and loved them, although I do wonder if I’d have loved them as much when I was sixteen. I expect I would have been alarmed and baffled to be honest. She seemed to be.
The main criteria then for introducing young minds to great literature in my opinion seem to be:
- Pick short classics
- Pick miserable classics
- Pick dead authors so they can’t complain.
- Preferably pick things by blokes, white blokes.
I don’t know if this has changed. Tilly has yet to get to GCSE stage. I was heartened last year when her teacher chose Skellig by David Almond for them to read. It is a work of genius, Almond is still alive, and it is a book full of hope and beauty. It is also written for children, not in a patronising way, because it is far from patronising, but in a way that makes the huge themes it is talking about accessible and meaningful.
This year she has Romeo and Juliet to read, so maybe the rot has already set in. I am slightly depressed by this.
I have been thinking about what things I would get kids to read, both to teach them, and to enthuse them into a life long love of books. It’s not easy.
I have not come up with any firm favourites yet, but I have broad ideas I would follow:
Don’t study the work of ‘a’ poet, study great poems by many poets, in many different styles, and from many different ages. Read everything out loud. Perform and listen.
Pick plays that you can take students to see performed. I struggled with Shakespeare for years on the page until someone took me to see the play I was studying on stage. It was like a lightbulb being turned on. After years of misery I suddenly ‘got’ it.
Teach kids to read out loud, whatever they are reading. It really helps to understand the point of grammar and punctuation if you have to read out loud.
Even if you have set books to read, why not pick something once a week that the kids are actually reading themselves because they want to, and do a lesson on that. It might make them feel that what they are reading is not worthless, or separate from ‘good’ literature.
Finally, a broad recommendation would be to get the teachers to read. Not read to the class, but actually read themselves. I find that quite a few of the teachers I encounter, who are entrusted with the education of my child, don’t seem to read any of the books they give my children to read. How can you teach a child about literature, or advise them on their reading, if you don’t read for pleasure yourself, and you haven’t read any of the books you are handing out willy nilly?
I have set myself the task of thinking about specific books I would teach as a going to sleep exercise.
Any suggestions?
