Books From Your Teens (1 Viewer)

magicbastarder

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i can't remember what novels might have been on the inter cert syllabus, if any. i did it in 91, last year of the inter cert.

i did read 'the catcher in the rye' around that age, but i think i borrowed it from the library. and i can't remember a thing about it, bar the tone.
 
IIRC my entire English reading list of prescribed novels over six years were:

To Kill a Mocking Bird - Harper Lee
The Cay - Theodore Taylor
Reading in the Dark - Seamus Deane
How Many Miles to Babylon? - Jennifer Johnston

I think that's it.
 
I did Blackcock's Feather for my inter cert - a damn decent adventure story written in the 30s and set in Ireland during Elizabethan times, iirc. Racial slurs aplenty in that too, the main character liked to swordfight with people who called him a dago.
 
i can't remember what novels might have been on the inter cert syllabus, if any. i did it in 91, last year of the inter cert.

i did read 'the catcher in the rye' around that age, but i think i borrowed it from the library. and i can't remember a thing about it, bar the tone.

I was also in the final year doing the Inter Cert in 1991.

the play we did was Romeo & Juliet and the Irish play was an O'Casey one.
(Juno and The Paycock or The Plough and Stars)
I also remember reading Silas Marner and Great Expectations then in class.

in transition year we read Catcher In The Rye.

the LC 1994 stuff was:
was the other O'Casey play (Juno or Plough) and Othello.

the teachers chose Wuthering Heights which I though wasn't a good choice
so the teacher said I could study Animal Farm on my own if I wanted.
when I dropped out of School in May 1993 we hadn't actually started the novel
yet so it was years later before I realised what Wuthering Heights was actually about.

maybe the teachers, who were women. wanted a female writer because it's
fair to say in Orwell's books women characters are nonentities.
(correct me if I'm wrong).

the short stories and poems for both exams were the Augustine Martin
compiled books.
one was called Soundings, the LC one, was reprinted as a souvenir for Xmas in the 2000's.

there was a collection of poetry and a collection of short stories for each exam.
as far as i remember ? correct me if i'm wrong,

the very Islamophobic poem Lepanto by G.K. Chesterton was on the Inter Cert list -
i remember doing it in class.

my other criticism of Gus Martin's books are that by 1991 they had been on
the syllabus since 1969 and the stories and poems seemed to be all set in the
time before my parents existed.
I'm struggling to remember anything that mentioned the post war era.
considering Gus Martin (1935-1995) was in his mid thirties at the time this seems
strange.

we only studied writers who were Irish, British and a few Americans.
all of them were white and apart from the novelists nearly entirely men.
 
A Clergyman's Daughter is about... um, A Clergyman's Daughter called Dorothy. You wouldn't put it on a school syllabus though, at least I don't think so, I was about 15 when I read it so maybe you would??
 
Julia is a pretty substantial character in 1984, iirc. Wuthering Heights is great

not criticizing Wuthering Heights but at 16 i thought it was a standard costume drama thing.
I was far off the mark.

I still think Animal Farm is better than Wuthering Heights but women don't have
much of a role in Orwell's world as far as I can see.
Julia is a younger attractive girlfriend character but as a person there's not a whole lot to her.
she's the only important woman character in the book.

also when he talks about the 2 Minutes of Hate there is a pointless comment about
women being the most committed and easily led to join in shouting the abuse.
 
I remember we did Lord Of The Flies and Silas Marner. I'm sure LOTF was Inter Cert if not pre-Inter Cert. Those of us in the class who were a little head in the old reading (and other things) had already read ahead to the part where the word "orgasm" is used. We waited with delight to find out who was going to have to read out that part and when the glorious day came, the poor fucker who had to read it had obviously never heard the word before, much less had any idea what it meant. He totally stumbled over it while the teacher had to tell him how to say it. We sniggered a lot.

And then someone just couldn't resist putting up their hand and asking:

"Sir, what's an orgasm?"
 
the play we did was Romeo & Juliet and the Irish play was an O'Casey one.
(Juno and The Paycock or The Plough and Stars)
I also remember reading Silas Marner and Great Expectations then in class.

in transition year we read Catcher In The Rye.

the LC 1994 stuff was:
was the other O'Casey play (Juno or Plough) and Othello.
ah yeah, we did silas marner too. and like yourself, i can't remember which o'casey play was in the IC and which in the LC.
 
I thought Of Mice And Men was great, and I liked Lord Of The Flies although even then I thought it was a bit ridiculous. I also read Animal Farm around the same time and it's amazing. We did Juno And The Paycock and I thought it was quite good, read bits of it again a few years ago and it's much better when you're older. We did Philadelphia Here I Come and I thought it was pretty shit. And we did The Crucible and even then I thought it was fuckin amazing.
Catcher in the Rye is just a book about a dickhead haha.
 
i remember that i read 'brave new world' when i was a teen, and that's another book i cannot remember a thing about.
'catch 22' was one of the best books i'd ever read when i was that age, and i revisited it about ten years later and just couldn't get into it.
 
Catcher in the Rye is awful.

My books/plays:
Of Mice and Men (JC) - Good but not something that I think has stood the test of time now
The Merchant of Venice (JC) - Excellent
Macbeth (TY) - Bloody and excellent!
Antigone (LC) - Heavy going given it’s Classical Greek but I loved it
Cinema Paradiso (LC) - this has stayed as one of my favourite films
Reading in the Dark (LC) - I really struggled with this, it was clumsy and worthy in a way that drove me bonkers
Remains of the Day (LC) - I studied this on my own as I hated Reading in the Dark so much. This is class.
Hamlet (LC) - I still think about it, I remember my teacher saying how Shakespeare uses disease as a metaphor for the growing corruption in the play. He sneaks in disease puns here and there, increasing their frequency until the climax of the play when everyone is corrupt. I highlighted every disease pun with purple highlighter and when you flicked through the book you could see it happen.
 
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