and where are you from?

and what age are you?

and how do you think what you had to read in school influenced yr reading habits over the years?

i have to admit, i have never recovered from being hit over the head by jane austen. also, i realised a few yrs ago that all the books we read in school (i went to an all girl school) had some kind of Message for Young Women. sneaky.

elizabeth bowen

jane austen

I read most of the Grug books. or are you specifically referring to the final year of high school?

UK, 24.

I think that they initially put me off certain writers because they tended to drain all of the life out of the books. After completely destroying Animal Farm for me, it took me ages to discover homage to catalonia simply because I associated orwell with being bored shitless.

I can list some of the books I remember doing:

Macbeth,
Animal Farm
Of Mice and Men
Lord of the Flies
Wuthering Heights
the canterbury tales
the handmaid's tale
a midsummer night's dream

and at A-Level

Great Expetations
Empire of the Sun

there were obviously more than that, but wierdly it's all I can think of right now.

my reading habits now are pretty wierd. I have a few authors that I'll read absolutely anything they write, and I have a mental list of books that I will pick up when I see them because I've been meaning to read them. aside from that I will pick up stuff that looks interesting, i go through phases of reading compulsively, or not reading at all.

im tryin to remember everything, it seems like such a long time ago. school reading only influenced me in that it made me mostly like C19th and early C20th literature. ive never really liked alot of stuff beyond the the middle of the C20th really? dunno why. changing style of writing i guess

we did macbeth, a midsummer nights dream, the tempest and the merchant of venice as far as shakespere goes. was never really fussed on him.

it feels like i have read alot of austen, but we did mansfield park & P&P (fucking hated it). we literally read it page by page, en masse. horrifying 'teaching' technique.

i loved the age of innocence and the last september, dont remember much of the poetry we did or the other plays, i think we did ocasey?

i havent read any drama since school, i dont see the point reading it

im sort of hoping this thread will jog my memory of what i appear to have slept through

we did a bit of poetry too, seamus o'heaney, carol ann duffy, william blake and ted hughes. Just had a flashback of an exam paper on Othello, so did that too.

my dad used to throw a lot of books in my direction, and i'd say was more of an influence than school.

the memory jogging is actually working by the way.