Top Ten Tuesday

Posted August 8, 2017 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday is gleaned from the old prompts on the page. Here’s ten books I was forced to read — which I loved! I’ve a vague feeling I’ve done this before, but I can’t find it by searching back, so why not?

  1. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. It’s a classic, of course.
  2. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy. I even had to read it in a week, thanks to a dare with my dad.
  3. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. I didn’t get far with this when I tried to read this as a kid, but when I finally had to read it for school, I fell in love.
  4. Troilus and Criseyde, by Geoffrey Chaucer. I didn’t have high hopes for this because I wasn’t a fan of The Canterbury Tales, in general. But I really got into dissecting it, in the end.
  5. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Is this cheating? I read a translation, of course, but I had to read it in the Middle English for my BA, and that was revelatory. The playing with language is gorgeous.
  6. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles. In style and content it’s not at all what you’d expect me to enjoy, but I really did.
  7. Postcolonialism Revisited, by Kirsti Bohata. I was never much of a fan of actually reading theory, in my lit degrees, preferring to closely analyse the texts. But this was pretty revelatory, discussing Welsh fiction as postcolonial fiction — because in many ways, the Welsh experience was like that of colonialism.
  8. Richard III, by William Shakespeare. I was never a fan of Shakespeare, but I ended up having to take a class on his history plays for lack of other modules that interested me. And I loved this one.
  9. Country Dance, by Margiad Evans. Or indeed, all the other Welsh fiction I read for that particular class. I’d never even been fully aware there was Welsh fiction like this out there.
  10. The Annotated Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien et al. I love The Hobbit, of course, but I’m not really a fan of annotated texts. Still, the annotated version of The Hobbit was fascinating for its insights on Tolkien’s process.

There’s probably dozens of others I should think of — at one point, my mother bought me a whole bunch of classics she said I had to read before I went to university, for example! (She wasn’t wrong in suggesting they were important to know. Should’ve included more Oscar Wilde, though, Mum, and insisted I read more Shakespeare. Now you know!)

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4 responses to “Top Ten Tuesday

  1. Ohhhh a lot of those sound very interesting!
    I loved to study english lit because analysing books and learning some context helped me love some books I was “meh” about at first! Like pride and prejudice haha!

    • Yes! Exactly! That’s precisely what I loved about studying lit. It took me so much work to get into Jane Austen at all. Still not a big fan, but I’ve learnt to appreciate!

    • Ha! I never got round to Stephen King till I was in university, and then devoured a whole bunch of his books in a semester as an antidote to the Victorian lit I had to read!

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