Thursday 28 June 2012

Back from Paris and a school reading list

So I'm back! I assume I'll write a few posts about my trip as I load the photos onto my computer, but I had an amazing time. It is such a wonderful city, and I find the people are so much more relaxed than in London (although maybe that's just because I was on holiday there, as when I said this to a Parisian, she was very shocked and told me she thought the opposite!)

It was so lovely to get away, especially after all my exams. And now I am on my summer holiday! Well, not really because I have two weeks of work experience from Monday, but I am more excited about that than anything else so I'm not really thinking about it as work.

I've also just received a reading list from school for next year. Weirdly enough Jane Eyre is one of the books we are studying - along with Wuthering Heights (can't wait to read it!) and Frankenstein :) So all very exciting.

But I also have a few other recommendations for English and some books I should read for History and Spanish, so I thought I'd compile a list here - I do like my lists..

For English:
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Odyssey, Homer
The Bible: Matthew, Luke and 'as much as you can' of Genesis, Exodus and Revelations
The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, Hemingway
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Handmaid's tale, Margaret Atwood
The Road, Cormac McCarthy (reread)
The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde

For Spanish (I will read some in Spanish and some in English)
Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Doce Cuentos Peregrinos (Strange Pilgrims), Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Veinte Poemas de Amore y Una Canción Desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song), Pablo Neruda
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
A Personal Anthology, Jorge Luis Borges

For History
Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, Stephen Ambrose
Hellhound on His Trail, Hampton Sides

So with nearly twenty books there, I'll have a busy summer! I think having received this list, I've realised I was a little to ambitious with my Classics Club deadline of the end of this year, so I've decided to extend it to the end of next school year (July). Although in fact many of these books are on my Classics Club list :)

I reckon I'll write reviews for most of them. Probably not the Rise to Globalism (unless its incredibly amazing), or the Bible, because I'm pretty opinionated on that and I don't want to offend anyone. However I think it'd be very useful to had read some of it for all the literary references.

I might make a new page for this list and link the book reviews as I read each one :) For the Spanish ones in fact I need to write up book reports in Spanish so I'll just copy up an English translation of those on here.

So that's how my summer holiday is shaping up - books, books and more books! I must say as summer work goes - this is pretty bloody good :D

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