Post-HSC reading group. Anyone interested? (1 Viewer)

[MiuMiu]

Hey guys
One thing I have soooo been looking forward is being able to go back to reading books for pure interest and enjoyment rather than the crappy texts set by the damn BOS. Ive noticed some people on this board have expressed similar ideas.

So heres what I was thinking. Each week or so (starting after the HSC exams have all finished of course) we start a new novel that we all agree on and after an agreed time we discuss what we thought about it etc. Im sure we'd be able to get our own forum set up for this purpose.

I really want to be well-read for uni and am very interested as such in reading the classics (some listed below). But off course if there was something new that people wanted to read, we could do that to.

I find it good to have someone to talk to after I have finished reading a novel, and I thought since a lot of you appear to be readers....why not?

Heres the novels I really wanna read, and Im sure you all have ones to add:

• 1984
• Crime and Punishment
• The Great gatsby
• Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
• Mein Kampf
• The Scarlet Letter
• Notes from the Underground
• Farenheit 451
• Lolita
• I am the Cheese
• The Rape of the Lock (poem, I know)
• Persuasion
• Gulliver's Travels
• A Clockwork Orange
• Ragtime
• The Communist Manifesto
• Of Mice and Men
• Out of Africa
• Six Characters in Search of an Author
• The Bell Jar
• A Streetcar named desire
• Das Kapital

Let me know what you guys think!

 

[Jinglebell]

sounds like a great idea! i've been looking forward to reading for months...maybe i'll stop reading Pride & Prejudice over and over now

 

[Abe]

I'm in...sounds cool. But 1984 HAS to be cut from this list...read it for advanced...

 

[*10#]

AWESOME im in for this idea i really wanna read for fun again and the list looks great i really wanna read 1984 though and mein kampf would be really interesting

when do we start???

 

[Huy]

Originally posted by Jinglebell
sounds like a great idea! i've been looking forward to reading for months...maybe i'll stop reading Pride & Prejudice over and over now

I've read it about six times now! It's my favourite book (I don't mind admitting that, because it's true - and I'm male).

@Ms 12, I can't promise anything, but I am interested. I have also read Persuasion (Jane Austin) and it's really not that great - maybe I can discuss it later, after everybody has read Persuasion

I'm interested, but I'm not fully comitted (still wavering on the idea).

 

[ArgueEverything]

Originally posted by Ms 12
Hey guys
One thing I have soooo been looking forward is being able to go back to reading books for pure interest and enjoyment rather than the crappy texts set by the damn BOS. Ive noticed some people on this board have expressed similar ideas.

So heres what I was thinking. Each week or so (starting after the HSC exams have all finished of course) we start a new novel that we all agree on and after an agreed time we discuss what we thought about it etc. Im sure we'd be able to get our own forum set up for this purpose.

I really want to be well-read for uni and am very interested as such in reading the classics (some listed below). But off course if there was something new that people wanted to read, we could do that to.

I find it good to have someone to talk to after I have finished reading a novel, and I thought since a lot of you appear to be readers....why not?

Heres the novels I really wanna read, and Im sure you all have ones to add:

• 1984
• Crime and Punishment
• The Great gatsby
• Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
• Mein Kampf
• The Scarlet Letter
• Notes from the Underground
• Farenheit 451
• Lolita
• I am the Cheese
• The Rape of the Lock (poem, I know)
• Persuasion
• Gulliver's Travels
• A Clockwork Orange
• Ragtime
• The Communist Manifesto
• Of Mice and Men
• Out of Africa
• Six Characters in Search of an Author
• The Bell Jar
• A Streetcar named desire
• Das Kapital

Let me know what you guys think!

You're obviously interested in Marx, as you've got two of his books on that list. I would suggest that you don't make the leap from The Communist Manifesto (extremely easy read, very well written, and AMAZINGLY prescient for a book written over 150 years ago) to Das Kapital (an important economic manuscript that just about no one has finished) - that would be suicidal. There are a lot of other less well-known texts that are more accessible - the German Ideology for example, or Wage, Labour and Capital. And, by the way, all of Marx's texts (as well as the texts of many brilliant Marxist theoreticians) are available at the superb website www.marxists.org

Mein Kampf is good as a historical document, but it makes for torturous reading. It's the kind of book you read extracts of, not from cover to cover, unless you have some particular interest in Hitler's (deranged) ideology.

The rest of your list is very well chosen, IMHO. I haven't read them all, but those which i have and particularly enjoyed are: 1984, I am the Cheese (Cormier's best novel, imo), A Clockwork Orange (Burgess was a Catholic, so, unlike Kubrick's film, the novel has a moral ending), and Of Mice and Men.

Unfortunately, though, i won't be able to participate in the whole thing, since i'm sitting the HSC next year