Hey, if you like books.....

Have you also seen the booker prize short list of booker winners - based on the 50 yrs of the literary award?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/26/man-booker-prize-novel-golden-five-shortlist

this is also a list of top reads and you can also tick off the ones you’ve read..

http://thegreatestbooks.org

We did some of the Canterbury Tales at school. We were told beyond the prescribed ones The Miller's tale was somewhat ribald, so as hormonal school kids.......

Killing an Arab. Robert Smith was also 1959 vintage and so he must have done L'Etranger for his French A level too. Oh. Mum died yesterday. At least I think it was but can't really remember. Then he committed said killing because he'd had too much sun. The idea you could be executed for not responding in socially appropriate ways spooked me but I liked Meursault's brutal honesty in not capitulating to the prescribed forms of sentiment.  We did The Plague too but I'd already read that at 13, along with Christie's Cat Among the Pigeons, where schoolmistresses were being murdered at an alarming pace at an exclusive girl's boarding school. RIP Blyton. I read The Plague because I was morbidly curious about Plague, which by the way is still going strong in some parts of the world, including the States. I still rate Camus for his anti capital punishment stance. 

Lolita I read for myself recently. Wuthering Heights I read many moons ago, as well as Jane Eyre. And did I read 1984. And Kafka's Trial and metamorphosis. Later on someone told me about a tale in which the protagonist is turned not into a giant beetle but rather a giant *** and it is his analyst who breaks the news. Good for a giggle. 

• Many an SF spree and glutting of all things vampire have I embarked upon. We did The Time Machine at school.and I have the film on You Tube, as well as more recent O level favourite, The Woman on Black. The 1989 TV film was.an absolute treat, the Harry potter version a bit overdone though the author didn't like the 1989 version at all. 

I started David Copperfield at 11 but could not continue as all the abuse David kept experiencong made reading it too upsetting, but I finished it later. 

I see Dante, Catch 22 and Middlemarch, which have come up before, have shown up here. Ulysses we did at Uni, ditto The Iliad and The aOdyssey, epics were mandatory, Scarlet and Black and Anna Karenina. 

Smith was directly influenced by his reading of 'L'Etranger' in the writing of 'Killing an Arab'.

Smith was directly influenced by his reading of 'L'Etranger' in the writing of 'Killing an Arab'.

For a long time the day job took all my energy from me, when I wasn't drawing and painting. These days I am reading a lot more because I get sent advance copies to review on GoodReads and Amazon and the like, though in a lot of cases these are pot boilers rather than Great Literature. I have also been ordering some non fiction too though

I caught up a little bit... then attended university at 28, where the habit of reading took hold.  For many years, in my 30s and 40s, I wouldn't be seen without a book.  The book habit for me then was like the mobile phone habit with many people now.  I would read walking down the street, on the bus, in the bath - everywhere.  That habit died in me when I had my last breakdown, in 2010.  It's only recently started to come back again... very slowly and gradually, by going back to tried and trusted favourites.  It's more of a struggle now, though.  I think my attention span - always very low - has fizzled out.  I almost have to force myself to sit and read.

Your list of reading sounds impressive though

I'm '59 vintage, too.  Robert Smith is 3 weeks my senior!  Morrissey was born the day after I was.  Andrew Eldritch is in there as well.  He wrote a fine song entitled '1959' - on the 'Floodland' album.

I didn't fail a single exam at school.

That's my spin on the fact that I didn't sit any!

The more I think about those times now, the more I wonder how on earth I managed to get through 10 years of schooling (I left - or rather, I stopped going - at 15) and never learn a thing.  I don't exaggerate.  I could read and write when I started.  That was about as far as I got.  The rest is a blank.  I didn't read a serious book until I was 26.

I know. Whether or not he did it as part of his French exams I don't know but he is 1959 vintage, so he could have.