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!

 

[pri]

hmm...this gives my life a meaningful purpose

it sounds promising actually
could we add:

vanity fair
portrait of a lady
the trial (kafka)
the rebel (albert Camus)

 

[Daemontreu]

Camus, is he the one who wrote "The Outsider"? Or am I just... not thinking straight? No.... wait. Colin Wilson wrote "The Outsider".

Yep. I've confused myself.

 

[Newbie]

i wana read
catch 22
ullysses
midnight children
and some of tolstoy's stuff which was too hardcore for me back in year 9

 

[ssssonicyouth]

Originally posted by pri
hmm...this gives my life a meaningful purpose

it sounds promising actually
could we add:

vanity fair
portrait of a lady
the trial (kafka)
the rebel (albert Camus)

gah!!!!

the opening lines of poal are: "Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake in tea or not..."

IT'S EXCRUCIATING! And there's no happy ending. Isabel Archer is stupid.

edit: of mice and men is great tho..

 

[chip]

I'm interested but could we also read some lighter books from time to time ..... i mean i love to sit down and read but sometimes you just want to read something easy that can be read in like an afternoon.... there are great books like that the alchemist for example

 

[Gregor Samsa]

Sounds interesting.. Here are some other works I'd recommend for it;

Hermann Broch-The Death Of Virgil (Not enough people are aware of his works, I feel...)
Hermann Broch-The Sleepwalkers
Albert Camus-The Plague (Better than 'The Outsider', I think.. The First Man is interesting too, as a thinly veiled autobiography, but it's probably not good for a reading group as it was unfinished..)
Joseph Conrad-Heart Of Darkness
Fyodor Dostoevsky-The Brothers Karamazov (Haven't read this, but I want to.. I mean, it has 'The Legend Of The Grand Inquisitor' within, defined by Kumar as the 'Key anti-utopian text of the nineteenth century'..)
James Joyce-A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (Finished this today. Good stuff, and there's quite a lot within it open for discussion..)
Franz Kafka-The Metamorphosis (Preferably within something like 'The Complete Short Stories'..)
George Orwell-Animal Farm (For those who haven't read it.)
Plato-The Republic. (Even with the proto-Facist undertones..)
Salman Rushdie-Midnight's Children (Mentioned above..This is very good.)
Yefgeny Zamiatin-We. (A dystopian forebear to works like Brave New World and 1984. Very interesting, besides being a well-written text.. Again, must food for thought within.)


I'd also like to read non-fiction works like 'The Drowned And The Saved' [Levi] and 'Age Of Extremes;The Short Twentieth Century' [Hobsbawm]...

 

[MiuMiu]

See 'The Reading Room' for more info guys...

 

[freaking_out]

Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger, its a good book, and i've got the whole book on pdf, if u guys want..

 

[Lolliana]

great idea, i also have in my collection like half of the books you guys have mentioned,
when we all decide on the time and book (i dont mind)
would someone pm me?

may i suggest that we start with ms 12, she recommends a book, we do the read and discuss thing, then ms 12 asks somone else to recommend, and so on and so forth?
that way, we could all save time arguing and also read books we may not have ever chosen ourselves

 

[Doctor_Z]

Yes.

I would like to read some books

although, i may take much longer than a week.

little women sounds like a mad book.

 

[Juliet]

Little Women is a wonderful book!!! although i don't agree on some things that happen...

 

[holl]

Sounds like a good idea Ms 12.
I also want to read the "Bell Jar" but at the moment I am reading "The english patient". We did "In the Skin of a lion" in english and that is the sequal to it. I would recomend it to those who enjoyed "In the skin of a lion" cause most of the characters are in it again and the style is very similiar.