Willow ,'Potential'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
You would think I would know a lot about Beowulf after that but I absolutely do not.
Recent scholarship suggests that Grendel's mom was unduly slandered by mistranslation and misogyny.
So there's that!
Also, you could read John Gardner's novel Grendel for an intriguing modern take on the tale from Grendel's POV.
I have been meaning to do that for a long time but I still haven't. Looks like my library doesn't have it so it won't be that easy to add to ye olde TBR mountain, but I will explore other options. Hm, the audiobook is short...
you could read John Gardner's novel Grendel
Seconded!
I am trying to remember books we studied en masse. For sure the Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, Heart of Darkness, and several Shakespeare plays and sonnets. I had four years of HS so there must have been more. Then all the books we chose on our own for book reports, of course. Oh, we did read Wuthering Heights as one. I don't think any Austen, though. Lots of short stories one semester -- that was a fun semester. I remember The Lottery the most vividly. I remember studying some of the Canterbury Tales. It's all a blur!
I think we maybe read one Canterbury Tale? A Shakespeare play every year, except for 10th grade when we did American lit
Oh, yeah, that's right - one Shakespeare per year might have been how we did it, too.
Yep, same here, Shakespeare every year except American lit year. And no Austen or Bronte for sure.
OK, I acquired Grendel on libro and realized I already had a copy of Bea Wolf so I bumped that up in the queue but I also got two of trungles' comics out of the library. This is why my TBR pile, while mostly existing only as electronic ephemera, will still manage to physically crush me at some point and possibly compress us all into a singularity
I can't remember if I read Jane Eyre for school or fun. (Maybe both? I read a lot of books for fun as a kid that were later assigned in school.)
The nuns always gave us a summer reading list of maybe 40-50 titles and we were supposed to read 10 over the summer break. I always read all of them. I devoured books as a kid. I don't read nearly as fast anymore. My ability to retain absolutely anything I read was just as bad back then as it is now so I could reread all of them without a clue as to what happens next. It would have been nice to keep track of what I read back then and rate them as we do now.