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.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t read Austen or any of the Brontës in high school. Or even college, although that was because I took as many poetry and play-focused courses as possible. They were generally shorter than novels, and college was my first experience with an active social life/ interpersonal drama, which was time-consuming.

The only Lit class I took in college I ended up dropping because there were just not enough hours in the day to read with working full time and pursuing a BS in Accounting. I foolishly thought taking that class would justify time for reading fiction but that was fantasy. When I finally did graduate I spent months devouring novels after not having the spoons to do so for so long.

Senior year included Johnny Got His Gun, Hamlet, The Bell Jar, and Les Miserables. Frosh or soph year included Romeo and Juliet and Lord of the Flies but I don't remember any others. I think Jr year was split between world lit and contemporary writing. I remember Siddartha, A Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, and readings from the Odyssey. I got to Austen and the Brontes on my own.

I finally got around to finishing Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil and I found it ultimately pretty unsatisfying. I think the tone and style of the writing made it hard to feel like the three women were distinct characters, and so when everything finally comes to a head I wasn't invested in any one of them in particular.

If anyone is looking for a good translations of Beowulf by a woman I highly recommend this one [link]