Top Ten Tuesday – Books I Was Assigned to Read in School

yggdrasille

This week’s topic from That Artsy Reader Girl sent me down the memory lane, back to the books I had to read for school.

I completed most of my high school education in Russia, so predictably this list is full of 19th-century Russian classics, some world-famous and some that are not well-known outside of Russia. I’m sorry to say that I found them a chore at the time, because our school program was seemingly designed with the sole aim of making you loathe these literary masterpieces. Oh how I hated all those tedious essay assignments. Naturally, once I re-discovered most of them years later outside of class room, I loved and appreciated them so much more.

1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

2. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

3. A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

4. Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

5. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

6. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

7. Olesya by Aleksandr Kuprin

8. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde – A rare book by a non-Russian author! I loved it on my first read, probably because it was an assignment for a different subject than literature, with no dreaded essays.

The last two books on my list I read in Australia, for the ESL class (English as a Second Language):

9. Maestro by Peter Goldsworhty – A coming-of-age story set in Darwin, about a young boy whose life is changed forever by his piano teacher, an old Austrian refugee. I enjoyed this one, and I remember having a good discussion with our teacher on whether the ending was tragic or happy.

10. Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris Lessing – This collection of essays, exploring themes of society, government, group psychology and patterns of human behaviour, was an interesting choice to throw at the students who might still be struggling with English. It is conversational rather than academic and the language is clear and simple, but it was definitely a challenge. Many ideas explored here sailed right over my head at the time, but this book did make me read more of Doris Lessing, who became one of my all-time favourite authors.

13 thoughts on “Top Ten Tuesday – Books I Was Assigned to Read in School”

Leave a comment