The Best and Worst of my Degree Required Reading

Part of the reason that I began this blog was to rekindle my love of reading, which was sadly lost during my time at university. I completed an English Literature degree at the University of Manchester, UK and graduated in 2013. As you can imagine during that time I had to read some books so I decided to put together a top 5 of the best and the worst of my set texts. I started off with some quick maths. 

12 primary texts per module, 3 modules per semester, 2 semesters per year, 3 years at University.

12 x 3 = 36

36 x 2 = 72

72 x 3 = 216

That's a whopping 216 primary texts that I should have read during my time at Manchester! I dread to think how many of those I have neglected. Well, sometimes I look at my special uni TBR stack and bow my head in shame, but I did manage to read quite a few despite this. 

Let's begin with the worst of my required reading. 

1. The Rainbow by D.H Lawrence

The lecturers were determined that this book was a revolution for literature and it may well have been, but this was one book that despite my best efforts I just couldn't finish. Apparently the story had a juicy lesbian twist to the plot, but I couldn't hold out that long. The writing style had no notable quirks that I could see and frankly the plot was like a poor imitation of a Josephine Cox novel. I think most of the reason that I was so disappointed by this book is that it didn't turn out to be the dangerously exciting, salacious story that I expected it to be. Maybe Lady Chatterly's Lover would be a better read. 

2. Emily Dickinson

I just - don't - get - all of the - dashes. This was part of a module in my very first year and I think that Emily Dickinson has frightened me away from studying poetry ever again. I have nothing particularly smart or cutting to say... I just didn't get it!

3. Mexico City Blues by Jack Kerouac

I know that with the re-emergence of hipsterism it is fashionable to worship Kerouac as some sort of god, but having taken an entire module on the Beats, I struggle to see how they are worthy of it. This final year module was possibly the least favourite of my whole degree and one that I didn't even choose! I just never understood where the Beats stood and this collection fits into that perfectly. The sad truth is that I expected them to be revolutionaries, feminists, Marxists. The reality was that they were drowning in white, middle class, mainstream America and commodified any form of 'otherness' they could find in order to add a thin, superficial veil of spice to their otherwise wholly ordinary lives. I could accept their drifter ways if it offered them a semblance of happiness or contentment, but from all I've read it seems that these wanderers were truly just lost. 

4. 253 by Geoff Ryman

This one was part of the most pointless module I ever studied. It was a compulsory module in my first year and strangely enough the author of this particular text just happened to teach on the course. (How serendipitous for him!) Now there's nothing particularly 'bad' about this text it was just boring. The book takes you through a serious of character profiles of people on the London underground and also exists in hypertext form. The website still exits here. The problem was that Ryman's representations of the people on this tube train were neither startlingly accurate nor revelatory. They did nothing to break stereotypes nor where they particularly relatable. There was just something so hollow and caricature-esque about most of them. Plus, Ryman's decision to make the final passenger on the train Anne Frank and thus suggest that the London underground is comparable to trains taking the Jews to Auschwitz was incredibly poor in my opinion. It is an example of a mediocre book desperate to make itself controversial and failing miserably. 

5. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais 

The main issue that I have with this book is how much it cost me! I bought most of my texts from charity shops or Amazon (pre-boycott), but because I had left the purchasing of this book very late I was forced to buy it from Blackwell's. It's not that books at Blackwell's are particularly expensive it's just that they charge the recommended retail price and the R.R.P of this book...? £16.99! The book itself is big so you might expect that it was value for money. That might well have been the case if we hadn't only used one chapter. One very boring, not-relevant-to-either-my-essay-or-exam-chapter. It might have been the 3 hours lectures that began at 9am that put me off this text. It might have been the rambling lecturer or it might have been the misogyny that is ingrained in the texts of the period we were studying. Whatever it was Rabelais failed to capture my imagination. 

Now to the best.

1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Academically speaking it is important to point out that my set text was specifically the 1818 version. That is because a lot of the details are changed in the 1831 reissuing and I can vaguely remember it making for quite a different story. I did spend a lot of time looking at this text through the lenses of several literary theories, but that is not why I fell in love with this story. For me, this story is the perfect representation of the bourgeois/proletariat dynamic and I read this book at around the time that I was discovering what that meant. I hate Victor Frankenstein with a passion. The character is arrogant and entitled and the absolute epitome of everything I detest. I have an enormous amount of empathy for the Creature who is both sharply intelligent and naively childlike. The Creature, though in extreme, exhibits the behaviour of a neglected child. A child that is resented and abandoned for no other reason than having been born and so this book is also a comment on parenthood, more specifically bad parenting. This book remains one of my solid favourites even to this day and is definitely one I will re-read. 

2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

This story was a revelation. I had never before read any dystopian fiction and was both amazed and terrified by the resemblance Huxley's world had to our modern day one. The inclusion of soma was an interesting part of the plot. The irony of course is that the happiness drug causes very few of the residents to be happy. I loved the focus on consumption and how damaging and dehumanising the effects of this were, not to mention the genetic race system. The story held a mirror to the world that I could see and it made me happy to know that someone else had noticed too. 

3. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

This was another dystopian fiction and one that frightened me beyond belief. The desolation that is caused by one man's ambition and greed horrified me more than any book I had ever read. The book is very much about sex and sexual politics and I really liked the non-judgemental way in which these relationships were explored. This was my first Atwood novel and I loved the way it was on the side of women and yet still managed to balance that with having a male protagonist. It depicts a world that is all too plausible which makes it one of the most chilling and brilliant books that I have read in my life so far let alone whilst at university.

4. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

When I was about 14 I discovered Jane Eyre and I absolutely loved it. I think that I had seen bits and pieces of different film adaptations of the novel, but getting to read the novel first-hand was wonderful. Rhys' novel which is a prequal focusing on the life of Mr Rochester and the mad wife that we discover in the attic in Bronte's original novel. When studying this book the focus was on the importance of it as a sequal and the way in which texts can relate to one another. It introduced me to the word 'intertextually'. This was a literary theory version of the chicken or the egg question. I hated the module, but the book was a revelation. The exploration of mental health was something that had never occurred to me and is something that stayed with me as I decided to focus my dissertation on very powerful literary representations of mental illness. I loved that Rhys had given a voice to Bertha or Antoinette as she originally was.  It really awakened me to a new kind of writing, a writing where fans can write stories of merit. Let's be honest, this book is basically excellent fanfiction. 

5. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

This was probably the first graphic novel that I had ever read. I remember finding out that my set text was basically a comic book and melodramatically rolling my eyes. I only read the book two days before the exam and only out of shear desperation. I soon found myself regretting not reading it earlier and having to rush it at the last minute, but I am very glad that I did in fact read it. The exam is now a blur, but I do remember how much I loved the wit and courage of Marji. I know that the book has a lot of big themes in there with the Iran/Iraq wars making an appearance, Islamist extremism, and revolutionary spirit all being dealt with. The novel makes plenty of important comments and observations about these things, but the thing that really resonated with me was that this book is ultimately about a young girl growing up. I was 19 when I read this book and I don't think that it could have been more relevant.