 | Macbeth (Penguin Popular Classics) by William Shakespeare
Buy new: £2.36 / Used from: £0.01 Undoubtedly one of Shakespeare's best, I first read this (sceptically) at 14 and it left me with an appreciation of older plays (as you'll see later in the list).
|
 | The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Penguin Popular Classics) by Robert Louis Stevenson
Buy new: £2.17 / Used from: £0.01 An interesting gothic tale. Though 'only' a GCSE-level text, I find it much better than the A-level Frankenstein.
|
 | Much Ado About Nothing (New Cambridge Shakespeare) (The New Cambridge Shakespeare) by William Shakespeare
Buy new: £6.92 / Used from: £1.80 A Shakespearian comedy that, to be honest, I find infinitely less interesting than Macbeth. Might just be cause I like darker stuff.
|
 | Mean Time by Carol Ann Duffy
Buy new: £5.87 / Used from: £3.03 A thought-provoking collection of poems by the critically-acclaimed poet. To be honest, I enjoy these a lot more than older works, such as Blake.
|
 | Knowledge of Angels by Jill Paton Walsh
Buy new: £5.23 / Used from: £0.01 A fantastic novel, exploring many theological issues, but in an interesting manner. Part thriller, part philosophical discussion. In the end, I loved it.
|
 | Dr Faustus based on the A text (New Mermaids) by Christopher Marlowe
Buy new: £6.99 / Used from: £0.01 More religion in this play by Christopher Marlowe (a contemporary of Shakespeare, if you don't know the name). Has its moments.
|
 | Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake
To be honest, I dislike William Blake and most of his work. Some of the poems are interesting to me, but most of it I just find dull.
|
 | Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
Buy used from: £0.01 Another dark play, and as such I rather like it. Deals with themes such as incest and insanity, even if they seem to be present in a rather loose way.
|
 | Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus (Penguin Popular Classics) by Mary Shelley
Buy new: £2.17 / Used from: £0.01 One of two gothic novels that I had to compare for my coursework. I dislike "Frankenstein" intensely, finding it repetitive, melodramatic and dull because of it.
|
 | The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
Buy new: £4.47 / Used from: £1.26 The other gothic text, this one of my choice. More dark stuff here, with death and incest forming some of the themes of the novel.
|
 | The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Buy new: £4.98 / Used from: £0.01 In the end I didn't use this for my essay, but I read it as a modern example of the gothic novel. A damn fine book, though again it's dark and contains some highly disturbing moments.
|
 | Rupert Brooke: Selected Poems (Bloomsbury poetry classics) by Rupert Brooke
The first of many texts from the WW1 module, for which we study a wide variety of works. Brooke is one of the war poets, and not one I like especially.
|
 | The War Poems (Faber Pocket Poetry) by Siegfried Sassoon
Buy used from: £0.01 Sassoon is one of the better war poets. He also penned six volumes of an autobiography, which naturally cover his time in the trenches.
|
 | Regeneration by Pat Barker
Buy new: £7.19 / Used from: £0.01 More about Sassoon, in this fiction that looks at his time at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917. First part of a trilogy.
|
 | Letters from a Lost Generation - First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends: Roland Leighton, Edward Brittain, Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow
Buy used from: £1.13 A collection of letters between Vera Brittain and four soldiers in the trenches of World War One. An account of the war from people writing whilst it was happening all around them.
|
 | Journey's End (Penguin Modern Classics) by Robert Cedric Sherriff
Buy new: £5.98 / Used from: £2.53 Written in 1928, just 10 years after the war, by someone who had lived through it in the trenches. Especially interesting for the characters, mainly the opposing characters of Stanhope and Raleigh.
|
 | "Blackadder": The Whole Damn Dynasty by John Lloyd
Buy new: £11.38 / Used from: £2.92 You may think it unusual to look at Blackadder Goes Forth in English, but a script excerpt came up on the paper a year or two ago. Amusing, yet based in fact.
|
 | Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Buy new: £4.80 / Used from: £0.01 Heading into the realm of becoming a classic, it would seem, as everyone seems to love it. Came 13th in the BBC's Big Read contest.
|
Listmania!
