My Desert Island Books

Headteacher and blogger Chris Hildrew yesterday made me aware of the fact that this weekend is 'Love to Read' weekend, and in accordance with Simon Mayo's BBC R2 'Desert Island Books' feature, he has named the six books that made the biggest impact on him. I enjoyed the post, and felt that this would be an enjoyable procrastination activity. My choices below, like Chris's, are in alphabetical order of the authors' surnames - the difficulty of ranking them in any other order necessitates this!

1. The Regeneration Trilogy - Pat Barker

I only read these quite recently, but Barker's trilogy of WW1 historical fiction, centred around the lives of some of our best-known war poets (Owen, Sassoon et al.) illuminates superbly these men, their motivations and their inspirations behind their own works of literature. Having studied an anthology of Wilfred Owen's war poems during my own Literature A-Level, I wish that I had read these books alongside at the time, as the contextual understanding afforded, particularly the insights provided into Craiglockhart Hospital, are wonderfully revealing, yet certainly not always comfortable reading.



2. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

I had to read Wuthering Heights several times before truly appreciating its multi-layered complexity and rugged beauty. Since then I have re-read Brontë's only novel many times, each time discovering additional details and treasures about the characters that were missed previously. The book is completely captivating and demands that the reader succumbs to its power, with the central relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff pulsating amongst the host of supporting characters, each with their own particular interests and nuances. The final passage, for me, is one of the most enduring in literature.



3. The Monk - Matthew Lewis

As a huge fan of the Gothic tradition in literature, The Monk by Matthew Lewis stands as a seminal text, widely regarded as one of the finest products of the genre. Despite a fairly convoluted subplot, which forms much of the mid-section of the novel, the pace of the 19 year old Lewis's prose is relentless, the subject matter often shocking. Complete with all of the tropes and conventions that we have come to associate with later Gothic works, The Monk will grab you and keep you questioning your predictions and suppositions right up to the climactic finale. A perfect book for a cold winter night, though reading it on a roof-top terrace in Valencia in July, as I did this year, is not a terrible choice either.



4. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

Arguably, Cloud Atlas does not quite match the literary merits of my three preceding choices, but for sheer enjoyment, satisfyingly twisty plots and Mitchell's typically irreverent voice, it is worthy of a place on the list. I admit that I did first encounter Mitchell's writing whilst at university when a film of this text was in production, but since then I have read, and loved, several others, including Ghostwritten, Number9Dream and The Bone Clocks. At some point I am going to need to fill in the gaps in my reading of this collection, and perhaps revisit them in order, as there are recurring characters and themes which vanish and reappear in different forms. However, as individual books in their own right, each is thoroughly enjoyable, and several have kept me happily occupied on long train journeys between Plymouth and Edinburgh which is endorsement enough in itself!



1984 - George Orwell

Ok, I realise that this will appear to be a rather clichéd and predictable choice, but it would be remiss of me to omit it from a list of impactful books. George Orwell is a particular favourite writer of mine, with his life experiences alone providing rich and stimulating reading material - Down and Out in Paris and London features on my additional list at the end of this post, and Animal Farm is always one of my favourite texts to teach. As a visionary depiction of a dystopian future society, it never fails to amaze me quite how prescient Orwell managed to be in this text, and his image of a 'boot stamping on a human face - forever' is one which is indelibly imprinted on my mind.



20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
The last offering on my list comes with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, as Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was for a very long time during my childhood one of my very favourite books, one which I read and re-read time and time again. The adventures of Captain Nemo (my first Latin lesson came from my father explaining how his name means 'nobody') and the Nautilus completely enthralled me, perhaps owing to the scope of the text being so much greater than anything I had encountered up to that point. There was something about this story that made such an impression on me, and has led to its being far more memorable to my particular mind than either of Verne's other notable works, Around the World in 80 Days and Journey to the Centre of the Earth.



This really is an impossible task, and so below are some other titles that could easily have made it onto this list:

A God in Ruins - Kate Atkinson
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
The Bloody Chamber (and other stories) - Angela Carter
Nothing to Envy - Barbara Demick
The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
Crisis of Conscience - Raymond Franz
Tess of the d'Urbevilles - Thomas Hardy
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Magician's Nephew - C.S. Lewis
Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

And the pile next to my bed currently consists of the following:

A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
The British Witch: The Biography - P. G. Maxwell-Stuart
The Reader on the 6.27 - Jean-Paul Diderlaurent
The Daemonology of King James I - Donald Tyson (ed.)
Catullus' Bedspread - The Life of Rome's Most Erotic Poet

What would be your Desert Island Books? Let me know!

Dreamtime!

It is my firm belief that ‘those who CAN, teach’. Equally, I would argue that ‘those who teach, should DO’. For this reason, it is a central priority of mine to continue practising my subjects alongside teaching them – and so I found myself, continually espousing the joys and benefits of reading for pleasure as I do, at the 2015 Cheltenham Literature Festival, in the children’s tent, eagerly awaiting the appearances of Judith Kerr and Michael Morpurgo. I was there to boost my own enjoyment of children’s literature, and to hopefully come away with new recommendations for my classes.

However, what instead emerged were insights into Morpurgo’s creative processes in the run-up to his writing of new books. Somewhat surprisingly, I found that the author does not enjoy the act of writing (a feeling certainly relatable, in my experience, to some students) and that his real joy is to be found in the preparation phase of writing, a so-called ‘Dreamtime’, in which music, art, sketching, reading and other creative stimuli are used to facilitate imagination and to gather together musings which might find use in the final work of fiction.

The way that Morpurgo described this preparatory work appealed to me, and reinforced the fact that the fiction writing we try to engender in classrooms is very often completely artificially constructed, and devoid of the time required for a deep and mature formulation of ideas. ‘Real’ writers rarely work under such constraints of time and space, and it is surely unsurprising that student creative writing is sometimes disappointing. Notably, Morpurgo mentioned that to prepare for writing, he reads. It is of course true that voracious readers are exposed to numerous ideas for the style and content of their own writing, and this struck me as being a major disadvantage for my Year 11 class, featuring many proud and self-professed non-readers, at the time.

Having a very short amount of curriculum time available to improve a piece of GCSE writing coursework, I took inspiration from ‘Dreamtime’ and put together an hour-long session in which I hoped to bring my sixteen-year-olds back to their earlier childhoods, in which the joys of exploration, imagination and discovery were foregrounded to a greater degree. Students entered the room, with tables pushed to the side, and sat on the floor, immediately transforming the space into something unusual. Here, they heard a dramatic monologue read aloud. Next, we went around the circle, creating a story one word at a time. After this, we moved into a corner of the room lit only by desk lamps and read a short ghost story. There followed, during the hour, further short readings, video clips, and pieces of music. Crucially, there was time allowed after each episode for students to try a very short mini creative writing task. These fragments were retained for later use.

This was designed as a one-off lesson, a bit of an experiment and certainly not something that I would advocate without a very carefully planned structure. It is impossible to measure the impact that this session had on the students’ writing, but what is for certain is that the new piece of creative writing coursework produced in the subsequent lessons was of a far higher standard, and notably featured far more interesting and exciting content, than did their initial attempts. It is purely my sense that this session, so far removed as it was from my students’ usual experience of lessons, at the very least served to alter their perspective of the task, reminded them of the playful nature and freedom of writing, and gave them licence to express their imaginative ideas, temporarily liberated from the overwhelming strictures of technical accuracy – this would come later, and indeed did come, as part of the redrafting process.

From this point onwards, creative writing was tangibly approached with a more positive mindset and students asked often for a repeat of the session. It makes sense to me that if we aim to replicate a final product which is edging towards a professional standard (and if we’re not then what is the aim?), then we ought too to try to replicate the process which leads to that product. In this way, my glimpse into Michael Morpurgo’s creative process of ‘Dreamtime’, something which has been proven to achieve results for him, was the enabling process which led to improved final products for my students.