The Examined Life 3: Bring back Fat Books

Yesterday I was astonished to discover that GCSE English Literature pupils at a prestigious local grammar school don't study Hardy, Dickens, Eliot, Austen, Lawrence, any of the Brontës, Thackeray or ...

... in short, they don't read any English novel fatter than my little finger. Their set book (sic: just the one) is 'I'm the King of the Castle' by Susan Hill, 224 pages, published in 1971. I haven't read it, but I have read Hill's 'The Woman in Black' which in my opinion is mediocre, in no way subtle, with a thin character (appropriately thinly played by Daniel Radcliffe in the recent film) and not even that scary.

I went to a London comprehensive in the 1970s and we read both 'Far from the Madding Crowd' and 'Great Expectations'. 

We may not all have enjoyed the experience, and not all of us who did may have liked it all of the time, but we at least put our little toes in the water and now many of us can swim.

Reading literature is a bit like swimming: it's better to be introduced to it than to discover it by accident.