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Thursday, February 24, 2005

The Independent considers Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood essential reading for British school children

What books should our children read? The Independent, 24 February 2005.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) has decided to launch a public debate on what classroom English in the 21st century should be.

Sue Horner, head of English at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA):
"We thought that rather than just tinker with it we would think hard about it, and how it will look in the future. We don't have a view. We are saying: 'What do you think about this, then?' It is a completely new way for us to work."

In response, The Independent proposes a cannon of 20 authors deemed essential school reading. The only one of whom to have featured as the author of one of our chosen Book Club Books is Murakami. And he certainly wasn't on the curriculum when I was at school.

Shakespeare: King Lear / Romeo and Juliet
John Donne
The Romantic poets: Keats/Coleridge/ Wordsworth
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
Anton Chekhov: Short stories
TS Eliot
F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse
George Orwell: Animal Farm
Alan Paton: Cry, the Beloved Country
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Primo Levi: If This Is a Man
William Golding: Lord of the Flies
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
VS Naipaul: A House for Mr Biswas
Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (1980)
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood (1987)

Posted by Nick @ 08:30 GMT
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Boris Vian, L’Écome des Jours, 1947, Translated by Stanley Chapman as 'Froth on the Daydream'1967, 1970, 1988

Current Book Club Book on the Back Burner

Herman Melvills's 'Moby Dick

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