This annoyed me. Apparently the government now gets to decide which books schoolkids do and do not get to read in English for GCSE and A-Level, and the list of books that are likely to stay seems to be part of a devious plot to put all students off English Literature for the rest of their lives, and ensure they never pick up anything other than maybe Jeffrey Archer and, if they're feeling really adventurous, Jackie Collins.

I'm quite interested to know how exactly they arrived at this list. What they seem to have done is taken out all the books that are remotely interesting or representative and left the ones that are gloomy, dull and alien (with the exception of DH Lawrence, who in my opinion is all three, and, I'm happy to say, has been shown the door.) As far as I can remember, the books I most enjoyed at GCSE were the ones that were (in no particular order) funny, political, exotic (by which I mean not set in Yorkshire, down an East End side street or under a Greenwood Tree). Explicitly I loved "To Kill a Mockingbird", which was entirely relevent to a "modern" student in many ways, set in the USA (which is much more interesting than the Mendips, pretty though they are) and very funny. Not insignificantly, it was also, despite its depth, not a grindingly long read. This meant teachers could legitimately get us to read in our own time, and that there was pretty much something worth discussing on every page. The likes of Thomas Hardy and even (much as I would leap to her defence in any other context) Charlotte Bronte, however, ramble on for pages about the exact shade of a particular bit of moorland on the patricular Sunday in question which, while not irrelevent to the plot (it's called "pathetic fallacy", I seem to recall) it is neverthelss reminiscent of Arthur Ransome breaking off from a plot that was never all that interesting in the first place to tell you in minute detail how to tie a reef knot.

I would argue that a plethora of books largely about the rotten lives of working class people and the not-so-rotten lives of middle class people looking for husbands, while important, hardly introduces children to the breadth of experience available in "Classic" writing. Any writing about race (Mildred Taylor, Maya Angelou) seems to have disappeared (Harper Lee isn't on either list, so I'm not sure what's happening to her), and sexuality doesn't get a look-in. I suppose there's scope for the same old debates about women and how generally awful it is to be one, what with Charlotte Bronte, and I suppose if the Conrad book chosen is "Heart of Darkness" you can discuss racism and colonialism (and if you have a decent teacher, watch "Apocalypse Now" - wehey!) though I expect it isn't. Religion also isn't mentioned anywhere, which seems a bit daft to me. It seems that in today's climate, there's enough impetus in the outside world to get kids talking about these sorts of issues, and in doing so looking about how these books relate to the present. But that's why they're not doing it. Too touchy. We don't want to risk education becoming relevent, now do we?
It amazes me that most of these "Classic" wrtiters also seem to be Victorian. Decent writing didn't stop at the turn of the 20th century, nor was it few and far between before that. It does seem rather short-sighted. Maybe the government has scrapped the likes of Muriel Spark and George Orwell simply because it hasn't heard of them?

There are also some pretty damn significant writers who don't even have the priviledge of being scrapped, since they don't seem to be there in the first place. Where, for example, is Virginia Woolf? And as for Anne Bronte, nobody seems to have even heard of her!

My list would probably be (in no particular order):

"Oranges are Not the Only Fruit" (Jeanette Winterson), "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (Anne Bronte), "Mrs Dalloway" or "Orlando" (Virginia Woolf), "To Kill a Mockingbird" (Harper Lee), "Of Mice and Men" (John Steinbeck), "The Catcher in the Rye" (J.D. Salinger), "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (Maya Angelou), "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" (Mildred Taylor), "Jane Eyre" or "Shirley" (Charlotte Bronte), "A Passage to India" (EM Forster), "Heart of Darkness" (Joseph Conrad), "Brideshead Revisited" or "The Loved One" (Evelyn Waugh), "The Lord of the Flies" (William Golding), "Brave New World" (Aldous Huxley), "1984" (George Orwell), "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (Ernest Hemingway), "On the Road" (Jack Kerouac), "The Canterbury Tales" (Chaucer), "Far From the Madding Crowd" or "The Return of the Native" (Thomas Hardy), "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (Murial Spark), "The Great Gatsby" (F. Scott Fitzgerald), something by Alan Bennett (though this would probably be a play, unless they did "The Laying On Of Hands"), "Lucky Jim" (Kingsley Amis), "Other Voices, Other Rooms" (Truman Capote), "Frankenstein" (Mary Shelley), "Three Men In A Boat" (Jerome K Jerome. Well, why not?), something by Jane Austen, "Hard Times" (Charles Dickens. Reluctantly, though, as I hate Charles Dickens.)

So there you go.