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A Reading List for English Applicants

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Reply 20
Avatar for sundogs
sundogs
2
this is brilliant, thanks so much :smile:
I don't like 1984 all that much, either.

Good thread, MSB.
Reply 22
Avatar for hobnob
hobnob
14
MSB
Old English isn't strictly English, although one wouldn't call it a foreign language (despite what my warning points would tell you).

:rofl: Oh dear. I wish that had been me, but sadly it wasn't...
Reply 23
Avatar for foxo
foxo
17
Dionysia
Am I the only person who didn't mention 1984, then?


Why would I mention a mediocre, overrated book I read when I was twelve?

I mainly spoke about 20th century American fiction and some quite recent Scottish literature too. With the exception of Dickens and Chekhov I'm not a great fan of the 19th century literature most people cram their personal statements with. Didn't seem to affect my chances of obtaining offers.
MSB

Well, no, but from my experience reviewing personal statements on here, I'd say it's possibly the most common book mentioned. Evidence suggests some may not be telling the truth.

If you are going to discourage regularly cited/predictable books though, you may as well do away with Victorian lit and Romanticism in general. What would be better, as seems to be your point, is not to mention a book based simply on prestige, as people may have been doing with 1984.
Reply 25
Avatar for Dionysia
Dionysia
12
Ooh, it's like a quiz.
Reply 26
Avatar for Reverie.
Reverie.
14
MSB

Spoiler



...and Stevenson's no Englishman. :wink:
Reply 27
Avatar for mel0n
mel0n
17
Good thread! :smile:
Reply 28
Avatar for MSB
MSB
OP
17
Ploop
If you are going to discourage regularly cited/predictable books though, you may as well do away with Victorian lit and Romanticism in general. What would be better, as seems to be your point, is not to mention a book based simply on prestige, as people may have been doing with 1984.

I meant to say: I've basically made a list of 'predictable' books...

Reverie.
...and Stevenson's no Englishman. :wink:

Extra coconut for you.
Reply 29
Avatar for Dionysia
Dionysia
12
MSB

Extra coconut for you.


Do I get one for my Freud thing? =P

Also, Reverie's going to be my college mother as of Oct *is happy*. Oh god my life is now tsr.
My friend emailed me an alleged list of books that Oxford expect you to have read before your interviews. I've not doubt it's absolute ********, plus it was a really really awful list. The one you've made is faaaaar better.
Reply 31
Avatar for MSB
MSB
OP
17
LostHorizons
My friend emailed me an alleged list of books that Oxford expect you to have read before your interviews. I've not doubt it's absolute ********, plus it was a really really awful list. The one you've made is faaaaar better.

Could you post it, out of interest?
MSB
I meant to say: I've basically made a list of 'predictable' books...


Extra coconut for you.


Beckett wrote in French, although I think he did translate Waiting for Godot into English himself. And are you discounting Joyce when you say written in England? I'm going for two coconuts here. :biggrin:
Reply 33
Avatar for Dionysia
Dionysia
12
Do you want me to post my college reading list? It's all on the computer anyway...is ghastly and long but...could help?
Reply 34
Avatar for MSB
MSB
OP
17
Ars Ludicra
Beckett wrote in French, although I think he did translate Waiting for Godot into English himself. And are you discounting Joyce when you say written in England? I'm going for two coconuts here. :biggrin:

Ah, but if that were the case, I would have included 'En Attendant Godot'. As Beckett made the translation himself, and the two versions differ (quite significantly in some details, as far as I understand), Waiting for Godot (i.e., the English one) can arguably be considered as a distinct text (i.e., one written in English), in my opinion. That said, I have already called that one a 'semi-exception' before, so I suppose it counts.

As for Joyce, I think he wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Trieste.


Dionysia
Do you want me to post my college reading list? It's all on the computer anyway...is ghastly and long but...could help?

Only if you want to. As I said above, I'm not going to change the list in the first post. I only asked LostHorizons as I'm interested in what Oxford are supposed to expect you to have read (mainly so we can rubbish it).
Sure. My friend's friend supposedly got this from either the Oxford's English department after emailing to ask them what she should read, and was told that this is sort of the minimal reading that they expect you to have done by the time you go to your interviews for you to be seriously considered:
Pre-1960

A Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathon Swift
Tristram Shandy – Lawrence Sterne
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Vanity Fair – William Thackeray
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Hard Times – Charles Dickens
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
The Mill on the Floss – George Elliot
Middlemarch – George Elliot
The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
June the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Dubliners – James Joyce
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
A Room with a View – EM Forster
A Passage to India – EM Forster
Sons and Lovers – DH Lawrence
The Rainbow – DH Lawrence
Women in Love – DH Lawrence
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Ulysses – James Joyce
Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Sunset Song – Lewis Grassic Gibbon
A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
The Road to Wigan Pier – George Orwell
1984 – George Orwell
The Power and the Glory – Grahame Greene

Modern/Contemporary Fiction

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
Reservation Blues – Sherman Alexie
The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
London Fields – Martin Amis
Behind the Scenes at the Museum – Kate Atkinson
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
New York Trilogy – Paul Aster
The Crow Road – Iain Banks
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Union Street – Pat Barker
Regeneration Trilogy – Pat Barker
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters – Julian Barnes
Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
The Book of Evidence – John Banville
The Master and the Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Possession – AS Byatt
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter
Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
Foe – JM Coetzee
Libra – Don DeLillo
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – Roddy Doyle
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Joys of Motherhood – Buchi Emecheta
Love Medicine – Louise Erdrich
Absalom, Absalom – William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
A Life in 4 Books – Alister Gray
Snow Falling on Cedars – Steve Gutterson
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
Plan B – Chester Himes
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureshi
Briefing for a Descent into Hell – Doris Lessing
If This is a Man – Primo Levi
Nice Work – David Lodge
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marques
All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Bell – Iris Murdoch
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
Our Fathers – Andrew O’Hagan
Running in the Family – Michael Ondaatje
Knowledge of Angels – Jill Paton Walsh
Cambridge – Caryl Phillips
The Shipping News – E Annie Proux
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
The Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
The Human Stain – Philip Roth
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Shame – Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
Waterland – Graham Swift
The White Hotel – DM Thomas
Sacred Country – Rose Tremain
Meridian – Alice Walker
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson


Ensure you have also read a range of dramas and poetry.


Also Dionysia, I would be interested to see your reading list =) sort of curious as to what I will be letting myself in for if I do get into Oxford.
Reply 36
Avatar for Dionysia
Dionysia
12
MSB


Only if you want to. As I said above, I'm not going to change the list in the first post. I only asked LostHorizons as I'm interested in what Oxford are supposed to expect you to have read (mainly so we can rubbish it).


Haha, fair dues. If anyone wants it, I'll PM it, but your list is good enough anyway. If I find something amazing, I'll shove it here.
Reply 37
Avatar for MSB
MSB
OP
17
LostHorizons
Sure. My friend's friend supposedly got this from either the Oxford's English department after emailing to ask them what she should read, and was told that this is sort of the minimal reading that they expect you to have done by the time you go to your interviews for you to be seriously considered

I'd only read seven of those before I applied and evidently it wasn't detrimental.
MSB
Ah, but if that were the case, I would have included 'En Attendant Godot'. As Beckett made the translation himself, and the two versions differ (quite significantly in some details, as far as I understand), Waiting for Godot (i.e., the English one) can arguably be considered as a distinct text (i.e., one written in English), in my opinion. That said, I have already called that one a 'semi-exception' before, so I suppose it counts.

As for Joyce, I think he wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Trieste.


Does that makes two coconuts? :ahee:

Edit: And I think I would consider Waiting for Godot a translation since, as far as I remember, the differences are not so great. They seemed to be differences relating to the staging rather than anything else. I'm not fond of Beckett, though, so I may have blocked the significant changes from my memory. :cute:
MSB
I meant to say: I've basically made a list of 'predictable' books...

Definitely. Surprised you went with Heart of Darkness by the way, as so many seem to loathe it, but I think it's a pretty good choice.

LostHorizons
Sure. My friend's friend supposedly got this from either the Oxford's English department after emailing to ask them what she should read, and was told that this is sort of the minimal reading that they expect you to have done by the time you go to your interviews for you to be seriously considered:

Spoiler




Ensure you have also read a range of dramas and poetry.


Also Dionysia, I would be interested to see your reading list =) sort of curious as to what I will be letting myself in for if I do get into Oxford.

It's a doubly good thing I didn't apply to Oxford then if that's a genuine list.

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