What books did you have to study at school?
My Western Australian school days are long past― over 50 years ago― but I can still recall many of them.
Prose Fiction:
Lorna Doone (an abridged edition; I still have the actual school book, for some reason)
The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
Tale of Two Cities (Dickens); and we were shown the b+w movie with Dirk Bogarde at school.
Great Expectations (Dickens).
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
―and (I think) Tom Sawyer (Twain)
Various short stories, only two of which I can remember:
"The Truth About Pyecraft", by H G Wells (which is a fantasy story, and funny)
"The Loaded Dog," by Henry Lawson. (also funny)
A collection of literary short stories by Australian literary author now almost entirely forgotten, Vance Palmer: The Rainbow Bird and other stories. Forgettable, except for one unforgettably bad simile: "A cold wind ran down the street like a yellow dog." (That's the only thing I can recall of any of his writing).
Drama:
Shakespeare―
Othello
Merchant of Venice
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
―and just possibly, The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde)
Radio Plays: Plays for Radio and Television was the book we had, and I recall one about a ship called, I think, The San Demetrio, something to do with convoys in WW2; I can't remember any others, although possibly another one was about Scott of the Anarctic and the ill-fated polar expedition.
Poetry
Tricky, this one, poems being shorter than novels, but one year the text book was Poems of Spirit and Action, which included one of the few I now recall, "The Highwayman", by Alfred Noyes. I can even recall the opening verse.
THE wind was a torrent of darkness upon the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding--
Riding--riding--
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.
(I just checked that on-line; my memory of line 3 was wrong; I had "crossing the purple moor" embedded in my memory.
Australian icons like "The Man from Snowy River" and "The Man from Ironbark" (Banjo Patterson).
I am sure there were a number of other worthy poems, but they are lost to my memory.
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