Everything I Read During My English Degree

What I read, and was it any good?

Twenty-three books, three years, one degree, and a lot of opinions I am now going to inflict on you.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about studying English: the reading list is not a list of books you will love. It is a list of books someone decided you should have opinions about. Some of them changed my life. Some of them I resented every single page of. And a few I hated reading but would happily write ten thousand words on, which turns out to be a completely different category and one I did not know existed before university.

So I am scoring everything twice. Enjoyment, meaning did I actually want to pick it up. And essay value, meaning did it hand me something to say. Those two things overlap far less than you would think.

By the end of this list I had also worked out something about myself that three years of seminars never quite said out loud, but I will get to that.

The life-changers

Frankenstein — Mary Shelley

Life-changing, and I am not being dramatic. This was the one that made me realise a book could be doing five things at once and that noticing them was a skill you could actually get better at. The creature's chapters wrecked me. Everyone comes in expecting a monster story and leaves having read a book about parenthood, abandonment, and what you owe something you made.

It is also endlessly generous to write about. Every angle works. Feminist reading, Romantic reading, science and ethics, the frame narrative doing quiet things to who you trust. I wrote about it more than once and never ran out.

Enjoyment: 10/10. Essay value: 10/10.

Macbeth — Shakespeare

Obsessed. Genuinely obsessed. It is short, it moves like a thriller, and the language does something to the inside of your head. The scenes after the murder, where the two of them cannot stop talking and cannot say the actual thing, are some of the best writing I have ever encountered.

Lady Macbeth deserves every essay ever written about her and then a few more.

Enjoyment: 10/10. Essay value: 10/10.

Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë

My favourite book of all time. Not my favourite book on this list. My favourite book, full stop, and nothing has moved it since.

It is the voice. Jane talking directly to you, insisting on her own worth in a world that has given her no reason to believe in it. The Red Room. Lowood. The proposal scene and then everything that comes after it. And Jane leaving, which I still think is one of the bravest things a character has ever done in a book I have read.

Yes, the Bertha problem is real and the postcolonial criticism is right. It did not stop me loving it. If anything, arguing with a book you love is the most English degree thing that can happen to you.

Enjoyment: 11/10, sorry. Essay value: 10/10.

Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë

Amazing for essays and I became insufferable about it. This is the book where I finally understood what people mean when they say a novel is structured. Nelly Dean telling the story to Lockwood telling the story to us, everything twice, every name repeating in the next generation. Once you see it you cannot unsee it.

It is not a romance. It is a book about property, revenge, and two people who are horrible to everyone including each other. It is so much better for that.

Enjoyment: 9/10. Essay value: 10/10.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll

My dissertation, and I loved it the entire way through, which I am told is rare and which I do not take for granted.

I went in thinking I would find it slight and came out convinced it is one of the strangest, most rigorous books in English. It is a book about logic written by a logician, where every joke is a joke about rules. The Mock Turtle's lessons. The trial. The way size and scale keep betraying her. Spending a year with it only made it bigger.

If you get to choose your dissertation text, choose something you can stand to read forty times. That is the whole advice.

Enjoyment: 10/10. Essay value: 10/10.

Sylvia Plath — selected poems

Honestly, all of them. "Daddy," "Medusa," "Lady Lazarus," "Parliament Hill Fields." I came to Plath expecting to admire her and ended up feeling slightly winded.

What surprised me was the control. The reputation is all rawness and confession, and the actual poems are tight, worked, brutally precise. The sound of them does half the work. Reading them aloud in a seminar room changed how I thought about what a line break is for.

Enjoyment: 10/10. Essay value: 9/10.

Genuinely loved

North and South — Elizabeth Gaskell

Devoured it. Absolutely devoured it. Margaret Hale is a brilliant heroine and the book takes the industrial north seriously as a subject rather than a backdrop. And then the TV adaptation is one of the great ones. The train station. If you know, you know.

Enjoyment: 9/10. Essay value: 8/10.

The Woman in White — Wilkie Collins

Loved it. Genuinely could not put it down, which is not something I expected from a Victorian sensation novel of that length. Marian Halcombe is the best character in it by a distance and everyone knows it, including the narrative. Count Fosco is a wonderfully repellent villain. The multiple-testimony structure means you are always slightly off balance about who to believe.

Enjoyment: 9/10. Essay value: 8/10.

Bleak House — Dickens

Loved it, and I did not expect to. It is enormous and I was dreading it. Then the fog opens the book and you realise Dickens is going to do something with an entire legal system.

The double narration is the thing. Esther in first person, past tense, and then the anonymous present-tense voice moving over London like a camera. Once you notice that switch you have an essay.

Enjoyment: 8/10. Essay value: 10/10.

The Monk — Matthew Lewis

Loved it. Absolutely unhinged from start to finish. Every time you think it has gone as far as it can go, it goes further. It is lurid and excessive and completely serious about being neither, and there is something magnificent about reading a book that has clearly decided restraint is for other people.

Enjoyment: 9/10. Essay value: 8/10.

The Tempest — Shakespeare

Great for essays. That is genuinely my main association with it and I do not think that is unfair. It is the play where the criticism is almost as interesting as the text. Colonial readings, Caliban, Prospero's power over the island and over the narrative, the fact that a playwright's last solo play is about a man giving up his magic.

I liked reading it. I loved writing about it.

Enjoyment: 7/10. Essay value: 10/10.

A Doll's House — Ibsen

My first ever play at university, and I am not a play girl. I want that on the record. I still loved this.

It works because the whole thing is a pressure system. Everything is set up, everything is paid off, and then the ending arrives and reorganises everything that came before it. That final sound is the most famous stage direction for a reason.

Enjoyment: 9/10. Essay value: 9/10.

Cloud Nine — Caryl Churchill

Really cool, and the only word I can find for it is cool. Cross-casting, a first act in colonial Africa and a second act in 1970s London where only twenty-five years have passed for the characters. It is doing something formally that no other text on this list attempts.

Enjoyment: 8/10. Essay value: 9/10.

The complicated ones

Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf

Good, but genuinely challenging, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend I sailed through it. The first time I read it I could not tell whose head I was in. The second time I could, and it was suddenly extraordinary.

The Septimus sections are the ones that stayed with me. It rewards rereading more than almost anything else here, which is a polite way of saying you probably will not get it on the first pass, and that is fine.

Enjoyment: 7/10. Essay value: 9/10.

The Book of Margery Kempe — Margery Kempe

Interesting. That is the honest word. Not enjoyable exactly, but genuinely fascinating as an object. A medieval woman dictating her own life, weeping constantly, arguing with clergy, travelling across Europe, and being an enormous inconvenience to nearly everyone she meets. The self-portrait is unlike anything else I read.

Enjoyment: 5/10. Essay value: 8/10.

Shamela — Henry Fielding

Weird. Very weird. It is a parody and it is barely a book, more of a hit-and-run on someone else's novel. Funny in places, but it assumes a familiarity with Pamela that I did not fully have, and reading a joke about a book you have not read is a strange experience.

Enjoyment: 5/10. Essay value: 6/10.

Robert Burns — poetry

Hit or miss. Some of it landed completely and some of it just did not reach me. The dialect was part of the barrier, though it is also the entire point, so I cannot really complain about it. When it works, it is warm and funny and much less sentimental than his reputation suggests.

Enjoyment: 6/10. Essay value: 6/10.

Dracula — Bram Stoker

The film is better and I will not be taking questions. I do not care about the train times. I do not care about the shipping schedules. Stoker's commitment to documentary realism means large sections read like admin, and I understand why that is doing something, and I still did not want to read it.

The good parts are genuinely great. Lucy's decline, Renfield, the ship's log. But it is a book with a lot of connective tissue.

Enjoyment: 5/10. Essay value: 8/10.

Not for me

The Importance of Being Earnest — Oscar Wilde

Not my thing. Everyone else in the room found it hilarious and I sat there recognising that it was clever without ever being moved by it. The epigrams start to feel like a machine after a while. I can see the craft. I just did not care what happened to anyone.

Enjoyment: 4/10. Essay value: 6/10.

Northanger Abbey — Austen

My least favourite Austen and the disappointment stung, because I love Austen. The problem is that it is a Gothic parody, and by the time I read it I had already read the actual Gothic novels and loved them sincerely. Being gently mocked for that was not the experience I wanted.

Catherine is sweet. It is still the one I would reread last.

Enjoyment: 5/10. Essay value: 6/10.

Gulliver's Travels — Jonathan Swift

Not my thing. The first two voyages are genuinely enjoyable and then it becomes an increasingly bleak argument with humanity that I found exhausting rather than bracing. Impressive. Relentless. Not something I would return to.

Enjoyment: 4/10. Essay value: 7/10.

William Dunbar — poetry

Nah. Not for me. I gave it a fair go and it never opened up. Middle Scots on top of medieval verse forms was a wall I did not get over, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Enjoyment: 3/10. Essay value: 5/10.

The Canterbury Tales — Chaucer

The toughest time I had at university, full stop. Not because it is bad, and I want to be careful here, because Chaucer is obviously extraordinary. But Middle English is a language you are learning while also being assessed on your literary analysis of it, and doing both at once nearly broke me.

I got through it. I do not think I ever properly read it.

Enjoyment: 3/10. Essay value: 7/10.

Three patterns I did not notice until I wrote this list

I am a Gothic person and I did not know it. Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Monk, The Woman in White, and even Dracula, which I complained about and still gave a decent essay score. My top tier is almost entirely one tradition. Nobody sat me down and told me this. I picked modules more or less at random and my taste organised itself behind my back. It also explains Northanger Abbey completely: I was never going to enjoy a parody of the thing I loved sincerely.

Medieval was the wall, and it was the language, not the books. Chaucer, Kempe, and Dunbar sit at the bottom of this list together. That is not three bad texts. That is one skill I never got good enough at. If I did the degree again I would take the Middle English seriously in first year instead of treating it as an obstacle to get past.

I am not a play girl, and yet. A Doll's House and Cloud Nine both landed properly, and Macbeth and The Tempest are among the highest scores here. The only play I bounced off entirely was Earnest. So the thing I have been saying about myself for three years is, on the evidence, just not true.

Which is probably the real answer to "was it any good." Most of it was. Some of it was not. And the whole point of the reading list was that I did not get to choose, which meant I found out things about my own taste that I would never have discovered on my own.

I would still like a formal apology from Bram Stoker about the train times.