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Top 10 books about boarding school | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I didn't attend boarding school, and I have read only one of these — Decline and Fall — and for some reason never thought of that as being primarily about boarding school. I just thought it was very funny. So, when Brideshead Revisited was on the list of novels I was supposed to read over the summer for a course that fall in the modern novel, that was the first one I chose to read, since I figured it would be funny as hell. I still remember pausing after reading for maybe 45 minutes or so and saying out loud to myself, "This is the saddest book I have ever read." It also turned out to be one of the greatest.
Odd that The Complete Stalky and Co. is available in the Oxford World Classics series yet is omitted here.
ReplyDeleteIt took a moment to find, but the moment paid off richly: one of the titles retrieved by a search on Kipling was The Oxford Book of Social Exclusion. It seems a book that someone needs, but who?