The only two Dickens novels I have completed are A Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol. What assigned books, if any, had an impact on you?
School Days, School Days
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I can’t remember that far back.
Catcher in the Rye, assigned by Sister Mary Micheal my senior year of high school.
Julius Caesar and The Odyssey- taught me that they were not ” too hard” but instead, delightful.
Animal Farm was when I began to realize that schoolyard brutality never dies.
“What book assigned in college.. ”
Two actually,
“Lord of the Flies” and “The Outsiders.”
“Catholics and Unbelievers in 18th Century France” (RR Palmer). Indirectly steered me to Edmund Burke and the realization that modern liberalism stems from the flippant hedonism of witty mountebanks, not from “philosophy”.
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, even though he despised Poles, Catholics and the West.
I had to suffer through Great Expectations in ninth grade…Pip, Miss Havisham, ugh.
Animal Farm and 1984 only because even back then, some didn’t see the evil of communism or big brother in our class.
Faulkner’s As I LAy Dying made me hate stream of consciousness writing
Macbeth