Musing Monday...School Days, Dear Old Golden Rule Days...

School days, school days,
Dear old golden rule days.
Readin' and 'ritin' and 'rithmetic,
Taught to the tune of the hick'ry stick.

This week's questions is inspired by the fact that our host, Rebecca from Just one more page, is starting a new teaching job, so she is taking us back to our school days...

Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about your bookshelf…
What books did you read while in school? Were there any that you particular liked, or even hated? Did any become lifelong favourites?

Now, in my defense, let me begins my saying that my school days were decades..several decades...ago. So my memory is a wee bit hazy. I am not at all sure of what I was reading in grammar school. I know I was reading. I remember all those trips to the library, one of my fav-or-ite places in the world,as I have recounted here before. But what books, what sorts of books, I really don't remember. What I do know is that I seem to have bypassed many of the books that are considered children's classics.

On the other hand, I do know that I developed a insatiable taste for mysteries. I know that before I was in high school I was working my way through Agatha Christie, Nero Wolf and the Complete Sherlock Holmes. That is a predilection that continues to this day. Push come to shove, my go to comfort books are mysteries, from English cozies to serial killers on the loose and everything in between.

Now it was in high school that I think I was first introduced to the classics and those books that many consider essential reading for a well read person. We studied them in school and we had to read them in the summer. The summer reading list...and I don't mean the two or three books that I have seen at some schools these days. I mean a list..maybe a dozen books per summer in my memory. Gosh, I wish I had those lists now.

I don't remember hating any of them. So I'm not sure if I really did not hate any, or I actually just don't remember. ;-)
But as to books I loved, oh, that is another story! I know for a fact one of them was To Kill a Mockingbird, still one of my favorite books of all time. Then there was Edith Hamilton's Mythology, a book that, for some reason, I now have three copies of. Another was The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton, one that is on my all time best list. And of course Catcher In The Rye the book that set me off on a brief Salinger obsession. Not serial killer Catcher In the Rye Obsession...book reader obsession. Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction..read them all
And Lord of The Rings...not sure that one was required and in fact, I think it is too long to have been on the list, but I know I read it for the first time in high school ..and then set off on a little Tolkien obsession. The Hobbit, Leaf by Niggle, Smith of Wootton Major, Farmer Giles of Ham, I read them all. You might notice a pattern to my reading habits. When I found an author I liked, I read as much of their work that I could find. But that was in the golden years, when I didn't have other distractions like earning a living and mowing the grass. I don't have time to be quite as obsessed these days.

I did a lot of reading in high school.

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