It's our last post of the year - and sadly, at the end of this term, we're saying goodbye to lots of people, including Head of Classics Miss Waterfield, and Colet Fellows Mr Rao and Miss Henry, who very kindly paused in the middle of their packing to answer the book blog's leavers' questionnaire.
What were you reading when you were a teenager?
Miss Waterfield: A mixture really. Some of the ones I remember are: Robin Hobb, Patrick Rothfuss, William Gibson, Isaac Asimov, etc. for fantasy/sci-fi; Allende and Garcia Marquez when I was going through a South American phase; the Brontes, Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, etc. for romance; in historical fiction, Gillian Bradshaw, Rosemary Sutcliff, Judith Merkle Riley, Elizabeth Chadwick, Dorothy Dunnett (while doing my scholarship exams, which was a bit of a distraction!), and Pamela Belle.
I remember my English teacher despairing of my reading taste and giving me what she considered good books (The Color Purple, Brideshead Revisited, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye…) – I read them all dutifully, and liked only one (Brideshead), from which I concluded that a) you should read what you like when you like it, b) tastes change. I recently read Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, because of the tv series, which I also read as a teenager – I hated it then, but was blown away by it now.
Mr Rao: My very first high school reading assignment was the first chapter of The Source by James Michener. I liked it so much I read the whole book.
Miss Henry: I had a phase around 16 where I read a lot of American history nonfiction. I remember reading a book on George Washington’s war tactics in the Revolutionary War, and the biography of Alexander Hamilton that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write Hamilton.
I also unapologetically loved (and still love) the Twilight series.
