In Reading Lessons, the author takes 16 key texts (a mix of poems, plays and novels) and in each chapter examines her relationship with them. How she first discovered them, what they meant to her and how her views have changed over the years. She explains in some depth how she approaches the texts in her classes and asks the students to ponder how each is relevant to their lives and society at large. She proposes the argument (and I agree with her) how important English Literature is important for a well rounded education. It teaches how to be more discerning, how complex humans can be, how to understand subtext, to be empathetic etc Reading Lessons is a love letter to literature and now I have a new list of wonderful texts to explore.

As someone who had complicated feelings about school and English, I was intrigued to see how I would feel reading a book about all the boring books I read and studied in school. Will this change my thoughts about any of the books? Will it make me appreciate my English classes more? Overall, yes. I thoroughly enjoyed dissecting these stories and learning that we can still learn something from these texts even today many years/decades/centuries later. While in school I hated analysing texts, now as an adult and a bookseller who reviews and promotes books for a living, I love diving in and seeing what I can take away or notice from a story. I liked looking at these texts from different lenses and I enjoyed hearing all the anecdotes that Atherton shared about her time in the classroom both when she was a student and as a teacher. My favourite section had to be the one on A Kestral for a Knave. It nearly had me crying on my commute home!

Dedicating each chapter to must-read novels or ones almost every English Literature student knows/needs to know, Carol Atherton shows through her 30-year career the importance of seeing a novel, novella, poem, play, etc. as more than just its plot or space in time. From an English Lit student's perspective, Reading Lessons is a must-read for anyone wanting to see how to analyse books and listen to not only a teacher but also points and input from Atherton's past students. I thoroughly enjoyed Atherton's book, as it looks at some of my favourite pieces of literature but also helped me see some others in new lights, making me want to go back and re-read them with these new perspectives. I highly recommend Reading Lessons to any Literature student out there who want to see classics (both classical, modern and contemporary pieces) in new lights. Thank you, NetGalley and Penguin General UK for sending me an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Every couple of years the subject of school texts comes up and the overarching question is whether they are still relevant. In this book, Carol Atherton explains that they are and goes into great detail to say how and why that is the case. In the introduction there are quotes that I recognise from the books I read at school. Not only that, but I remember the context and how I felt about them at the time and how I feel about them now. There are many that I re-read as an adult as I thought that perhaps I didn't fully appreciate them at the time. But they have stayed with me all of my life. Atherton has included her own life and introduction to the literature, so in part this is autobiographical. As a pupil she studied the same books. She became an English teacher in a secondary school and gives anecdotal instances of interactions with her students. But the emphasis is on the books and why they are important, as displayed by the organisation of the chapters: each is a theme very pertinent to our modern lives. With chapter titles such as 'On gaining a voice', 'On not fitting in', 'On power, gender and control', 'On not being enough' and 'On seeing things differently' it is easy to see why these classics are still as important today as they ever were. The author is keen to point out that these works serve to act as 'mirrors to the world', to start discussion, expand our minds and not tell us what to do or think. There is a real love of literature and learning here and I can almost hear her taking a lesson, such is the detail of the analysis. Current, readable, essential. So the next time some kind of expert questions why our children should be reading Dickens, Steinbeck or Bronte, show them this book. You know we're right.

I'm just going to say, as someone who hasn't touched English literature since my GCSE days, I would've been sitting here with an English degree right now had I read this book when I was younger.