What sort of age are they, @vero ?
We did Animal Farm at school and I was fine with it. I think it was comprehensible for a 15-16 year old! The others definitely weren’t 
Jack London too I hope.
Première and Terminale so 15 -18 usually. English is one of their 2 compulsory foreign languages.
So that’s what those words meant! Sorry Vero… not needed to know terminology for school years so far
(Correction - I know about CP and CE1 from reading Ratus books with my first French teacher here…)
It isn’t very obvious -
CP, CE1, CE2, CM1, CM2, are primary school (cours préparatoire, elémentaire and moyen respectively)
6ème, 5ème , 4ème , 3ème are collège,
2de, première , terminale are lycée.
You start CP the September of the calendar year you are 6.
It is possible to skip years or to repeat them. My eldest daughter was 15 for Terminale, for example. I have had pupils who were 20.
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You spoil them!
What a varied and impressive list, a far cry from marking O grade essays on ‘Of Mince and Men’ 
I did have good pupils too, though.
I loved my school texts from O level onwards and have fond memories of some of the teachers who brought them to life for us. But we weren’t treated to ANYTHING like that kind of range. Shakespeare, Elliot, Keats, Hardy - that was about it. The rest was up to us, whatever we could lay our hands on, to make what we could of it.
Mentioning Elizabeth Gaskell made me think of David Lodge’s ‘Nice Work’, which is … nice work.
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Skip this if lycée is not your cup of tea!!
@amanda1 we have a fairly short list of set texts for each year (complete works) from which to choose.
There is also themed programme, as long as we can shoehorn a text into it somehow we are completely free to choose what we like.
I tend to swap things around and give my pupils stuff I think they need to read as well as stuff I love and loathe so they can make up their own minds. We read a fair bit of non-fiction as well.
They have a 3 and a half hour written exam in Terminale plus a 20 minute oral, for English as a speciality. They have to discuss a personal dossier they make containing 5 or 6 texts in relation to one of the themes, for the oral. They speak without notes, the dossier contains only un-annotated texts. They are expected to be at B2-C1 level.
Sorry for the digression.
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We did at school, as far as I remember Henry V and 1984. One homework was to critically review 1984. My one sentence was "In the future, things change and shit happens " got away with detention, cane was threatened…
Currently re-reading Red storm rising by Tom Clancy
Usually its Sci-fi or post apocalyptic stuff on kindle unlimited
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Jane Eyre
Aaargh! I’d managed to forget that one (IV form English Lit)…
The remarkable thing is despite all the efforts of the Joint Mariculation Board to deter teenage boys from reading, I consumed contemporary fiction voraciously until about halfway through my doctorate. Since then it’s been nothing, but non-fiction ever since (apart from a brief flirtation with Haruki Murakami).
Yesterday, I wanted to make a slightly snarky reference to early postmodernists’ fondness for ironic use of parody and quotation. I had a dim memory of a book whose title began ‘The Postmodernist Always …’ However, I was certain the author was Jonathan Meades and, in order to avoid bringing up the film in my Google search, I added his name to the search parameters - but nothing all came up.
An hour or so later, while doing an old-fashioned physical search for an entirely different book, I discovered that I’d owned Gilbert Adair’s The Postmodernist Always Ring’s Twice for nearly thirty years. I think it must have sat on the same mental bookshelf as Jane Eyre.
Really need to get out more…
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Ironic rogue apostrophe or freudian typo? Hmmmm what would Lacan and Barthes have to say 
I sometimes have to point out to my pupils that the ideal reading position isn’t always with your head up your arse and that sometimes the curtains just happen to be blue, or whatever.
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My English A Level was a lot of literature,including teaching us ‘ how ‘to read. It was years before I could enjoy a book without dissecting it and reading thing that weren’t there
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No - mixed GS
Goodness I have some work to do with my new 2nd student then 
The whole point of reading is that it is individual. You use your own imagination.
Maybe in fiction the author still has a point to put across, but it is up to you whether you agree or not.
Ah. And there I was thinking, chippily, that we got Jane Eyre because we were girls.
Just make sure you’re home before six!
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Or demonstrating that you shouldn’t proofread your own texts.
To make it worse, when not looking for books yesterday, I was recommending Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves to someone.
For me, Barthes lost all credibilty as a skilled observer of visual culture when, the author of the presciently titledDeath of the Author got run over and killed by a bread delivery van, whereas (as befits a deep thinker) Gilbert Adair died of a brain haemorrhage.
Think things seldom ‘just happen’ to be blue by accident, unless of course, you’ just happen’ to spill some ink.
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They only need to hit B2 if they aren’t specialists. Courage 
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La Mort Li Roi Artu : re-reading it from when I first studied it way back in university (along with a load of other 12th century French literature, including most of the works accredited to Chrétien de Troyes ). Not your everyday read, granted 
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