birds ate my face

@jolselin let me reply in a post so i can have some thinking space!

(just a side note this is very funny to me because i thought that the way literature is taught in czech schools was normal and then i went on to study in the UK and i couldnt believe they were just making all of us read the same book at the same time haha. like we had to read the stranger which is a very short book and they made us read like one chapter each week and then we were supposed to discuss it at class and to me it felt like such a waste of time... like i could just read it and write an essay about it and submit it and be done with it, instead of dragging it out like this...) anyways!

czech structure of literature classes is, i would say a bit more complex. it is required for you to have an overview of world literature (western canon im not gonna lie) and also specifically czech literature. now because obviously that is a huge amount of books it is not required for you to read them all but you are required to know "about them" as in i have never read 100 years of solitude but i can tell you country of origin, author, genre, rough publishing date, characters, main themes and topics & why the book is important. also if you show me an excerpt from the book i would be able to say yep, thats 100 years of solitude.

this is how we learn about most books. we often get excerpts when we're learning about tropes a styles etc, sometimes we talk about something in depth etc but you are never really required to actually read it (unless lets say its a poem from a collection of poems).

in order to pass the final exam you choose your list of 20 from "the canon" and it is expected that you have read these books and can talk about them in depth. i have never taken a literature exam for uni but i expect its structured in a similar way. like honestly i dont think its necessary to read the entire book if you need to identify something in an excerpt & also it is just expected that people will know the main topics and plot points of most books from the western canon.

12. did you enjoy any compulsory high school readings?

there are no compulsory books in czech high schools, you get a list of like 100(?) books and you need to pick 20 (?) from different categories. but i did enjoy a lot of recommended books throughout HS, im big on classics... dostoyevsky, tolstoy, many poetry books, victor hugo etc and so on... i still come back to the list when im looking for book recs tbh

20. what are things you look for in a book?