No, it's shiny! I like to meet new people. They've all got stories...

Kaylee ,'Serenity'


Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.

There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."

First Previous Recent

JenP - Jul 24, 2026 8:05:48 am PDT #28724 of 28733

I am trying to remember books we studied en masse. For sure the Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, Heart of Darkness, and several Shakespeare plays and sonnets. I had four years of HS so there must have been more. Then all the books we chose on our own for book reports, of course. Oh, we did read Wuthering Heights as one. I don't think any Austen, though. Lots of short stories one semester -- that was a fun semester. I remember The Lottery the most vividly. I remember studying some of the Canterbury Tales. It's all a blur!


-t - Jul 24, 2026 8:13:38 am PDT #28725 of 28733
I am a woman of various inclinations and only some of the time are they to burn everything down in frustration

I think we maybe read one Canterbury Tale? A Shakespeare play every year, except for 10th grade when we did American lit


JenP - Jul 24, 2026 8:24:34 am PDT #28726 of 28733

Oh, yeah, that's right - one Shakespeare per year might have been how we did it, too.


meara - Jul 24, 2026 8:38:13 am PDT #28727 of 28733

Yep, same here, Shakespeare every year except American lit year. And no Austen or Bronte for sure.


-t - Jul 24, 2026 9:06:06 am PDT #28728 of 28733
I am a woman of various inclinations and only some of the time are they to burn everything down in frustration

OK, I acquired Grendel on libro and realized I already had a copy of Bea Wolf so I bumped that up in the queue but I also got two of trungles' comics out of the library. This is why my TBR pile, while mostly existing only as electronic ephemera, will still manage to physically crush me at some point and possibly compress us all into a singularity


Jessica - Jul 24, 2026 9:14:58 am PDT #28729 of 28733
And then Ortus came and said "It's Ortin' time" and they all Orted off into the sunset

I can't remember if I read Jane Eyre for school or fun. (Maybe both? I read a lot of books for fun as a kid that were later assigned in school.)


Laura - Jul 24, 2026 2:36:19 pm PDT #28730 of 28733
Our wings are not tired.

The nuns always gave us a summer reading list of maybe 40-50 titles and we were supposed to read 10 over the summer break. I always read all of them. I devoured books as a kid. I don't read nearly as fast anymore. My ability to retain absolutely anything I read was just as bad back then as it is now so I could reread all of them without a clue as to what happens next. It would have been nice to keep track of what I read back then and rate them as we do now.


Calli - Jul 25, 2026 5:50:03 am PDT #28731 of 28733
I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul—Calvin and Hobbs

I’m pretty sure I didn’t read Austen or any of the Brontës in high school. Or even college, although that was because I took as many poetry and play-focused courses as possible. They were generally shorter than novels, and college was my first experience with an active social life/ interpersonal drama, which was time-consuming.


Laura - Jul 25, 2026 7:24:43 am PDT #28732 of 28733
Our wings are not tired.

The only Lit class I took in college I ended up dropping because there were just not enough hours in the day to read with working full time and pursuing a BS in Accounting. I foolishly thought taking that class would justify time for reading fiction but that was fantasy. When I finally did graduate I spent months devouring novels after not having the spoons to do so for so long.


aurelia - Jul 26, 2026 2:35:07 pm PDT #28733 of 28733
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story. Tell me a story.

Senior year included Johnny Got His Gun, Hamlet, The Bell Jar, and Les Miserables. Frosh or soph year included Romeo and Juliet and Lord of the Flies but I don't remember any others. I think Jr year was split between world lit and contemporary writing. I remember Siddartha, A Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, and readings from the Odyssey. I got to Austen and the Brontes on my own.


First Previous Recent