Comments on: Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.27: Best and Worst of Fictional Schools and Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall https://readingtheend.com/2014/08/20/reading-the-end-bookcast-ep-27-best-and-worst-of-fictional-schools-and-nathan-filers-the-shock-of-the-fall/ before I read the middle Thu, 01 Feb 2018 19:22:14 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.2 By: Marriage Material, Sathnam Sanghera - Reading the End https://readingtheend.com/2014/08/20/reading-the-end-bookcast-ep-27-best-and-worst-of-fictional-schools-and-nathan-filers-the-shock-of-the-fall/#comment-29882 Fri, 01 Jul 2016 10:00:26 +0000 http://readingtheend.com/?p=5795#comment-29882 […] hence when it was early 2014 and I was choosing The Shock of the Fall to read for podcast, I was also excited by the notion of this book Marriage Material, a comic novel about a man called […]

]]> By: Christy https://readingtheend.com/2014/08/20/reading-the-end-bookcast-ep-27-best-and-worst-of-fictional-schools-and-nathan-filers-the-shock-of-the-fall/#comment-20997 Sun, 07 Sep 2014 21:48:01 +0000 http://readingtheend.com/?p=5795#comment-20997 I loved the depiction of the kids at the one-room schoolhouse in Ivan Doig’s The Whistling Season. It’s like you mentioned in the podcast – all these kids stuck together due to geography, and they manage to more or less get along. I also liked the depiction of school in Claudine at School. It was a laissez-faire atmosphere with teachers having affairs with each other, but there is this great part where they have to travel to another town to take their exams, and everyone is nervous, and there’s some unexpected camaraderie among the classmates who are usually annoying each other.

I haven’t minded the Harry Potter mentions. If you ever decide that you mention it too much, you can do what the Filmspotting podcast does – they started putting films they loved into the “Pantheon” – which meant those films were then ineligible for their regular Top 5 feature. Otherwise, they felt they would keep mentioning the same films over and over for that feature. http://www.filmspotting.net/top-5/pantheon.html

]]> By: Ela https://readingtheend.com/2014/08/20/reading-the-end-bookcast-ep-27-best-and-worst-of-fictional-schools-and-nathan-filers-the-shock-of-the-fall/#comment-20884 Fri, 05 Sep 2014 14:54:19 +0000 http://readingtheend.com/?p=5795#comment-20884 Gosh, yes there are a lot of awful British boarding schools in fiction! I am unlike you and Whiskey Jenny since I would not have wanted to go to Hogwarts, but that’s maybe because I read Harry Potter as an (ostensible) adult. When I was kid I wanted to go to Malory Towers (Enid Blyton), though again, now, I probably would have hated the lack of privacy and the cliquishness (I mean, my own school was quite cliquey, but you could go home in the evening).

The school in Agatha Christie’s CAT AMONG THE PIGEONS sounds really good (though since it’s not primarily a school story we don’t learn much about what it’s like in classes). The most realistic school in children’s fiction that I can think of is Kingscote in Antonia Forest’s books about the Marlow family, but very few people even in the UK have read her books: it’s realistic but neither does it sound like a horrible place to spend your formative years.

]]> By: 3 fictional schools I definitely don’t want to go to - Here There Be Books https://readingtheend.com/2014/08/20/reading-the-end-bookcast-ep-27-best-and-worst-of-fictional-schools-and-nathan-filers-the-shock-of-the-fall/#comment-20652 Thu, 28 Aug 2014 11:59:47 +0000 http://readingtheend.com/?p=5795#comment-20652 […] House from Witch Week. Jenny mentioned this school in the newest Reading the End podcast (where I got the idea for this post!); it is a school for witch children and troublemakers in an […]

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