Monday, June 30, 2014

The ten best boarding school books

James Browning is a spokesman and chief strategist for Common Cause, a government watchdog group. He attended Brown University and has an M.A from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. His new novel is The Fracking King.

One of the author's ten best boarding school books, as shared at Publishers Weekly:
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The word cloud for this brilliant, subtle, and subversive novel could fool you into thinking the whole thing was a bland student handbook or the Hailsham School’s novel-length appeal for money from its alumni. Narrator Kathy H. (the possibility that “H.” may be her entire last name is an early clue to the school’s true purpose) talks lovingly of the “donations” made by her friends and, without irony, says that a student giving his life in service of the school is “completing.” One of the best books I’ve ever read, a 1984 for the bioengineering age.
Read about the other entries on the list.
 
Never Let Me Go is on Jason Allen Ashlock and Mink Choi's top ten list of tragic love stories, Allegra Frazier's list of seven characters whose jobs are worse than yours, Shani Boianjiu's list of five top novels about coming of age, Karen Thompson Walker's list of five top "What If?" books, Lloyd Shepherd's top ten list of weird histories, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best men writing as women in literature and ten of the best sentences as titles.

Also see Robin Stevens's top ten boarding school stories.

--Marshal Zeringue