Heh, trust me not to have noticed the distinction between art and writing. Nothing my snobby intellectual mind makes could be described as visceral.
UK is a good guess, but not quite it. Make another try. I think science in your school became advanced earlier than mine: by ninth we'd learned the basics of 1-d motion, most of the fundamental measures (of work, force, electricity, and the rest), basic carbohydrate theory and a general idea of lie processes, but in tenth we advanced barely, if at all, from there. Where were you at that grade? Computer science interests me in a theoretical way because it has so much to do with hard, introspective information processing -- this is literally the single crutch that keeps us dominant as human beings, and it's our only hope for becoming more sustainable dominators in the future (besides being the only thing I can do properly). I don't know how that translates to practical computer programming, however; I will learn basic C++ this year.
At the same time, when art comes along -- screw everything else. Let us be useless and proud of it, you and I, like Oscar Wilde.
I hadn't realised how precise the idea of good art is in comparison to good writing, but it makes sense. An object can be defined and analyzed, but a concept: that lies in a range from infinity to infinity, where anything and everything can be originated, and which follows only the ideas of smoothness and clarity that we impose almost arbitrarily on the thing. I have tried systematically explaining the mechanics of good prose to myself. Tried many times; failed just as many.
I read too few children's books, i'z a pity. There really is nothing in my bookshelf for children besides the Hobbit; I never got around to figuring out Narnia; I had to read so much of other writers' interest in fairy tales before I developed my own interest. Generally though I'll pull up a misshapen list I gave to some community or the other. I include comics because they are excellent at being stories, which is the important thing.
"Anything and everything Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, or William Blake (and I haven't even read that last one). The Children's Book, AS Byatt. I like what I've read of Tolstoy. The Plague by Camus. Do I even need to put Shakespeare? Alan Moore's comics, Neil Gaiman's comic. The Discworld Series. 1984, Animal Farm, Faust (Goethe). Arthur Clarke's stories, the Foundation series. Tolkien's epics. Homer's epics. Oh, and Scott Pilgrim."