This blog is completely inspired by The Classics Club ….I am not sure why I venture into these challenges, considering I fail most of the time….I mean I am not a person who really thrives on short notices or deadlines! I felt really weird writing the last sentence, I mean the other me – you know the ‘Project Manager’ me – the Corporate wheeler-dealer me, really thrives and succeeds on deadlines and pressure tactics; in fact the tighter the leash, the better I will succeed. But when it comes to this me – you know the blogging-reading round the clock-with clueless love live-talking endless nonsense me, well, I just so badly fail. I could not complete the NaNoWriMo; I could not complete any of reading challenges, though as God be my witness, I read enough, so this me – the one I consider the real me, does not come out gloriously in these events. So why do it again – like knowingly set yourself for a fall? Well I guess, you cannot teach an old dog new tricks – if there is a cliff, I will climb to the very top of it, only to fall head long!! Yeah! Yeah!! I know I will live through this!
Anyway after all the procrastination, I amble back to the main subject. So The Classics Club has a Spin list – what one does is, list 20 classics in a random order. They could be a list of books you love reading or never finished or dread starting. On Monday, 18th February, The Classics Club will announce a number – whatever number is declared, you read the book that you have marked against this number by April 1st 2013. The ideal list is of course a mix of all the above – books you love, books you have been planning to read forever, but never got down to it and naturally, books that you absolutely dread and so on and so forth.
Therefore without any more ado, I present my list –
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Great Expectation by Charles Dickens
- North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
- The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
- To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Madam Bovary by Gustav Flaubert
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- The Moonstone by Willkie Collins
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- Wives and Daughter by Elizabeth Gaskell
I love Austen, Swift and really want to read Gaskell, Burgess and Collins. I shudder at the thought of Woolf or Eliot – never quite developed a taste for them. I have been planning to go back to Flaubert for some time – especially since my sister told me to read closely in the details, because apparently, the beauty of the book lies in those minute details. The same holds true of Anna Karenina – did not like it the first couple of times I read it, but since reading Stefanie’s thoughts on the book, I have been curious to give it another try, though War and Peace remains my favorite Tolstoy book and would love to go over it again!
To end, I am waiting with bated breath for the number draw – again, I wonder why I am doing this? But maybe this time because of the contest, I will have the patience to finish The Awakening and in my mind list, it would be one down! 😉
Mockingbirds, Looking Glasses & Prejudices... 
You’ve got some good books on your list! For not being a fan of Woolf or Eliot you picked their two most famous and most difficult books. Good luck with the challenge, I hope whichever one you read ends up being a marvelous experience 🙂
Thank You! I need all the pep that I can get…Woolf has always been on my oh!-so-don’t-make-me-go-through-it list…but after your reccomendations– I might give it a go…reagardless whether it gets picked in the club # or not!
What a great challenge! I just might have to compile my own list of classics that I want or otherwise feel compelled to read. As for Flaubert, your sister is right. I read Madame Bovary a couple of years ago and found some passages or even just a sentence here or there breathtaking. The story overall was good but not exceptionally so, in my opinion, but his descriptions of what drove her and how she surrendered herself to the notion of being in love stuck with me.
I read Jane Eyre for the first time last year and fell completely and utterly in love with it. Oh, and The Awakening! It might have been my state of mind at the time, but as I read it (in my late 20s) I was entirely absorbed by the descriptions of the sea and the summer heat and Edna’s inner turmoil over the emotional awakening she experiences. I remember thinking how amazing it is that I could read something in 2008 (or thereabouts) and identify so much with something a woman wrote in 1899.
Have fun reading! 🙂
A big thank you for all the motivation…I so need it! You know between you and my sister and some other supporters, I feel like I will end up liking Madame Bovary this time round! I read it like in my teens so, thats very differnt from the woman I am now and I am excited (thanks in huge chunks to you) to start all over again with this book at a different age and stage in my life. I think I will give both Eyre and Awakening a shot again. In fact thanks to you and Stefanie, i will also take up Woolf and Eliot…just keep egging me on now and then! 🙂