Classics Spin #6!

By -
It's everyone's favorite time again!  The Classics Spin is run by the Classics Club, and they'll publish the lucky number on Monday.  I have to put up a list of 20 books, so here they are:
  1. Marlowe: Faustus and one other play.
  2. Confucius, China, 551-479 BCE. The Analects.
  3. Baldwin, James, 1953,  Go Tell It On the Mountain.
  4. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five. 
  5. John Donne, Divine Meditations
  6. Murasaki Shikubu, Japan, ca. 990.The Tale of Genji.(abridged)
  7. Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy.
  8. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.  
  9. Mohandas Gandhi, India, 1928. My Experiments with Truth.
  10. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Time of the Hero (or another work).
  11.  Meshack Asare, Sosu's Call.
  12.  Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum
  13. Anthony Trollope, 1864, The Small House at Allington. 
  14. Italo Calvino, 1979, If on a winter's night a traveller 
  15. Junichio Tanizaki, Japan, 1943. The Makioka Sisters 
  16. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews.
  17. Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy, vol. 1
  18.  Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country.
  19.  Chaim Potok, 1972, My Name is Asher Lev.
  20.  Thomas Mann, Germany, 1924. The Magic Mountain.
It's like rolling a d20!

Some of these are titles I'm looking forward to, some are scary, and some I know nothing about!  As always, The Makioka Sisters is on the list, which probably guarantees that 15 will not get picked.  I'm just going to keep putting it on there until I read it.

If you are not a CC member, why not join us in a literary game of roulette?  Your odds are way better than they are in Vegas!

Comments

  1. CleoMay 5, 2014 at 9:21 PM

    Ah, I can't believe it. There is only one book that I'm not familiar with on your list: Sosu's Call. You usually have me puzzled over a few of them.

    I got The Custom of the Country and The Small House at Allington on my spin list, too. It's unusual that my picks correspond to anyone else's.

    If you get If On A Winter's Night A Traveler and want to do a buddy read, let me know. I stalled on it in January and need some sort of motivation to continue …… either a buddy read or a cattle prod …. ;-)

    I loved My Name is Asher Lev. Have you read any others by Potok? He's a wonderful writer.

    Good luck with your spin, Jean!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanMay 5, 2014 at 9:38 PM

    I don't know anything about Sosu's Call. I wanted some African titles for my CC list way back when I made it, and I found some list of the 100 best African titles and took the first 12. My rule is that I have to read at least 6, in case I can't find a couple or something. So far I've only read two or three of them and they've been pretty good.

    There are also some German titles I know nothing of. My brother recommended them.

    I've read The Chosen, and that's all. I want to read the sequel to that too. And a buddy read for If on a winter's night would probably be a really good idea!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sam (Tiny Library)May 6, 2014 at 12:27 PM

    I've not read any of these, but I hope you get a book you are excited to start...

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousMay 7, 2014 at 6:06 AM

    I've only read a few of these. Such an unusual list.

    ReplyDelete
  5. BronaMay 8, 2014 at 4:27 AM

    If no. 4 spins up we will read Slaughterhouse 5 together. I may need a helping hand, as I started it several years ago and gave up!

    I will post my list in the next or 2 - good luck :-)

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousMay 8, 2014 at 6:36 PM

    I think I only heard of the Makioka sisters last year, but it's definitely one on my general to-list even if it's not on my original classics club list.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more