Classics Spin #8!

Time for another Spin at the Classics Club!  Oh I just love these.  The rules:

• Go to your blog.
• Pick twenty books that you’ve got left to read from your Classics Club List.
• Try to challenge yourself: list five you are dreading/hesitant to read, five you can’t WAIT to read, five you are neutral about, and five free choice (favorite author, rereads, ancients — whatever you choose.)
• Post that list, numbered 1-20, on your blog by next Monday.
• Monday morning, we’ll announce a number from 1-20. Go to the list of twenty books you posted, and select the book that corresponds to the number we announce.
• The challenge is to read that book by January 5, even if it’s an icky one you dread reading! (No fair not listing any scary ones!)

Here's my list, arranged suitably randomly:

1. Chaim Potok, 1972, My Name is Asher Lev.
2.  Pensees, Pascal
3. Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy.
4. Divine Meditations, John Donne
5. Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum
6.  Mohandas Gandhi, My Experiments with Truth
7.  Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
8. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,  Faust. 
9.  Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat.
10.  Confucius, The Analects.
11. Moa Martinson, Women and Appletrees.
12.  Murasaki Shikubu, The Tale of Genji (abridged).
13. “The Crucible,” Miller
14.  Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy
15. Shakespeare:  Henry V
16. Junichio Tanizaki,  The Makioka Sisters
17.  Cesar Vallejo, Los Heraldos Negros
18.  John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
19. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Time of the Hero or another work. 
20. Feodor Dostoevsky, Russia, Brothers Karamazov

 

Roll that D20 and pick a title!

There are a whole lot of scary titles on this list, to be honest.  Henry James--scary because really really long.  Pascal--scary because I have no idea what I'd be getting into.  Dostoevsky: scary because super-long and I'm a little full of Russian lit anyway.  Mahfouz--have you seen the Cairo Trilogy?  I've been giving serious thought to switching that title out for something by the same guy, but shorter.  Anything by anyone Spanish--just scary.  Grass--Tin Drum is long and guaranteed to be strange.

At the same time, there are some titles I'd like to put on the list but can't because I haven't yet figured out how to get them.  The Australian lit I listed doesn't seem to be held at any libraries nearby--there's got to be a way to get them, I just haven't put enough time into it yet--otherwise I would put them on and count them for the Australian lit event that I couldn't join because reality got in the way.  I thought about putting the Dream of the Red Chamber on, but I need to order it for work and I haven't actually done that yet (we have two works of criticism but not the actual text--odd).  I actually have ordered Mia Couto's Sleepwalking Land (to my great surprise, Mia Couto is not a black African woman, but a white Portuguese-African man) but I don't know if it will show up in time.  And some titles are just so extremely long and medieval or otherwise heavy-duty that there's no way I could read them in the time.