Classics Spin #14

By -
It's time for another Classics Spin, yippee!  If you're not familiar with it, head on over to their page for an explanation.  I'm really running into trouble these days, because if you don't count the two giant, slow books I already have going, I only have sixteen more titles on my CC list.  I'm supposed to read them all by next March, and I'm not at all sure that I'm going to manage it, but I'm going to give it a good try.


As I've come to the end of the list, I've also had to trade out a few titles that weren't really working out, especially in the Latin American section, which I knew nothing about in the first place and don't know much more about now.  I think I have a slightly better handle on those now, though (actually I have a bunch of modern titles on my TBR, but what constitutes a classic is still tricky for me).  So here we go--the sixteen CC titles I haven't read yet, with four random selection repeated to make 20:

  1. William Faulkner, US, 1929. Light in August.
  2.  Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams
  3. Carl Sandburg, 1940, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
  4. Thomas Mann, Germany, 1924. The Magic Mountain.
  5. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
  6. Pope St. Gregory I, Pastoral Care 
  7. Mario Benedetti, Little Stones at My Window
  8. Berthold Brecht, Germany, 1928. The Threepenny Opera
  9.  Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo
  10. Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol
  11. Lao Tzu, China, ca. 550 BCE. The Tao Te Ching.
  12. Poems of Octavio Paz
  13. Kalidasa, The Loom of Time.
  14. The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela
  15. “A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes,” Frost (1924)
  16. Labyrinth of Solitude, by Octavio Paz
  17.  Carl Sandburg, 1940, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
  18.   Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams 
  19.  Kalidasa, The Loom of Time.
  20.  Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol
 I'm hoping for Glass Menagerie, which I just checked out of the library, or the Gogol stories, which will count for Back to the Classics.  Or Loom of Time, that would be great.  The Magic Mountain is the scariest title on this list.
   


Comments

  1. Karen K.September 29, 2016 at 10:40 AM

    Wow, you have a challenging list! I haven't read a single one of those but I think Gogol would be top of my list, though Threepenny Opera is intriguing. Good luck with your spin pick!

    ReplyDelete
  2. FictionFanSeptember 29, 2016 at 12:57 PM

    Gosh, some tough ones on your list! My pick would be The Glass Menagerie too, I think. Hope you get one you enjoy!

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanSeptember 29, 2016 at 1:10 PM

    That's what happens when your list consists of everything you've put off for nearly 5 years...

    ReplyDelete
  4. CleoSeptember 30, 2016 at 7:16 AM

    I kind of hope you get The Magic Mountain. Is that mean? It wasn't meant to be. ;-) I read it a number of years ago and while I found it somewhat odd, I'd love to hear what you think about it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousSeptember 30, 2016 at 9:25 AM

    I see you're saving the best for last!
    Tenneessee Williams...magnificent plays, I hope you get Glass Menagerie.
    I read John Locke...it is not for the fainthearted. I developed my own reading stragegy just to get through it!
    As Cleo said..Magic Mountain is very good!
    Good reading, good luck!

    ReplyDelete
  6. BronaSeptember 30, 2016 at 6:05 PM

    Fascinating, although I can see why many of them have been left to last on your list!!

    I'm almost finished Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Canadian writer Madeleine Thien(shortlisted for the Booker) which is predominantly set in China, so I wish you the Tai Te Ching this spin :-)

    ReplyDelete
  7. LorySeptember 30, 2016 at 6:06 PM

    Impressive list! I would like to read The Magic Mountain but it's not even on my list. I think I"m going to do a complete overhaul next year.

    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