The rules are:
- by next Monday, May 12, list any twenty books left to read from our Classics Club list. They could be five Classics Club books 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.)
- On May 12, the Classics Club hosts will announce a number from 1 through 20.
- The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on our Spin List, by July 7.
I’ve taken a slightly different approach from the one suggested in order to get to my spin list. My version doesn’t involve making any choices! Since my list is in order of publication date, I simply took the first five, the last five and ten from the middle.
Admittedly, there are some here that I might not be thrilled at the prospect of reading but I wouldn’t dread them if they came up. I don’t really understand the point of listing a book that you’re dreading reading – the Classics Club is meant to be fun, not the equivalent of taking medicine.
Here’s my list:
- Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer c1380
- Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe 1719
- Candide – Voltaire 1759
- Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith 1766
- Evelina – Frances Burney 1778
- Washington Square/Daisy Miller – Henry James 1880
- The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner 1883
- The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith 1888
- The Invisible Man – H G Wells 1897
- The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers 1903
- Nostromo – Joseph Conrad 1904
- The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf 1915
- Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton 1920
- Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf 1925
- The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf 1927
- Silent Spring – Rachel Carson 1962
- The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov 1967
- Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1985
- The Infinite Plan – Isabel Allende 1991
- Half a Yellow Sun- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2006