Classics Club Spin #7

The Classics Club is giving all participants another nudge to read some of the books we have on our lists. I’m still making my way through the book I got through the last spin (Canterbury Tales) but since the challenge for spin number 7 doesn’t have to be completed until October, I figure I have plenty of time to complete the task.

The rules are:

• by next Monday, August 11, 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.)
• 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 October 1.

I’m not playing exactly by the rules since I don’t see the point of having any books on my list that I am dreading – that would be like being forced to swallow medicine rather than chocolate.  ISince 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:

1. Candide – Voltaire 1759
2. Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith 1766
3. Evelina – Frances Burney 1778
4. Mansfield Park  – Jane Austen 1814
5. Old Gariot – Honore Balzac 1835
6. Washington Square/Daisy Miller – Henry James 1880
7. The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner 1883
8. The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith 1888
9. The Invisible Man – H G Wells 1897
10. The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers 1903
11. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad 1904
12. The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf 1915
13. Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton 1920
14. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf 1925
15. The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf 1927
16. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
17. Silent Spring – Rachel Carson 1962
18. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov 1967
19. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1985
20. Half a Yellow Sun- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2006