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:
- Candide – Voltaire 1759
- Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith 1766
- Evelina – Frances Burney 1778
- Mansfield Park – Jane Austen 1814
- Old Gariot – Honore Balzac 1835
- 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
- Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
- Silent Spring – Rachel Carson 1962
- The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov 1967
- Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1985
- Half a Yellow Sun- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2006