Back to the Classics 2018 - Wrap Up Post

I've completed the Back to the Classics challenge, hosted by Books and Chocolate, for another year, and it never fails to stretch me out of my comfort zone. I read some beauties this year, although it kept my total number of books completed lower than normal since some of them are so massively thick. (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and Moby Dick.) Once again, I've ticked off all 12 categories, and here they are.


A Nineteenth Century Classic - David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

A Twentieth Century Classic - Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

A Classic by a Woman - Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

A Classic in Translation - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

A Children's Classic - Pat of Silver Bush by L.M. Montgomery

A Classic Crime Story - Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Classic Travel or Journey Narrative - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

A Classic with a single-word title - Emma by Jane Austen

A Classic with a colour in the title - Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy

A Classic by an Author that's new to you - The Napoleon of Notting Hillby G.K Chesterton

A Classic that scares you - Moby Dick by Herman Melville

A re-read of a favourite Classic - The Children of the New Forest by Captain Frederick Marryat


Last year I awarded medals to my best three picks from the list, and thought I'd do the same again, with the only three 5-star reads on the list.

Bronze Medal - Pat of Silver Bush
I adore this story because it's so full of everyday magic and the beauty of living a quiet, simple life. It's a perfect cure for the sort of depression that comes from thinking your life doesn't measure up to some arbitrary standard. It also has one of my favourite young L.M. Montgomery heroes, Jingle Gordon.



Silver Medal - Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy kept the characters' personal epiphanies coming thick and fast enough for me to keep turning pages, and they're the sorts of insights we can adopt for our own lives too. I think Konstantin Levin was the character who nudged this up among the best reads of the year for me.



Gold Medal - Wives and Daughters
This has got to be up top, because it holds so much of what makes the Victorian era a joy to look back on for those of us who never lived through it (and that's all of us, of course). It's perfect in its balance of subtle, nuanced characterisation and the buzz of what was going on, such as scientific discoveries by the likes of Charles Darwin. No Victorian novel has made me feel I might have been there as much as this one.



Looking over this list, I think my three stand-outs might all share the simple satisfaction of enjoying ordinary lives, and that probably reveals a fair bit about me, the reader, too. Now, bring on next year!