Simon’s Comments (group member since Dec 12, 2023)

Simon’s comments from the 24 Classics for 2024 group.

Really enjoying it so far. Sometimes it can be a little difficult to know who is talking or making quick comments, but finished Volume 1 earlier today. Totally lost on me in high school, delightful and charming as an adult.

I’m swapping out 100 Years of Solitude for The Brothers Karamazov, I’ve been wanting to read it for some time now and after finishing books like the Count of Monte Cristo and Jane Eyre, I’m going to stay in that time period. I still very much want to read 100 Years, I’ve heard so many good and interesting things about but I think I’ll swap it in for something in the spring or summer time!

I am from North Carolina in the U.S.! Lived here my whole life but enjoy traveling when I can. My fiancé and I just moved so I have fallen a week or two behind where I wanted to be in the reading challenge but hoping to catch back up in the next couple weeks!

I was not expecting the horror language in some passages once she’s in Thornfield! I got to around page 180 yesterday, the third floor and the attic made me go turn on my lights real quick!

Enjoyed/enjoying both books so far! Never had to read either for school and I never ended up seeking them out on my own. Both are enticing in their own way, hoping to finish up Jane Eyre soon.

That’s a good point! I must have missed that portion about the Note. This is not the typical novel that I would read, but I am thoroughly enjoying it so far, and I’m excited to read through Wuthering Heights later on this year.

Jane Eyre is my first Brontë novel as well! 100 pages in, I’m really enjoying her writing style. Her landscape descriptions have some admirable alliteration, and her dialogues are delightful. I’ve noticed she uses a lot of colons, semicolons, and commas to break up her more complicated thoughts and digressions. I’ve found that these require a little bit more concentration to get through, but once you read through it twice, it really opens up the whole page.

**potential spoilers in my last comment**

Ralph seems to me to be the everyman character, he is prideful at first and takes more jabs than necessary in the beginning, but has a humble character arc, tries to keep things fair, and maintains his voice of reason all the way through.

Jack is definitely set up to be Ralph’s foil, he is headstrong, combative, wrathful, marshal, and violent. He embodies a charismatic leader that relies on groupthink and a mob mentality to establish and enforce his power once he has it.

Poor Piggy. I imagined him as the good angel on Ralph’s shoulder, no matter how often he got put down, he always came back and gave virtuous advice. I think the status of his specs represent the mindset of the stranded group. They are functional in the beginning, having to be constantly cleaned and maintained to still work accordingly. The first fight on top of the mountain is where a lens is popped out, and the group is no longer seeing straight, or ‘eye to eye’ literally. Eventually they are stolen and broken altogether, leaving Piggy blind and stumbling, just as the kids are blindly and brokenly following a new master. Definitely a rational intellectual type, the kind of friend you need and advisor you want.

I read that the three characters in ‘Coral Island’ are named Jack, Ralph, and Peterkin. I would like to think that Simon is a spin on Peterkin, making a biblical reference to Simon Peter and connecting them. I don’t think the connections end there, ‘The Lord of the Flies’ is a direct translation from the demon Beezlebub, and Simon and this demon have an imagined dialogue in the book. I’m sure there’s more there, but I’d have to go back and read that piece again. The book is absolutely summed up by him when he says ‘maybe WE are the beasts.’

Hard to say I ‘enjoyed’ something so dark, it was good in a ‘can’t take your eyes from it, horrifying type of way’ though. There’s a point about halfway in the book where you can see everything go cracked, and you’re just along for the downward spiraling ride. More research shows that Golding wrote this as a response to ‘Coral Island’ in the 1850’s to satirize that books idyllic depiction of similar circumstances. I can see why it’s considered a classic though, still better than Catcher in the Rye.

Excited to start! I’m currently about halfway through the Count of Monte Cristo from my own personal reading list, I’m hoping I can have that done around mid-January with enough time to read Lord of the Flies, and then pick up Jane Eyre. Luckily, there’s some flexibility in there to finish Monte Cristo and Jane Eyre with Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men being fairly short.

Erin, I’ve been wanting to tackle Crime & Punishment, The Brothers K, and The Idiot for a long time! Maybe this year will be the year for one (or all?) of them!

Hi everyone! My name is Simon, I am a financial analyst a couple years removed from college and have been reading a lot of foundational classics this past year, as my education never really required going through any of them. My favorite book has always been The Lord of the Rings, but so far my favorite this year has been Paradise Lost and C.S. Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost.