Cleo’s Comments (group member since Apr 12, 2016)

Cleo’s comments from the Reading Classics, Chronologically Through the Ages group.

I'm assuming the above is some sort of promotion. Is that allowed, Kenia?

I'm waiting for your thoughts, Kenia. I have finished all three plays in the trilogy (still writing my Eumenides post though) and thought they were fantastic.

I never did like Agamemmon from The Iliad; I thought he demanded respect instead of commanding it, and was rather infantile. This play gives another perspective to his character which I think is valuable and it made me like him a wee bit more. Whether he deserved his fate is an interesting question.

There is another take on the story of the death of Iphigenia, in that Agamemnon sent a message back to Clytemnestra to get her agree to the killing of their daughter. Wow! Few of these stories/myths seem to have one version.

Yes, the fire along the mountain-tops is indeed effective ....... now perhaps we know where Tolkien got his idea of communication from Gondor to Rohan that they were in need of help. :-)

Bookworm, I was trying not to feed your sickness habit. ;-) Go for it!

Sandy wrote: "Maybe I will even try my hand at learning Greek. Who knows?
.."

If you are serious (?????) Elementary Greek Koine for Beginners, Year One Textbook is a great start. There are three levels, each with a textbook, workbook, CD and flash cards. I'm working my way through Level One; it's a very easy introduction and also easy to understand.

Nicky wrote: "This is a wonderful list and your blog is very engaging!"

Thanks! I have too many lists but at least I'm never at a loss for a book to read! :-D

Ooo, look at all those placeholders! I keep thinking that I should have added more! :-) I can't wait to see what other projects you come up with.

Thanks for the recommendations, Sharon. I'm glad that you showed up to push me into unfamiliar (scary) territory! I'll definitely get in at least one Hardy before the year's out.

You're welcome! You actually reminded me that I should add my Zola project to my lists so I've gone and done just that. Hardy ....... another author I struggle with, simply because his works are so depressing. But I must start reading him. I've only read Under the Greenwood Tree, which is not enough exposure to fairly judge. I'm adding him to my TBR list.

Sharon, I think that it's a wonderful idea to read through the works of an author in sequence. It gives such insight into their ideas and the growth of their worldview.

I started to read through the Rougon-Maquart series a couple of years ago. I decided to follow Zola's recommended order instead of the published order so I am on book #5 The Dream (Le Rêve). Zola is a masterful writer and his descriptions are breathtaking, but his subject matter can be heavy and I find I'm needing breaks in between.

Best of luck with your projects!! :-)

While I did read the Mills books for background, one of the great inspirations to jump in, actually came from Susan Wise Bauer. In her histories, she reveals how history cannot actually be 100% known, that there are differing opinions between certain historical scholars as to what happened or how things developed. There are so many uncertainties. I can't tell you how many times I've read something and then read something different about the same thing in another historical account. Because of this, I've become pickier about what I read from author/historians. I do not like when an author/historian presents something that is very uncertain, as 100% factual. I've read a few authors who have done this, almost as if their main goal is not to share history, but instead promote their conclusions. So I stay away from them and stick with ones who let history speak for itself and are not afraid to note the differing opinions (as Bauer does).

Yet because of all the uncertainties, I really haven't tried to give myself a really broad background, as it can get confusing and there are so many tempting rabbit-trails. Rather, I have a base, then I read and mentally plug in what I read into that base, and from the actual reading expand my knowledge. Actually, it was C.S. Lewis who helped me with this approach when he noted how many books people have read about Plato but he rarely met anyone who'd actually read Plato, when in fact, Plato himself was the easiest to understand.

Sandy, I started with Homer's The Iliad (even before I read Mills' books) and it is really the best introduction. In fact, I think in this case, getting the history first (from someone living 3200 years later) might alter your experience. Who is going to know better how people acted and lived in that time than Homer himself? If you want a guide, one of the best is Elizabether Vandiver's Great Course on The Iliad of Homer (she also has a number of others on Greek literature and life). It will help you to understand the behaviour of the Greek characters in a way that few history books will.

What I do get intimated by are books like The Faerie Queene where they work on multiple levels. There is the historical context, then the biblical context, then the political and social context, and next add in allegory, symbolism and imagery ----- it can get overwhelming very quickly. In fact, I'm reading it at the moment and have hit a brick wall. After thinking it over for awhile, I've decided to mentally treat each book like a separate work. That way, hopefully I'll be able to get through it without my head exploding. Wish me luck!

Welcome, Nicky! I, too, was so happy to find GRs because of the lack of classic-enthusiasts in real life. Congratulations on your new baby and happy reading in your months off!

Kenia wrote: "Cleo wrote: " Good thinking! ;-) Once I get myself organized, I'll be doing the same.
..."

;-) I learned it from another GRs member so I'm passing the knowledge along!

I just returned from being out of town too. I thought I wouldn't be gone long, but my daughter's nearly-last-place softball team ended up going to the final and winning gold in their pool, so my stay was longer than anticipated, although for a good cause! :-)

I used a couple of books to give myself an understanding. Dorothy Mills wrote a couple of excellent histories for high school students: The Book of the Ancient Greeks and The Book of the Ancient Romans. I prefer these because some histories have a heavy focus on characters and others events, whereas Mills gives and excellent balance between the two. Other possibilities are The Story Of The Greeks and The Story of the Romans (Christine Miller has also done a re-write of these two books) ---- I still prefer Mills books for the balance, and they are a joy to read!

Hi Gabriela! I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on the books as you progress through the lists.

Thanks, Kenia! I'm away this weekend so it will take a few days to post lists, but I've made my thread and held spaces for them. I'll come up with something in a few days.

Holding for list #5

Greek & Roman Challenge

Homer
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Homeric Hymns


Aeschylus
The Persians
The Suppliant Maidens
Seven Against Thebes

The Orestia:
Agamemnon by Aeschylus
The Libation Bearers
The Eumenides

Promethus Bound


Sophocles
Electra
Ajax

The Theban Trilogy:
Oedipus Rex
Oedipus at Colonus
Antigone

Women of Trachis
Philoctetes


Euripides
Electra
Heracles
Medea
Hippolytus
Hecuba
The Trojan Women
Iphigenia at Tarsis
The Bacchae
Iphigenia at Aulis
Ion
Rhesus


Aristophanes
The Frogs

Herodotus
The Histories

Thucydides
The History of the Peloponnesian War


Plato
Apology
The Republic


Aristotle

Roman Literature

Virgil

.....


(in progress .....)

Trollope Project:

The Barsetshire Chronicles

The Warden
Barchester Towers
Doctor Thorne
Framley Parsonage
The Small House at Allington
The Last Chronicle of Barset


The Palliser Novels:

Can You Forgive Her?
Phineas Finn
The Eustace Diamons
Phineas Redux
The Prime Minister
The Duke's Children

The Rougon Macquart series by Émila Zola :
(in Zola's recommended order - thanks Sharon for reminding me of this project!)

La Fortune des Rougon (1871)
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876)
La Curée (1871-2)
L'Argent (1891)
Le Rêve (1888)
La Conquête de Plassans (1874)
Pot-Bouille (1882)
Au Bonheur des Dames (1883)
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875)
Une Page d'amour (1878)
Le Ventre de Paris (1873)
La Joie de vivre (1884)
L'Assommoir (1877)
L'Œuvre (1886)
La Bête humaine (1890)
Germinal (1885)
Nana (1880)
La Terre (1887)
La Débâcle (1892)
Le Docteur Pascal (1893)

Well, my first list, of course, should be the WEM List:


Novels:
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Native Son by Richard Wright
The Stranger by Albert Camus
1984 by George Orwell
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
White Noise by Don Dellilo
Possession by A.S. Byatt

Biographies:
Confessions by Augustine
The Book of Margery Kempe
Selected Essays by Michel de Montaigne:
Introduction
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
The Life of Saint Teresa of Àvila by Herself
Meditations by Réne Descartes
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners by John Bunyan
The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Walden, or My Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
Narratve of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington LOVED IT!
Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth by Mohandas Gandhi
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life by C.S. Lewis
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Born Again by Charles W. Colson
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs


Histories:
The Histories by Herodotus
The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
The Republic by Plato
Plutarch's Lives
The City of God by Augustine
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Utopia by Sir Thomas More
The True End of Civil Government by John Locke
The History of England, Vol. V by David Hume
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Common Sense by Thomas Paine
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey
The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
The New England Mind by Perry Miller
The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith
The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made by Eugene D. Genovese
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century by Barbara Tuchman
All the President's Men by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson
A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama



Plays:
Agamemnon by Aeschylus
Oedipus the King
Medea by Euripides
The Birds by Aristophanes
Poetics by Aristotle
Everyman
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
Richard III by William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Tartuffe by Molière
The Way of the World by William Congreve
She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw
Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
No Exit by Jean Paul Satre
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
Equus by Peter Shaffer


Poetry
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Iliad by Homer
The Odyssey
Greek Lyricists
Odes by Horace
Beowulf
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Sonnets by William Shakespeare
John Donne
Bible: Psalms (King James Version)
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
John Keats
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Christina Rossetti
Gerard Manley Hopkins
William Butler Yeats
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pound
T.S. Eliot
Langston Hughes
W.H. Auden