Rebecca’s Comments (group member since Mar 31, 2013)

Rebecca’s comments from the Classics Without All the Class group.

Kalki

I am only listing books that were assigned to an entire class, and some were probably read in junior high school. I recall reading quite a few more from a list of books that would count for extra credit, but that would be a much longer list.

The Red Badge of Courage, Crane
Across Five Aprils, Hunt
Diary of Anne Frank
The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne
Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee
Brave New World, Huxley
Tom Sawyer, Twain
The Pearl, Steinbeck
The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway
Grendel, Gardner
My Antonia, Cather
Cimaron, Ferber
Humboldt's Gift, Bellow
Lord of the Flies, Golding
Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut

Plays:
Romeo & Juliet, and, Julius Ceasar, Shakespeare
Our Town, Wilder
The Crucible, Miller

Poems & Verse
The Raven, Poe
Hiawatha, Longfellow
selections by Frost, Dickinson, and others.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind

Careful... once you start reading it you will not want to put it down. The anti-hero is a sociopath with a profoundly sensitive sense of smell, so that in a crowd he can sense each individual, their sex, age, hygiene, etc. But, he has absolutely no odor of his own, which makes him strangely insensible to the rest of humanity. If you find it at a book store or public library, read the first two paragraphs. Paragraph #2 is my single favorite passage from all the books I've read. Read this book and you will never think about the sense of smell the same way again!

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. I read it early in high school, and it definitely influenced my decision to study medicine.

Coralville Iowa. Thanks.

Xerxes Invades Greece

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

"In Ford we Trust"

Taylor,
In the classic horror category, may I suggest The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

For romance (albeit, tragic romance), I strongly second Shannon's recommendation for Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.

Also, you cannot go wrong with Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, because it is a great story with great romance, AND there is more than a little horror in the second half!

I read all of these in my teens, and then enjoyed rereading them years later, and I do not reread books very often.

Happy Reading!

The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith

I read it because it was mentioned in Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow, as one of the books owned (and presumably read) by Martha Washington.

I also read about it and its author, and according to Wikipedia:
"The novel is mentioned in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Jane Austen's Emma, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as well as his Dichtung und Wahrheit.[citation needed]".

The book is loaded with classic themes, such as
- the mother who lives to see her daughters marry well
- the fortune lost, and then.... (spoiler alert) regained at the end
- the good guy who is really a bad guy
- debtors prison ("gaol").

So it certainly influenced Austen and Dickens! And my reading made me feel just a little closer to Martha Washington.

My name is Becky, I live in Iowa. Grew up in West-Central IL, went to school in Chicago. The reading of my youth included many classics, thanks to a junior high school teacher who knew that I was an avid reader, but could see that I was reading mostly crap. One day he dumped this big box full of used paperbacks he had collected from a used book dealer in town, all classics, and resold them for 25 cents each. (You could keep the book, or sell it back for $0.25, or trade it for another book). When I approached the table, he picked up a copy of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, and said, "read this, I think you will really like it". I did, and read many classics after that. So I guess that my answer to the "why am I here" question would be, because of my 8th grade English teacher!

Favorite author: Thomas Hardy remains my favorite classic author, for the bulk of his work. But my single favorite classic book will always be Jane Eyre. Can't say that I have a single favorite genre, though the classics I recall most fondly tend to be the romantic-but-tragic morality tales.

I am now a history buff and 95% of what I read is nonfiction, but when I do pick up a novel, it is usually a classic, and is often chosen because it was written in or influenced the era I am reading about. My current NF book What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 includes much history of the abolitionist movement in America, and the roles played by men such as Lyman Beecher (father of Harriet Beecher-Stowe. So my next book will be a re-read of Uncle Tom's Cabin, followed by a book about the author: Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America, by David S. Reynolds.

Favorite sound: I love laughter. I love the commercial that starts with a baby laughing and ends with the laughter of an old man....darned if I can remember what it is selling, but I love the sound track.

I look forward to following the discussions here.