Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion
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Jon's Getting Back to the Classics
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Now this is my sort of list, especially the first part. I have a lot of those on my read/reading/tbr lists as well. There just never seems to be enough time for everything. I'm planning on filling in the gaps with pre-18th century literature over the next year or two, as theoretically this should be quicker than reading all of the 18th/19th/20th century literature that I still feel I'm missing out on. I'm also planning on working through Shakespeare, but at the rate I'm going that will take until my death. I'm wondering from what you've read so far, which books do you think are worthy of their place in the English cannon and which would you give a miss, if any?
Jon! A kindred spirit. I'm also an aspiring writer working on a novel, and began reading more seriously for similar reasons. I'm drawn to book lists, and love yours. I'm curious how you chose them? Why did you pick Emma, my least favorite Austen? :-) And what lead you to Oroonoko, which I'll be reading soon? And thank you for Monkey: The Journey to the West, which I somehow never heard of but sounds great!
I found a great booklist in a writing book Starting from Scratch. The book was good, but the list was superb, and set up chronologically like yours.
Your idea to read as research for your novel is something else I relate to. In my case, the main character in my novel is a woman on a journey and I am focusing on women writers, particularly with strong female heroines.
Thanks for sharing this, and enjoy your reading!
Jon, I really like not only the books on your list but also the idea of and execution of the list itself - organization is a beautiful thing. The books look great and several of them are on my TBR list as well (although merely at the cerebral stage at this point - maybe I can successfully mimic your method in the not too distant future). ;-)
I wish you lots of luck with your endeavor and look forward to reading your thoughts.
Pink wrote: "I'm also planning on working through Shakespeare, but at the rate I'm going that will take until my death."This is actually the part that felt least efforty for me. Cus plays don't take any longer to read than to watch, I find it fairly easy to slip them in-between bigger books.
Plus this year the BBC has been putting lots of adaptations for his 400th so there's been lots of good versions to watch on TV or listen on the radio.
Pink wrote: "I'm wondering from what you've read so far, which books do you think are worthy of their place in the English cannon..."
Pretty much all of them. Although, in some cases, more for their historical/literary significance than for the enjoyment I got out of them as a reader. But the ones I think I most enjoyed so far were: The Oresteia, Metamorphoses, and the first volume of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.
Pink wrote: "... and which would you give a miss, if any?"
Most have seemed pretty worthy, except for The Sorrows of Young Werther which is properly awful: adolescent in the dullest way. Whining on about how the girl he loves is with his best friend but should be with him. Its only ~90 pages long but felt far longer than anything else on the list. And it's not just me, all of my friends who had to read it for uni hated it.
A Tale of a Tub was hard going just for the prose style – long convoluted sentences and archaic technical language throughout. I don't think I would recommend that to anyone, but also its not really one of Swift's major works.
Kathleen wrote: "I'm curious how you chose them?"It's a mix of what I had on my bookshelves already, and what I thought counted as important on the basis of what I've picked up by osmosis from being around bookish people and by asking for recommendations.
Some things didn't make the list for reasons that have more to do with me than anything else.
Like, I chose The Toilers of the Sea to rep Hugo rather than Les Misérables, because I'm from Guernsey where it is set (and where Les Mis was written). And Dostoevsky isn't on the list cus I already love him and have already read a fair few of his books, this list is about getting an overview.
Kathleen wrote: "Why did you pick Emma, my least favorite Austen? :-) And what lead you to Oroonoko, which I'll be reading soon? And thank you for Monkey: The Journey to the West, which I somehow never heard of but sounds great!"
Emma - I had already read P&P in school, and in my brain Emma was the next most significant of her works. I actually really loved it. Really impressive on a technical level.
Orinooko - I figured I should have some Behn on the list because she is the first female professional author – in that she makes her whole living from writing. As it happens the book itself was rather incidental. But my copy had an interesting introduction that was worth reading.
Monkey - This is one of the "Four Classics" of Chinese literature. All four are insanely long in full versions. The unabridged version is called "Journey to West".
The other Classics for the interested are Romance of Three Kingdoms, Outlaws of the Marsh (sometimes called "The Water Margin") and "Story of a Stone/Dream of a Red Chamber" of which I have the five volume translation that starts with The Golden Days.
Jon, thanks for answering all of our questions and explaining a little more why you've chosen the books you have. It's interesting to learn more about your reasons. I'm going to have to check out more of the BBC's Shakespeare works. I've been watching a few things lately, but not so many actual performances of his work.
Yes, interesting. Thanks Jon! I've added Journey to the West, and decided I must re-read Emma ...
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Pink wrote: "Jon, thanks for answering all of our questions and explaining a little more why you've chosen the books you have. It's interesting to learn more about your reasons. I'm going to have to check out more of the BBC's Shakespeare works."No problem, that's what forums are for.
Re BBC Shakespeare here are links to a few things that are still on the iPlayer as at the 31st May 2016:-
for one day: Hamlet in Russian.
for two days: Julius Caesar on Radio.
for about a week: Lear on Radio; and Season 2 of the Hollow Crown which is made up of Henry VI parts 1-3 & Richard III.
for 4 more months: RSC Stage production of Richard II starring David Tennant.
Happy watching/listening.
Jon, reading Shakespeare in Russian is tremendously impressive! You must be pretty fluent!I have a question for you: I think last week or perhaps a little earlier, you posted a link from Wikipedia about novels of a list of novels throughout history?
When I saw that link you posted, I meant to go back and read the article but now I can't find the link and couldn't turn it myself on the web. It isn't in the place where I thought you posted it. Do you recall where you posted that link?
Andrea (Catsos Person) is a Compulsive eBook Hoarder wrote: "Jon, reading Shakespeare in Russian is tremendously impressive! You must be pretty fluent!"It's actually a movie, and – thank goodness – comes with English subtitles. Apparently its Simon Russell Beale's favourite version of Hamlet.
The link you want is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel – for the wikipedia page on the novel. I think it was in the Spoiler thread for The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
Oh! Hamlet in Russian with subtitles! Cool.I used to own a vhs of a Japanese subtitled version of Macbeth. I can't recall the title. The title might be "Throne of Blood" but the Macbeth character was played by a very famous actor from that country.
Also, thank you for that link!
Thanks for posting those links, I have most of those downloaded on iPlayer waiting to watch, but was unaware about the radio performances. I've been hesitant about the Russian Hamlet. I watched Simon Russell Beale talking with Adrian Lester about their own performances of Hamlet and other versions and noted that this was his favourite....but it's in Russian, so I'm just not sure!
Throne Of Blood is a Kurosawa movie - it's not a direct translation of Macbeth, more an interpretation - he also did a similar thing with a film called Ran which was based on King Lear
Finished two light ones: The Man With the Golden Gun, which means I have now read all the original Bond novels in order; and 1968 which was a bit of a surprise win. With 1968 I was expecting something fairly conventional about the American involvement in Vietnam but it comes back to the USA pretty quickly and becomes more about personal and national trauma. I feel like I should have liked it a lot more, but as it is I just kind of enjoyed it.
Pink wrote: "I've been hesitant about the Russian Hamlet. I watched Simon Russell Beale talking with Adrian Lester about their own performances of Hamlet and other versions and noted that this was his favourite....but it's in Russian, so I'm just not sure!"I saw that too, and avoided watching it for much the same reasons. Though slightly regretting it, now that it has expired on iPlayer. I don't mind subtitles really, tend to forget about them once I'm in the film. And weirdly when I remember the lines after watching a subtitles film, I always remember them as if I heard them in English.
Darren wrote: "Throne Of Blood is a Kurosawa movie - it's not a direct translation of Macbeth, more an interpretation - he also did a similar thing with a film called Ran which was based on King Lear"I've seen Ran and it was great. But that is to be expected, Lear is my fave Shakespeare. Kurosawa also did a very, very loose adaptation of Hamlet set in modern day Tokyo called The Bad Sleep Well.
Bat-Cat wrote: "Jon, I really like not only the books on your list but also the idea of and execution of the list itself - organization is a beautiful thing."Cheers. I'm the kind of person who has a spreadsheet of all my pre-1918 books arranged by date of publication. So the information was quick to find.
I have been maintaining all sorts of other lists which I am slowly consolidating onto Good Reads.
I think I might still have the Russian Hamlet recorded on my Sky box. I have no problems with subtitled films, but I just don't know how it would work with such iconic language. I'm not sure I want to hear different words spoken as I love the lines in English so much! I suppose I need to watch it to find out.
Just finished The Girl Who Played Go which was rather good. If rather weak in the ending. I kind of picked it up at random in a second hand bookshop because I need to write a scene involving go and wanted to see how others do it. So pleasant surprise.Next up I want to get properly into The Master and Margarita, while continuing to pick away at A Man on the Moon.
Four more books ticked off this week:The Master and Margarita
The Two Noble Kinsmen
Henry VIII
&
All's Well That Ends Well
Which means I have now read or watched or listened to all of Shakespeare's plays. I feel like there should be a badge I can wear.
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Kathy wrote: "Well congrats & here you go."Thank you, Kathy.
I also read a volume of James Fenton's poems which isn't part of the challenge. And King Harald's Saga which wasn't originally on the list but I've stuck up there cus it's an excerpt from one of the most important works of medieval literature Heimskringla: or, The Lives of the Norse Kings. Having done the battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings from the British standpoint at school it was really interesting to read the Norwegian side.This makes for a total of 8 books completed in June. Some of which were non-challenge.
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A while since I updated this. Because of various IRL things happening. But I have read 11 books since June of which the following were challenge books:The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Good.
Shakespeare After All - Great.
A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq - Alrightish.
The Golden Notebook - Good.
Don Quixote - Looooooooong.
Colonel Sun - Fun.
Jane Eyre - By turns good and terrible. Alrightish overall.
I also read Story of the Eye, which is a classic if not part of my actual challenge goals. I will hopefully be better at updating this as I go along now.
Well, Jon, despite RL, you managed to make some good progress on your challenge reading!Congrats!
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Jon, I love your long lists and hope to make this kind of progress on mine. I especially like the pre-1800 list, some of which I read in college but would love to revisit. Thanks for the inspiration.
Your update looks good to me, I've read a few of the same books recently and have mostly similar opinions about them :) Good luck with your next batch!
Pink wrote: "Good luck with your next batch!"Thank you, the next batch is in.
I read the other two Brontë's: Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. Of the three the only one I really liked was Emily. The other two were too moralistic, at least with Wuthering Heights no one expects you to like the horrible characters.
I also read the following other challenge books:
- Starship Troopers, which was fun, if somewhat politically conservative.
- A Man on the Moon, great book about the Apollo missions. If interested in space flight this would be my go to recommendation.
- An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed & Exhausted Peoples of Europe, good speeches which massively undercut the idea that Trotskyists were loveable just cus they were opposed to Stalin.
- Tao Te Ching, interesting but not much fun to read. Could have done with an edition containing an intro and some endnotes.
- The First Ten Books, ditto.
- The Waves, which was a mass of beautiful sentences although I'm not sure if it held together as a thing. I subsequently listened to a great radio adaptation which seemed more coherent so I wonder if I just wasn't very focused while I read it.
I think there were a couple of other non-challenge books including the A L Kennedy Dr Who novel Doctor Who: The Drosten's Curse. Kennedy is one of my favourite literary writers so it was fun to see her do a take on a children's TV show that she clearly loves.
You're right that Anne Bronte is moralistic. Even more so in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, although it's still my favourite Bronte book. Wuthering Heights is a passionate mess, I love and hate it in equal measure!I haven't read any of the other books you've mentioned. Although A Man on the Moon might be worth a try for me. I've previously read and enjoyed Moondust: In Search Of The Men Who Fell To Earth and for the pre-lunar missions I found The Right Stuff absolutely fascinating.
I'm building myself up for The Waves and have it pencilled in for next year. I can't exactly say I'm a Woolf fan, but I don't hate her writing either.
Catching up on Classics (and lots more!)
Books mentioned in this topic
The Waves (other topics)Moondust (other topics)
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (other topics)
A Man on the Moon (other topics)
The Right Stuff (other topics)
More...
✓ = Read
X = Started
- = TBR
3. Catching Up on The Classics
In date order...
✓ ~500BC, The Dhammapada, Anon
✓ ~500BC, The Bhagavad Gita, Anon
X 600-100BC, The Old Testament, King James Authorised Version
- 600-100BC, The Apocrypha, King James Authorised Version
✓ 458BC, The Oresteia, Aeschylus/Ted Hughes
✓ 411BC, Lysistrata, Aristophanes
✓ 420BC, Electra, Euripides
✓ 441BC, Antigone, Sophocles
✓ 370BC, The Symposium, Plato
✓ ~20BC, The Aeneid, Virgil
✓ 8AD, Metamorphoses, Ovid
X 100-400, The New Testament, King James Authorised
✓ 632, The Qur'an, translated by M A S Abdal Haleem
✓ 800-1000, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, Anon
✓ 1230, King Harald's Saga, Snorri Sturluson
✓ 1260, The Saga of the Volsungs, Anon
✓ 1320, Inferno, Dante Alighieri
- 1399, The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
✓ 1600s, Monkey: A Journey to the West, Wu Cheng-En
✓ 1615, Don Quixote, Cervantes
✓ 1688, Oroonoko, Aphra Behn
✓ 1704, A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift
✓ 1749, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Henry Fielding
- 1767, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne
✓ 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
✓ 1815, Emma, Jane Austen
✓ 1825, Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin
✓ 1847, Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
✓ 1847, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
✓ 1847, Agnes Grey. Anne Bronte
- 1851, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Herman Melville
- 1861, Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
- 1862, Fathers and Sons, Turgenev
- 1871, Middlemarch, George Eliot
- 1885, Germinal, Emile Zola
- 1891, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
- 1904, Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
- 1915, The Rainbow, D H Lawrence
- 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
X 1300-1994, The Penguin Book of English Verse, Paul Keegan
As you can see, it sort of trails off, which is because I switched at some point to wanting to clear all those books I had started and which were abandoned with a bookmark halfway through them:
2. The Shelf of Half-Read Books
That shelf currently looks like this in order of length...
X 816pp, Collected Stories, Vladimir Nabokov
X 688pp, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, Richard Dawkins
X 680pp, The Oxford Book of Essays, John Gross
X 548pp, The Complete Western Stories, Elmore Leonard
X 544pp, The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol 1, Richard Feynman
X 502pp, Selected Short Stories, D. H. Lawrence
X 384pp, Smoke and Mirrors, Niel Gaiman
X 368pp, Hang-Ups: Essays on Art, Simon Schama
X 368pp, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories, Washington Irving
X 336pp, Plain Tales From The Hills (Penguin Popular Classics), Rudyard Kipling
X 318pp, Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other stories, Annie Proulx
X 306pp, How to Be Alone, Jonathan Franzen
X 259pp, Short Stories, Anton Chekov
But before I start chipping away at the books above, the highest priority list I am working on is research for the novel I am working on. These include books that are stylistically similar to my novel, deal with similar themes, have historical information in them that I need, or which I think will be otherwise helpful to my thinking about the novel I am working on.
Research Books for A Novel
In roughly the order I need the information inside them for the novel...
✓ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson
✓ Dispatches, Michael Herr
✓ Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag
✓ The Quiet American, Graham Greene
✓ Falling Man, Don DeLillo
✓ The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
✓ A War of Choice: Honour, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq Jack Fairweather
✓ A Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer
✓ A Man on the Moon, Andrew Chaikin
✓ Hiroshima, John Hersey
✓ What It is Like to Go to War, Karl Marlantes
✓ Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes
✓ 1968, Joe Haldeman
✓ The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
✓ Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans, Wallace Terry
X The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Ngyuen
✓ The Girl Who Played Go, Shan Sa
✓ Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: An extraordinary diary of courage from the Vietnam War, Dang Thuy Tram
✓ Novel Without a Name, Duong Thu Huong
✓ Call Me by My True Names: The Collected Poems, Thich Nhat Hanh
✓ The Sorrow Of War, Bao Ninh
✓ The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
X The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
✓ A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives, Michael H. Hunt
✓ Ho Chi Minh: A Life, William J. Duiker
✓ The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx & Freidrick Engels
✓ An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed & Exhausted Peoples of Europe, Leon Trotsky
✓ Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
✓ The First Ten Books, Confucius
✓ The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X
- American Pastoral, Philip Roth
- Pettibone's Law, John Keene
- Libra, Don DeLillo
X Underworld, Don DeLillo
- Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
✓ Shark, Will Self
✓ The Man With the Golden Gun, Ian Fleming
✓ Colonel Sun, Robert Markham
- The Information, Martin Amis
- The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk
- The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
✓ The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
✓ Starship Troopers, Robert A Heinlein
- Catch-22, Joseph Heller
- The Beach, Alex Garland
- Point Omega, Don Delillo
✓ The Waves, Virginia Woolf
So at the moment my current goal is to clear a few Xs from each list and get through as many of the research books on my list by August (when I intend to have finished my first draft). Then start working through those classics again.
I also want to read these four:
0. Jon's Shakespeareance
As then I have read – or watched/listened to an adaptation of – all of his plays and poems.
- The Rape of Lucrece, William Shakespeare
✓ All's Well That Ends Well, William Shakespeare
✓ Henry VIII, William Shakespeare & John Fletcher
✓ The Two Noble Kinsmen, William Shakespeare & John Fletcher
✓ Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber
Another longer term goal is to redress the near 10:1 ratios of male:female and white-western:not white-western writers I have read. But first things first...