2020 - What classics are you reading?

As it is Dec. 31st, I thought that I would go ahead and set up next year's thread.

I just finished a reread of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, stimulated by reading Val McDermid's "updated" version. Actually I was surprised by how closely McDermid stuck to the original (other than changing the setting from Bath to Edinburgh, oh and a somewhat drastic change to the final ending). Some of the conversations were almost word for word from Austin.

I think that I will start off the year with The Wings of a Dove by Henry James or perhaps with Balzac's At The Sign Of The Cat And Racket. I am hoping to make inroads into Balzac's Human Comedy this year, maybe reading 1-2 of the books each month.

I'm going to start off the year with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (her 200th birthday in January), and Castle Richmond by Anthony Trollope.

I am hoping for a higher proportion of 17th - 19th century works in this reading year. It is likely that my first book will be a collection of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's short works, Ralph The Bailiff, And Other Tales.

Noting too that a group read of Anthony Trollope's The Bertrams will be starting in the next couple of weeks, through the 75 Books group. Everyone is welcome to join; I can post more definite details here when we get organised.

>2 kac522: It's Anne Bronte's 200th birthday this month? Then I guess I will add Agnes Grey to my monthly tbr pile!

>3 lyzard: I like Trollope so please do post more details about The Bertrams group read!

>4 leslie.98:

Will do! We would be very happy to have you join us. At the moment it will most likely be starting over the weekend of the 11th / 12th.

Meanwhile, I have completed Leandro: or, The Lucky Rescue by J. Smythies, from 1690. It began well, seeming to be about the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes and its effect upon a French Protestant family, but then degenerated into a rather dull picaresque tale.

I am now reading Johann Goethe's fourth and final novel, Wilhelm Meister's Travels.

I haven't decided on a theme for my classics reading this year, so I'm just reading some shorter novels and plays. I just finished Ajax by Sophocles and I'll probably read a few more by him.

Currently finishing Emma, and thoroughly enjoying it, too.

I didn't know it was Anne Bronte's 200th birthday this month. I've been meaning to read The Tennant of Wildfell Hall for the longest time now, and this sounds like a perfect excuse to finally get started. :)

Also, a group read sounds like fantastic fun. Perhaps I'll come round to join too!

I start off every calendar year with a reading (or in most cases, a re-reading) of a Joseph Conrad novel, going through them all in this way in chronological order of their publishing. I'm almost at the end. This year I'm reading one of the few I have gotten to yet, The Rescue, the next to last that Conrad published. The first 40 pages have been very enjoyable.

I have finished Wilhelm Meister's Travels by Johann Goethe, a fractured, frustrating work that is almost post-modern in its wilful refusal to be a novel.

I am now relaxing with The Bertrams by Anthony Trollope, in preparation for the group read.

>8 Majel-Susan:

And you would be very welcome! :)

Well, I've read 2 plays by Sophocles and 3 by Euripides in the past few days (they are very short). I still haven't decided on a theme for this year...

I'd like to read The Water Margin, the only one of the 'Four Classic Chinese Novels' I haven't read yet.

I finished The Rescue, Joseph Conrad's next to last novel. It's not peak period Conrad, but still very enjoyable.

I finished Balzac's At the Sign of the Cat and Racket - a quite short novella from his "Scenes from Private Life"...

I finished Anna Katherine Green's The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow, a 1917 book that marked the end of her Mr. Gryce mystery series.

The thread is up for the group read of Anthonhy Trollope's The Bertrams:

Here

Anyone who would care to join in would be very welcome! :)

Thanks >15 lyzard:.

Anne Bronte (her 200th birthday in January)

Anne doesn't get the recognition that she should.

>17 nx74defiant: It turns that I have already read Agnes Grey… But I agree that Anne Brönte is overshadowed by her sisters.

I am sure that this question has been raised before (probably more than once!) but I am wondering what people think makes a book a 'classic'.

I belong to a reading group that defines a classic as anything first published 50+ years ago. In that sense, I reported my reading of Anna Katherine Green's The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow.

However, I am dissatisfied with a purely age-based criterion. While I enjoyed reading Green's mystery, I wouldn't consider it a "classic". To me, it was merely an enjoyable and old book.

So what makes a book 'classic'? In this day of easy reproduction of public domain books in electronic format, how does one distinguish between a true classic and a book that is merely old?

I am currently reading, in addition to >15 lyzard:'s group read of Trollope's The Bertrams, Uncle Silas by Le Fanu.

>19 leslie.98:, nobody has a concrete definition. It's just a useful term for "old stuff". I'd prefer a snobbier approach where we list the 200 or 500 most renowned old stuff and say everything below that doesn't get the medal. But then that's just an arbitrary cut-off too, plus nobody can agree on such a list, so there's no winning.

Handy thing about your group's definition is the pranks you could play. Fifty years = 1970 now, so why not propose The Godfather, Airport or Myra Breckinridge? And Stephen King is a mere four years away.

Maybe we need something like old movies - there are classics and there are B movies, which are old and perhaps enjoyable enough but not deserving of the title classic.

I use "classic" for old stuff (i.e. pre-1900) too, purely as a convenient classifier. But there are always sub-tags to make a book's actual status clear.

"Classic" is misused so much that I don't have an issue with my own misuse. :)

The question of where we draw the date line as the years slip by is a fascinating one. I may say that I do draw a mental line, not at 1900, but at 1914---because the world changed so profoundly at that point, there is all but a tangible dividing line: the end of the Edwardian "long summer" and the beginning of modernity.

Meanwhile...I'm now reading Ralph The Bailiff, And Other Tales, a collection of short(er) works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, collated in 1862.

I'm about to see how well I can tolerate reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Hoping I find it more fun than frustrating.

As I round the bend and head towards age 65, I am finally reading Little Women for the first time. I've read so much that's positive about the new movie version, especially in The New Yorker and the NY Times, that I've decided to read the novel first and then see the film. First I'll see the current version, and then I'll try to go back and watch the Katherine Hepburn version. I'm hoping that the novel is one that holds up to a first reading in adulthood. I'm guessing that it is.

>26 rocketjk:, that should be an interesting contrast. You'll see exactly how it's been updated for 2020. I'd expect the Hepburn version will prove more loyal to the text.

>25 Cecrow: Don’t forget to wind the clock before you start!

>25 Cecrow: I quite enjoyed Tristam Shandy! The writing is discursive (think Don Quixote or Moby Dick) but not difficult to read.

I have read some Balzac - most recently the short story The Purse. I have been following the Project Gutenberg list and so reading from "Scenes from Private Life" but have had several people mention that this isn't the best order to read "The Human Comedy" in.

Does anyone here have a suggested reading order for this massive 'series'? Or at least point me to a website or group which could help me decide how to proceed?

I have embarked on Le rouge et le noir and am dismayed by the additional material. Three kinds of footnotes, by Stendhal and the editor. Not sure if I can hack this.

>31 MissWatson:, you're the second person I've seen to recently describe that one as an uphill battle, and there it is on my shelf waiting to be read. Yikes.

>31 MissWatson:

I got halfway through that one and abandoned it when I discovered I didn't care at all for what I was reading. Better luck to you!

>33 lilisin: …… okay, make that three people.

>32 Cecrow: >33 lilisin: >34 Cecrow: Uh-oh. I have been warned. Thanks, ladies.

>35 MissWatson:

Ahem. Four. :)

But I often do struggle with French literature for some reason, so I'm not the best yardstick.

Meanwhile, I have embarked upon James Fenimore Cooper's The Last Of The Mohicans. It is easier to read than I expected but, oh dear, the central (white) characters are behaving very stupidly. :D

I was considering diving into Balzac's Human Comedy too. The local (university) library has the complete set. So far I have only read The Girl With the Golden Eyes.

I just finished Piers Ploughman, which is something I've wanted to read since university. I read it in translation, but someday I might tackle it in the original Middle English.

I finished a reread of The Hamlet by William Faulkner in preparation for finally reading the second and third books of the "Snopes" trilogy, of which The Hamlet is the first book. The novel tells a series of interweaving stories with a core set of characters moving throughout and an interchanging series of part-time players revolving around them. This is life in small town deep South in the late 19th/early 20th centuries: grim, ruthless and hard, with a few hesitant glimmers of grace woven in. The writing hurtles headlong with dense, flowing language, memorable characters and beautiful, lush descriptions of nature and location that serve as much to set the tone of the characters' actions and frames of mind as it does to offer an acute sense of place and time. Powerful and absorbing.

>38 rocketjk: I have been toying with the idea of rereading some Faulkner. For some reason, I have never read his "Snopes" trilogy so maybe I should read those instead of rereading!

I am currently reading Le Pere Goriot as part of my effort to read Balzac's "Human Comedy". This way, if I give up before I finish, I will have at least read his most famous book!

>39 leslie.98: I can't speak to how reading the Snopes trilogy would compare to rereading some of the other Faulkner novels, especially if those novels are particular favorites of yours. The Hamlet is the only Faulkner I've read at all, so far. All I can do is highly recommend The Hamlet in its own right. Cheers!

>41 rocketjk: Thanks - I loved Faulkner in my younger years when I first was introduced to his books in school. I am glad that you liked Hamlet and look forward to comparing notes on it sometime in the near future.

>40 leslie.98:, that's a tall order, tackling the whole sequence, so piecemeal makes sense to me too. I've the same approach to Zola.

>43 Cecrow: It is a bit intimidating but luckily I like Balzac's writing. I can't say the same about Zola unfortunately.

Speaking of Faulkner, I just finished The Sound and the Fury. Now I'm reading Scott's The Talisman

>35 MissWatson: Just dropping in to report that I persevered and finished Le Rouge et le Noir. Can't say that I actually see the point Stendhal was trying to make.

>46 MissWatson: Yeah, that was pretty much my feeling when I finally read The Red and the Black (after several false starts). I have Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma on my Kindle but after finishing The Red and the Black, I have been putting it off!

I finished Le Pere Goriot - such a sad ending!

I am now starting First Love by Turgenev. It has been a while since I read any Russian literature...

>49 leslie.98: The only Turgenev I've read is Fathers and Sons, which I enjoyed.

In January I finished The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte and Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather. In February I read Castle Richmond by Anthony Trollope.

First Love was excellent. Now I am starting Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett...

I finished Crime and Punishment an enjoyable story with a rather unlikable protagonist

I finished The Town by William Faulkner. This is the second novel in Faulkner's "Snopes Family" trilogy. The action has moved from the hamlet of Frenchman's Bend to the town of Jefferson, still, of course, in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. In the first novel in the trilogy, The Hamlet, Frenchman's Bend and to a lesser extent Jefferson have become overrun with Snopes sibling and cousins following the beachhead established by Flem Snopes. The Snopes slowly begin usurping the money and, especially, the power in the community from Varners, the longtime ruling family of the area. The word Faulkner uses for this new clan, over and over, in both novels, is "rapacious."

In The Town, Flem has begun to acquire more power, and to aspire to actual respectability. While The Hamlet features several interlocking narratives, a series of stories that together paint the picture of the area and its inhabitants (and their varying reactions to the Snopes invasion), the narrative in The Town coalesces around Flem Snopes and his drive for money and influence in the town, as complicated by the open secret of his wife's 16-year infidelity with another important town citizen. Faulkner's breathtaking ability to peel back human motivations, for good or evil, make these novels extremely rewarding reading experiences.

I finished The Mansion by William Faulkner. This is the final novel in Faulkner's "Snopes Family" trilogy. The three novels tell the story of the arrival and expansion of the Snopes family as they arrive in the hamlet of Frenchman's Bend in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, expand into the town of Jefferson and eventually, in the person of their most successful member, Flem Snopes, rise to power and even respectability. The action is mostly seen throughout through the eyes of three characters, none of them a Snopes, who provide a perspective on the action that is in turn bemused, alarmed and outraged. One of the three, V.K. Ratliff, has the advantage of being a traveling sewing machine salesman who's secondary (or maybe primary) stock in trade is information received and offered. Gavin Stevens is the town's primary attorney and the county's attorney as well. He is also the intellectual and idealist of the group and the one who twice experiences the intense love that is one of the trilogy's central themes. The third perspective comes from Stevens' nephew Charles, who begins by narrating events that have happened before he was born but were only told to him, and ends by being a lawyer himself and World War 2 veteran.

The various Snopes have all (or almost all) one thing in common: they are "rapacious" (Faulkner's word for them, especially in the trilogy's second novel, The Town), with the "moral values of a wolverine." Some rise into state government or bank presidencies, some, at least figuratively, remain mean scrabblers in the dirt.

The overall theme of the trilogy seems to be the ways in which the rural American South was thrown completely off the rails of American society and political progress by the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the long, tortuous, and inevitably bent process by which these regions slowly--achingly and tragically slowly--eventually drifted or were pulled back into something like actual participation with the country as a whole. Faulkner ruefully kicks over rocks and logs to show the anthills and mold thriving beneath. But, and this is important in understanding this work, he is also very frequently and very wryly quite funny.

Started Seven Gothic Tales, and soon I'll be starting Dickens' Hard Times as well.

>54 rocketjk:, are those some of his lesser known novels? I"m not familiar with them, yet they tag into Yoknapatawpha County. Isn't that the same place as The Sound and The Fury?

>55 Cecrow: They're the only Faulkner I've read, but, yes, I think they're somewhat lesser known. They do take place in Yoknapatawpha County in the time period of late in the 19th century to just after World War Two. They follow the progress of the "rapacious" (the narrator's word) Snopes family and the reactions to them of several (three in particular) local citizens. They are supposedly along the lines of being more "accessible" Faulkner, but, as I said, I haven't read any of the others so can neither confirm nor deny that claim, nor am I sure whether any of the characters in the Snopes books appear elsewhere in the other Yoknapatawpha County novels. At any rate, I highly recommend the trilogy.

A group read is just beginning for Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret. It is being conducted through the Virago group, but everyone is welcome. :)

The thread is here.

Just listened to Beowulf. As the introduction says this was originally something you listened to. I imagined listening to this by the light of a fire.

I needed a cheerful book so I am rereading via audiobook She Stoops to Conquer, the 18th century play by Oliver Goldsmith.

I read (in a day) James Baldwin's classic play, Blues for Mister Charlie. Soon I'll be starting Knut Hamsun's Nobel Prize-winning novel, Growth of the Soil.

I just finished Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (aka "The Hunchback of Notre Dame") - the unabridged edition. Hugo will never be one of my favorite authors because, while I can tolerate his lengthy digressions, I don't really like them. I found myself surprisingly angry by the end of the book; I guess my tolerance for men obessessed with a woman and making it all her fault has substantially diminished. It is an excellent book and the characters are all well portrayed - I think it is because Claude Frollo was so believable that he made me so mad!

I've just finished Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun. This novel is a classic of Norwegian literature. First published in 1917, it won Hamsun a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. The book is Hamsun's ode to hardy settlers and farmers of Norway's rugged and remote areas. A long, hard day's work is a man's greatest accomplishment, and Isak, the strong, simple, unremittingly persevering farmer is Hamsun's hero. The storyline follows Isak's early days carving out a farm, his taking on of a helpmate, Inger, who becomes his wife, and the growth of their family. Along the way, there are problems aplenty, of course, some of their own making. Hamsun often uses a sort of stream of consciousness narrative to good effect to get inside of his characters' minds. Even when they are flawed and troubled, they are characters we are happy to follow along with through life. We get a close up, if certainly idealized, picture of the tough life of these country communities. But also, as the narrative progresses, we come to understand that Hamsun is placing these mostly admirable people before in contrast to his disdain for modernism, and especially for new more or less liberal ideas about human nature.

So it was enjoyable to read Growth of the Soil. And interesting to read this acclaimed example of the early 20th-century style, Norwegian New Realism. Hamsun's prose here is certainly engaging, as is his humor and eye for the foibles of human nature, and his extremely deft touch at describing the intense beauty of the Norwegian countryside. But it's also the case that Hamsun was a Nazi sympathizer, and I have to admit that knowing, as I read, that the author was at the very least an admirer of people who would have been very happy to murder my grandparents and my parents drained a bit of the enjoyment out of the experience for me.

How do you pronounce "Tacitus" ... is it tack-it-us, or tacit-is, something else? Since I only have to read him and not say him, I've started The Annals of Imperial Rome.

Also trying a side order of The Scarlet Letter, which no one forced me to read in school.

I've just finished the Italian modern classic Cristo si è fermato a Eboli — I'd read it before in translation, years ago, but it's nice to have read it in the original as well now, and I'd forgotten most of it. Wonderful writing.

Also finished L'Argent the other day, 18th in my Zola read-through. I'll post properly about that when/if I've read the last two!

>63 Cecrow: British people mostly seem to say "TASS-it-əs", which is also what Wikipedia gives, but I'm sure it depends where and when you learnt Latin. Real pedants probably pronounce the "C" as a "K".

Finished two this week:

Dombey and Son, Dickens. Won't be a favorite, but interesting nonetheless.

Mansfield Park: an annotated edition, Austen, intro and annotations by Deidre Shauna Lynch. Annotations enhanced the reading without being overdone. I listened to the audiobook read by Juliet Stevenson, and then after each listening session went back to read the annotations for those pages.

I recently finished two classics: A Moveable Feast by Hemingway, and the Ambassadors by Henry James. A Moveable Feast is Hemingway's memoir of Paris in the '20s, and it is fascinating-- especially his portrayals of Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.

Can't say I liked The Ambassadors as much. I've read a few other novels by James, which were ok-- but this one pretty much ended it for me. It will be a long time before I pick up another Henry James novel. The whole novel is just so overdone.

I have finished a reread of Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck - it was more powerful than I had remembered from my (admitedly long ago) high school reading.

Now I am enjoying Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, which has a lot of the comic elements that Tom Jones has but with a decidedly anti-Richardson slant (the main character is supposed to be Pamela's brother)...

Dickens' "Pickwick Papers" and Ovid's Metamorphoses.

>69 Betelgeuse:, I've been reading Dickens in publication order, so far up to Hard Times, and Pickwick is still one of my very favourites. He was never so light with his comedy again as in that.

>70 Cecrow: I’ve read a lot of Dickens over the years, out of order. I’m nearly finished with Pickwick, and I agree with you. I’m finding the final hundred pages to be some of the funniest. The characters, as usual, are wonderful — particularly Sam Weller.

I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Wonderful book

Reading To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I may be late to this classic, but at least I'm there now and enjoying it. :)

I've just started Dickens' Barnaby Rudge; so far not bad. Very mysterious. Historical fiction based on the anti-Catholic ("Gordon") Riots of 1780. I'm not a fan of A Tale of Two Cities, so we'll see how it goes.

>69 Betelgeuse: (etc.), >74 kac522: I've just been reading Angus Wilson's The world of Charles Dickens and realised that Barnaby Rudge is one of the few I haven't read yet. I must get to it some time! The Wilson book is very enjoyable, and possibly almost counts as a classic in itself — it came out in 1970. He obviously loved Pickwick, but didn't think much of it as a novel (unfairly, because it quite clearly isn't even pretending to be a novel). The books he praises most are Bleak House and — less predictably — Great Expectations. He uses the expression "near miss" rather a lot, e.g. of Dombey and son and Our mutual friend.

>75 thorold: I read Dombey a couple of months ago, and yeah, it was a "almost complete miss" for me, except for the beginning about the young Dombey. I just could not get into it. I enjoyed Our Mutual Friend much more. My favorites are Bleak House, Little Dorrit and all the parts of David Copperfield that don't include dear Dora. After Barnaby, I only have Edwin Drood left to read.

I'll have to check out the Wilson book, thanks.

>75 thorold: My favorites are David Copperfield and Bleak House, but I have fondness for Great Expectations and many more.

I finally finished Ulysses. Nice to have that off my TBR pile. Done! Done at last!

>78 madpoet:, congrats! Major milestone accomplished.

>78 madpoet: Congrats!

Thanks! It was not an enjoyable experience, but I'm glad it's behind me.

I'm currently working my way through Schiller's plays, something I escaped at school. I'm enjoying it so far — I finished reading Don Carlos yesterday and celebrated by watching a video of Verdi's version. Wallenstein next.

I was just looking to see what was coming up in Volume II and realised that it includes the notes and introductions for the plays in Volume I. That's going to slow me down a bit, now that I know they are there...

>81 madpoet:, oh, lol! I guess I can't argue I enjoyed it either, but with supplementary help I can say I at least appreciated what he was doing. Can't pay me to read the Wake, though.

Portrait, on the other hand, is among my top ten.

>81 madpoet: & >83 Cecrow: Glad to hear that I am not the only one who found it less than enjoyable! For years I have had some lingering guilt about not liking Ulysses as my father apparently really liked it & he and I generally had common tastes in books. But I (in common with >83 Cecrow:) found Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man much more to my taste & Dubliners as well.

I have finished Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées by Balzac, an epistolary novel tracing the married lives of two school friends. The most surprising thing was a detailed description of the joys and pains of breastfeeding, which you don't expect to meet in a nineteenth century novel written by a man.

>85 MissWatson: Interesting! I need to get back to reading more Balzac.

On a whim, I decided to revisit Vanity Fair - one of my favorite classics :)

Notable classics recently:
Finished Trollope's The Way We Live Now (sept-2020)
Finished Dante's Divine Comedy (sept-2020)
Finished Goethe's Faust (I & II) (sept-2020)
Finished Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (oct-2020)
Moving through Dostoevsky's The Possessed (oct-2020)

Have been targeting 'classics' all year, spurred on by the 75-in-2020 group.
Glad I found this one (always looking for missed gems)

>86 leslie.98: It is. The girls find themselves in very different circumstances but remain close friends.

I'm reading The Book of Margery Kempe, purportedly the earliest autobiography written in English (14th century). I feared it would be as dry as reading Augustine's confessions, but I'm finding it actually engaging for me despite the subject matter. If only Margery had done more to record her surroundings, lifestyle, etc.

>78 madpoet: Good for you

Just finished Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope (1862). A fast and entertaining read, especially if lawyers aren't your favorite people.

>92 kac522: Oh, my copy just arrived. Looking forward to this!

>93 MissWatson: I'll be interested to know what you think of it. I feel like it's quintessential Trollope, although sometimes a bit repetitive, but still good.

I finished Ragged Dick or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks by Horatio Alger, Jr. Alger's name became synonymous in late 19th century (and thereafter) America with rags-to-riches, by-his-bootstraps boys' stories, wherein the hero starts out with nothing and, by pluck, honesty, hard work and a little (or a lot of) luck begins his way up the ladder of success. With Ragged Dick, Alger, who had been trying to make a name as a writer, had found his niche. This book is the first of six "Ragged Dick" novels and Alger wrote many other books of the same genre. But according to Alan Trachtenberg's interesting forward, Ragged Dick was Alger's only true best seller.

At any rate, this was a quick and pleasant read. I can see how it would have held fascination for me had I read it, say, at age 10 or 11. As Trachtenberg points out, Dick and his boot-black pals, at least those with gumption and grit enough to want to improve themselves, are not necessarily looking to get rich right away. Their goal is simply to raise themselves up from their street lives of danger and hunger into a more respectable life path. They just want a chance, in other words. In addition to making a name for himself as a writing, Alger was hoping with these books to create a bridge between the upper classes and the lower, to create some sympathy among the former for the latter, in other words. The coincidences and lucky breaks pile one upon the other in quick order here, too frequently for the plot to be taken seriously. But, again as per Trachtenberg, what Alger was creating was more along the lines of mythology than of straightforward fiction.

>95 rocketjk: While I am familiar with Horatio Alger's name & the basic kind of books he wrote, I have never actually read any. It sounds a bit like an American version of some of Dickens (say Oliver Twist for example)... I will have to look on Project Gutenberg for this book.

>96 leslie.98: Much less gritty than Dickens. Dickens was trying to dramatize real life. Alger was creating entertainment for young adults (well, boys, actually) in which he was creating an idealized world where pluck, stick-to-it-ive-ness, honesty and a little bit of luck would ensure that you could get ahead in life.

>97 rocketjk: While I can appreciate the distinction, I can enjoy the children's/YA morality tale that it sounds like you are describing (just like I enjoy Burnett's A Little Princess and Secret Garden, the girl's British version of that genre).

>98 leslie.98: Oh, sure. I enjoyed the book, too. I just didn't want you to go buy a copy expecting to read an American Dickens. You would be disappointed if that was your expectation. Not on my watch!!!

Reading The Ladies' Paradise after liking the PBS series a few years back. My first time with Zola, good so far.

I finished Nine Greek Dramas, edited by Charles W. Eliot. Here's a book that I've had on my shelves waiting to be read since before I first posted my library here on LT. The volume contains four plays by Aeschylus, two by Sophocles, two by Euripides and one by Aristophanes. I know I've probably read a few of these in the past, and seen one or two performed. And certainly I knew the classic, iconic story lines of the House of Atreus plays and, more or less, of Prometheus Bound. But browsing my shelves one day, I came upon this book and decided it would be interesting, maybe even fun, to give these plays a read over the period of a couple of months. I haven't, nor am I going to at this late date, going to make a deep study of the archetypical themes found here, although I do recall well my high school English teachers description of these Greek tragic heroes being brought down, each one, by their "fatal flaws," pride being among the foremost. Editor Charles Eliot's, in his introduction to the Euripides plays notes that these plays are often marked as the beginning of the decline of Greek tragedy, as events begin to be driven by happenstance rather than destiny. This opinion was evidently firmly held by Aristophanes, whose entry here, The Frogs, is a hilarious comedic take down of Euripides, who loses a debate with Aeschylus in Hades about quality their verse.

I can't say I entirely enjoyed every minute of this reading. The long expositions in each play by chorus and character alike could be a slog for this poor Philistine. But I always found the reading interesting. As far as the language is concerned, I agreed with Euripides' take that the poetry in Aeschylus was far superior to the other writers here. That might have to do with the translations, of course, as each playwright received a different translator. Aeschylus is translated here by E. D. A. Morshead. And in fact, according to Wikipedia anyway, Morshead's main claim to fame was his translations of Aeschylus.

Book note: My copy of Nine Greek Dramas is, at this writing, 111 years old. It is Volume 8 of the 1909 edition of the Harvard Classics, noted on the title page as "Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf of Books." Sadly, no, I don't have the whole set. Goodness only knows where I picked up this volume.

I have embarked on Il gattopardo with two different translations on hand. I wonder what I have let myself in for, because I keep checking them against the Italian original...

I just finished Abigail by Magda Szabo. She is perhaps most famous for The Door. I liked The Door and loved Abigail. The latter is in some ways the Hungarian take on the same topic as Elio Vittorini's In Sicily, though ultimately I think Abigail has more to say about the interaction of society and war and silence.

Edit to fix a touchstone

I'm currently listening to Juliet Stevenson reading North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. So good!

Just finished Arrow of God which follows Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The former, of course, is his masterwork, a true classic. Arrow of God doesn't quite reach the same level but I think it's a great novel nonetheless. It presents the encroachment of British colonialism on two small Igbo villages.

I've finished The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson. This classic novel of the Harlem Renaissance (although it was first published a bit earlier) is Johnson's exploration of the schizophrenic, frustrating and tragic existence of black Americans in post-Reconstruction America. The unnamed protagonist, born in Georgia just after the Civil War, is a black man light-skinned enough to pass as white, the child of a rich white man and his black servant. Mother and child are sent north to live outside of the worst of Jim Crow. Talented and smart, our narrator takes us through his education, his desire to spend time and discover his native Southland, his long period in the "sporting life" of the lower echelons of New York City society, and his months exploring Europe, thanks to a rich benefactor who takes him along as a companion.

The narrator is particularly well-spoken and an extremely talented pianist, both conditions facilitating his journeys. The narrator's light skin allows him to step back and forth between the races as if stepping through a membrane, and to observe conditions for blacks both from within and from without. The irony of the white refusal to acknowledge the black middle and professional classes become most apparent to the narrator. Johnson, through his narrator, was a most acute observer. It is only occasionally that we are shown the true violence and tragedies of Jim Crow, but those realities always are present in the background. That the character must even think about choosing between being white and being black, instead of just concentrating on being himself, struck me as a dominant theme of the novel, as are the ways in which life as a black man will as a matter of course be limited, again making that choice fraught with the possibilities of danger and regret.

>104 kac522: I love both that book and that particular narration! Just a heads up in case you don't already know (I didn't my first time reading this), the book is unfinished as Gaskell died before she could complete it.

>107 leslie.98: N&S was serialized in 1854-55 . It was Wives and Daughters that was not finished before Gaskell's death in 1865.

>107 leslie.98:, >108 ELiz_M: Yes, Wives and Daughters was unfinished at Gaskell's death. I haven't read that one yet. I still have a couple more Gaskell novels (Ruth and Sylvia's Lovers) before I get there. I just finished The Moorland Cottage, which was also very good, although short.

North & South is a complete novel, although I read somewhere that she shortened the ending a bit on Dickens' request for his serial publication.

I read N & S about 10 years ago and enjoyed it, but it wasn't a favorite. I then saw the movie, which I loved (a young Richard Armitage helped a lot!). But this audiobook listening is making the book come alive for me, much more than my first reading. It's more of an emotional experience, I think, and I feel closer to our heroine Margaret than I did on the first reading. Not sure why, but there it is.

>108 ELiz_M: Oh, dear - I misread the original post. You are, of course, quite correct.

>102 MissWatson: It has been a fascinating exercise to compare two German translations against the original Italian. And the original won hands-down. How I wish I could learn all the world's languages!

Loved North & South when I read it for the first time this summer, looking forward to more by Gaskell.

>112 Cecrow: if you haven't seen the movie, you're in for a treat. A young Richard Armitage....

I finished Rachel Ray by Anthony Trollope, in my quest to read all of Trollope's 47 novels (this was #25). Sweet story set in a small country village--rather different for Trollope.

I finished a reread of W. Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale. I know that his Of Human Bondage is considered his tour-de-force but I love this book so much more!

I'm reading Ovid's Metamorphoses as translated by Allen Mandelbaum in an Everyman's Library edition.