2024 What classic are you reading?

I didn't see a thread for this year, so I took the liberty of creating one.

I have started the year with a classic Danish author, Herman Bang, and read Sommerfreuden. A lovely tale of a small town in Northern Jutland where the local innkeeper wants to profit from the new fashion for summer resorts.

And because it's the bicentenary of Wilkie Collins' birthday, I plan to re-read some of his novels over the following months.

In a few days I'm going to start reading Time Regained, which will finally put In Search of Lost Time to rest after three and a half years of reading it off and on.

Classics I read in January:

--A London Child of the 1870s by Molly Hughes (1934); a memoir
--North and South (Norton Critical Edition), Elizabeth Gaskell (1855); a re-read
--2 stories by Elizabeth Gaskell: "The Manchester Marriage" (1858) and "Mr Harrison's Confessions" (1851)

and currently finishing up:
The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle (1891); an adventure tale set during the Hundred Years' War

I have finished The woman in white which was different from what I remembered, in some ways. Which means I'm probably mixing it up with the TV version in my head. What is really scary to a modern reader is to see how the women are completely at the mercy of their menfolk.

February Classics--all re-reads this month:

Bleak House, Charles Dickens (1853); on audiobook
Nina Balatka, Anthony Trollope (1867)
Hard Times, Charles Dickens (1854); on audiobook
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (1883); on audiobook
Lady Susan, Jane Austen (1871); on audiobook

Modern Classics--two new, one re-read:

Evil Under the Sun, Agatha Christie (1941)
John Bull's Other Island, G B Shaw (1904); play
Pygmalion, G B Shaw (1914); play; a re-read

I have read La femme de trente ans and was grateful for the copious notes and introductions which explained the genesis of the book. The disparate episodes would have made little sense otherwise. Not a favourite.

I just finished my second novel by Herman Bang Am Weg, and it is every bit as great as the first. I'm really glad to have discovered this author.

With a reading group on Zoom, I am working through De Anima, Aristotle's exploration of psychology in general, and human psychology in particular. Well worth the effort.

I have finished Guy Mannering which is a delightful romance set in early 1780s Scotland.

I'm not sure everybody will consider this a classic, but I finished Homage to Catalonia which, as most here will know, is George Orwell's memoir of his time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. I very much enjoyed and was interested in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell writes with clarity, a terrific eye for detail and description, and humor. You very much get the feel for what it was like to be in those mountain trenches, despite (or maybe because of) Orwell's understated, wry writing style. He describes the mood of optimism, togetherness and idealism of Barcelona when he first gets there, and observes with regret that when he returned from the front lines just a few months later, the whole mood of the revolution had dampened, and class divisions were already reasserting themselves. Orwell also tells us of his bewilderment and eventual irritation at Spanish politics, but his great and abiding affection for the Spanish people.

>10 rocketjk:

I, for one, have no doubt that anything Orwell wrote is a classic. Thanks for your description; that title is still on the virtual TBR pile.

Classics I read in March:
A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe (1722)
Waverley, Sir Walter Scott (1814)
Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens (1857); on audiobook read by Simon Vance

20th century Classics:
My Uncle Silas, H. E. Bates (1938)
The Quiet American, Graham Greene (1955)

>12 kac522:, nice list, I've just started Waverley.

>13 Cecrow: Waverley started out slow for me, especially with the dialects. But it picked up at about the half-way point and then flew by. Interestingly, sometimes I found Scott's writing in the historical notes in his appendix easier to read than the style he used in the novel.

>14 kac522:, I was just coming back to say, he's rather stiff at the beginning but now it's improving.

I have finished Le rêve which has rather more than its fair share of purity and virginity and incredibly beautiful young people. Not to mention embroidery techniques.

>16 MissWatson: It’s quite a shock if you’ve just read L’Assommoir or La Terre, isn’t it? I first read it years ago when I knew nothing about it but had the vague idea that Zola was French and shocking, and I kept expecting the shocking bit to be in the next chapter…

I’m just getting into Death comes for the archbishop, my first brush with Willa Cather.

>17 thorold: I haven't gotten round to them yet, but I found the greed in L'argent shocking enough to be surprised by this one.