A new Classics Club Spin was just announced and since I had good luck with my last CCSpin pick — The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett — I’m going for it again.
Last night I was looking around for what to read next and decided to check out my Classics Club list. Lately, my reading has been focused on reading new releases, and while that’s exciting and has turned me on to some excellent stories, as always I have started hankering for something old. A story that has stood the test of time and/or that opens a door to the past.
I reviewed my Classics Club list and decided that if I want to get serious about reading the books I’ve listed, it would help to have the books “on-hand” to combat inertia. I downloaded all of the titles that were available on Project Gutenberg. And then some others, lots of others. My WiFi and ereader had a huge workout last night.
So, here’s my list of for this Spin:
- Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, 1605
- The Monk, Matthew Gregory Lewis, 1796
- Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, 1819
- The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, 1862
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1866
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, 1869
- The Bostonians Henry James, 1886
- The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896
- The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin, 1903
- The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams, 1918
- Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, 1919
- So Big by Edna Ferber, 1924
- The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, 1924
- Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, 1929
- A Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain, 1933
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, 1943
- From Here to Eternity by James Jones, 1951 <— I’ll be reading this novel
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding, 1954
- Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, 1956
I am prepared to read whichever title the Fates point to when the announcement is made on August 9th. Except for The Magic Mountain and From Here to Eternity, my ereader now contains all of the early titles and I own hard copies of those still under copyright.
And now I wait a week for the Spin number to be announced.
In the meantime, I’m going to start Forever Amber by Kathleen Windsor. It’s a historical romance published in 1944 and 972 pages long, so it’ll take me awhile to get through (or to even make a significant dent). I was almost named Amber because of this novel, which I wrote about a few months ago.
If this is your first time visiting my blog, welcome! And you’ve never heard of the Classics Club, here’s the link to their About page: https://theclassicsclubblog.wordpress.com/about/
If you hate a book on this list, I don’t want to hear about it! But if there is one or more that you love, please share the love. 🙂