Bloomsday sign up

It is 12:39 am, a time of the day when I am susceptible to ill-thought out enthusiasms, usually involving expensive credit card purchases. This time I can at least comfort myself that I won't be wailing "Why O why did I do that?!" in 55 days.

  • The challenge is to at least start reading Ulysses or some other James Joyce book on June 16th.
  • Ulysses was already on my reading list.
  • Ulysses was LAST on  my reading list (before I alphabetised it), for a reason.  Everybody seems to fear it, and I figure there must be some kind of wisdom of crowds behind that.  I tremble before it too.
  • On the other hand, @o_delaisse is coordinating this readalong, and she is right about Clarissa, read it, it's fantastic.
  • I am kind of sold on the idea of powering through Ulysses without trying to figure it all out.  I just know it will take me way longer than a day!  More like a week, minimum.
  • Bloomsday the celebration doesn't mean anything to me.  On the other hand, why not that day?  June 16 would give me April to finish Clarissa, and six weeks of May+ June to read The Tale of Genji (seems reasonable),  then go for option 2 on Bloomsday.  
  • All that sounds like a plan.  Now to sleep

 

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What I was reading before The Classics Club

This is just a quick map of my last year, reading-wise:
  • On June 6 2011 I started reading the NET Bible in chronological order, using Bible Study Tools to mark off my progress.  I did this because I am an atheist in a family with some branches deeply into Christianity, and I wanted to be able to (truthfully) say, "why yes, I have in fact read the bible - cover to cover!"  
    - Best OT book: Ecclesiastes. Existential mullings which seems out of place in the OT.  
    - Worst OT: Levicticus. Mean-spirited.
    - Best NT: The Gospels
    - Worst NT: books written by Paul.  IIRC, he showed up and took over Christianity, adding in stuff that didn't seem very Christ-like. 
    - Most boring: Numbers and other books that are basically accounting
    - Most surprised to learn: Who of my family and friends couldn't discuss any part of the bible with me because they've NEVER read ANY of it, yet still identify as Christians. And have belonged to bible study groups!
    - Would I read it again? Yes, most of it, but next time I might try the KJV for the language, and I'd read the NT (gospels only) straight through, rather than chronologically. 
    Finished this on Dec 31st.
  • I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, pub. 1943, sort of a cross between A Little House on the Prairie and Angela's Ashes. I've been fond of poverty literature since I was a kid when Five Little Peppers, A Little Princess (aka Sara Crewe), The Railway Children, and A Girl of the Limberlost were some of my favourite books.  In fact, this sort of reading may have set me up well for my current lifestyle ;-).  Or sapped any material ambition, whatever.
  • The tv promos for the tv series Justified got me to read Elmore Leonard's Pronto, Riding the Rap, and When the Women Come Out to Dance (short stories, includes Fire in the Hole, which Justified is based on).  Very easy reads. I've bought his new one, Raylan, but haven't read it yet.
  • As soon as I finished the bible I started on the Maude's translation of War and Peace, just because I wanted something meaty and "worthy" to start the new year.  I enjoyed the scale and detail: I like to think it's the book version of viewing a Rembrandt, something I'll never get to do, but I can read War and Peace. That said, my interest petered out four chapters after the masterly narrative ended, so I still have eight chapters of Tolstoy's theory of history in the second epilogue to wade through. He's expostulating on why soldiers are willing to go to risk their own lives and murder other men they've never met to fight someone else's battle (but whose?), and if you've read the first fifteen books and the first epilogue, you know Tolstot's conclusion already.  Plus, I don't buy what he's selling (see first bullet point). My Kindle kept dropping from my hands as my eyelids closed and I drifted off to sleep.
  • By the time I'd decided I was finished with W&P, Feb 6th, I'd had the curtain idea, so I wanted the next book to be something that wouldn't embarrass me in years to come.  So I looked at lists of "best books" and decided on The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha in the John Rutherford translation.  I LOVED THIS BOOK!  It's just a delight.  It's not pretentious - there are fart and vomit jokes and plenty of fisticuffs.  Alonso Quijano has rotted his brain from reading too many rubbish books (exactly like my teachers said I would do when I was at college (high school in the US): Mills and Boon, if you must know) and transformed himself into his representative literary hero, Don Quixote.  He grabs a neighbour, Sancho Panza, to be the best squire ever and they embark on not one but two road trips.  The second sally is the better one (and meta to boot).  Finished March 6.
  • After War and Peace and Don Quixote I felt like I was really getting into the classics groove, and when I peeked at The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had by Susan Wise Bauer, I was interested to see Don Quixote right at the beginning of the novels list, so I was off to a good start. The next one was The Pilgrims Progress, but after reading the Bible last year, I've had my fill of religion for now, so I skipped past that to Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and so that became the first book I read off my list for The Classics Club.

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The Curtain Reading Log: Stay classy

Around 10  years ago, I bought some old cotton curtains for $20 from a thrift shop.  They were too wide for my windows, weren't lined, had sun damage near a couple of the edges, plus some mysterious holes (from bugs?).  The bookshelf design ("Bestsellers" was printed along the selvedge), however, made up for these flaws.


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Last January, Debbie, my neighbour, helped me paint my living room walls a soft grey before the new grey carpet was laid.  We were anticipating  how fresh the room would look and although Deb was not impressed with the limp tatty curtains that I was determined would stay (I like vintage stuff), we discussed which of the book titles we had read.  We have both read The Good Earth, I have read Gone With the Wind, neither of us have read Hawaii yet, and so on.  At the time I was reading War and Peace and she looked in vain for that title on the curtain.  Alas, it is not part of the design. "That's okay, I'll just grab a marker and fill in one of the blanks," I joked.  

This idea  for a unique reading log stuck in my brain for a bit, and I decided to run with it.  I bought curtain lining and new tape and Deb and I cut down the curtains to a reasonable width for the wall space, discarding the worst bits and even patching the worst holes then adding new tape and the lining.  Now when I finish a book, I'll write the title on a blank book spine (there are over 1100 available) with a fabric pen.

The beauty of The Classics Club for my curtain project is that all the titles have already stood the test of time.

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Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Book review will be added by end of March.

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Classics Club ~50 books list

Completion date: March, 2017

I chose titles that I can read on my kindle, because it's lightweight and I can increase the font. I may have to substitute #29 for The Clever Woman of the Family by Charlotte Mary Yonge, because I haven't found The Magic Mountain as an ebook yet... but in five years, who knows?

Alhabetical order:

  1. Emma - Jane Austen [1816]
  2. Persuasion - Jane Austen [1818]
  3. Old Goriot - Honore de Balzac [1835]
  4. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [1966]
  5. My Antonia - Willa Cather [1918]
  6. The Return of Don Quixote - G. K. Chesterton [1926]
  7. The Awakening - Kate Chopin [1899]
  8. On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin  [1859]
  9. Bleak House - Charles Dickens [1852/53]
  10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens [1860/61]
  11. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1880]
  12. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1866]
  13. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1869]
  14. An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser [1925]
  15. Middlemarch - George Eliot [1874]
  16. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert [1856]
  17. Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol [1842]
  18. Hunger - Knut Hamsun [1890]
  19. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne [1850] (currently reading)
  20. The Odyssey - Homer [8th Century BC], translated by Robert Fagles [1997]
  21. The Portrait of A Lady - Henry James [1881]
  22. Ulysses - James Joyce [1922]
  23. The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella - Charlotte Lennox [1752]
  24. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka [1915]
  25. The Princess of Cleves - Madame de La Fayette [1678]
  26. Sons and Lovers - D H Lawrence [1913]
  27. The Monk - Matthew Lewis [1796]
  28. Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann [1901]
  29. The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann[1924]
  30. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville [1851]
  31. 1984 - George Orwell [1949]
  32. Animal Farm - George Orwell [1945]
  33. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson [1748]
  34. Pamela - Samuel Richardson [1740]
  35. Sir Charles Grandison - Samuel Richardson [1753]
  36. Rob Roy - Sir Walter Scott [1817]
  37. Waverley - Sir Walter Scott [1814]
  38. The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu; Translated by Royall Tyler (currently reading) [early 11th Century]
  39. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal [1839] translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff
  40. The Red and the Black - Stendhal [1830] translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff
  41. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [1758-67]
  42. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift [1726/35]
  43. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray [1847/48]
  44. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy [1878]
  45. Last 8 chapters of War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [1869]
  46. Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev [1862]
  47. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain [1884]
  48. Candide - Voltaire [1759]; translated by William F. Fleming
  49. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf [1925]
  50. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf [1927]
  51. The Waves - Virginia Woolf [1931]
  52. Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin; Translated by Gladys Yang [~1750]
  53. Germinal - Emile Zola [1885]

Chronological order:

  1. The Odyssey - Homer [8th Century BC], translated by Robert Fagles [1997]  (currently reading)
  2. The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu; Translated by Royall Tyler (currently reading) [early 11th Century]
  3. The Princess of Cleves - Madame de La Fayette [1678]
  4. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift [1726/35]
  5. Pamela - Samuel Richardson [1740]
  6. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson [1748]
  7. Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin; Translated by Gladys Yang [~1750]
  8. The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella - Charlotte Lennox [1752]
  9. Sir Charles Grandison - Samuel Richardson [1753]
  10. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [1758-67]
  11. Candide - Voltaire [1759]; translated by William F. Fleming
  12. The Monk - Matthew Lewis [1796]
  13. Waverley - Sir Walter Scott [1814]
  14. Emma - Jane Austen [1816]
  15. Rob Roy - Sir Walter Scott [1817]
  16. Persuasion - Jane Austen [1818]
  17. The Red and the Black - Stendhal [1830] translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff
  18. Old Goriot - Honore de Balzac [1835]
  19. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal [1839] translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff
  20. Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol [1842]
  21. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray [1847/48]
  22. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne [1850]
  23. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville [1851]
  24. Bleak House - Charles Dickens [1852/53]
  25. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert [1856]
  26. On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin  [1859]
  27. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens [1860/61]
  28. Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev [1862]
  29. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1866]
  30. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1869]
  31. Last 8 chapters of War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [1869]
  32. Middlemarch - George Eliot [1874]
  33. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy [1878]
  34. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1880]
  35. The Portrait of A Lady - Henry James [1881]
  36. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain [1884]
  37. Germinal - Emile Zola [1885]
  38. Hunger - Knut Hamsun [1890]
  39. The Awakening - Kate Chopin [1899]
  40. Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann [1901]
  41. Sons and Lovers - D H Lawrence [1913]
  42. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka [1915]
  43. My Antonia - Willa Cather [1918]
  44. Ulysses - James Joyce [1922]
  45. The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann[1924]
  46. An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser [1925]
  47. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf [1925]
  48. The Return of Don Quixote - G. K. Chesterton [1926]
  49. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf [1927]
  50. The Waves - Virginia Woolf [1931]
  51. Animal Farm - George Orwell [1945]
  52. 1984 - George Orwell [1949]
  53. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [1966]

 

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