I am super excited to participate in Classics Spin #17 because I haven’t participated in years. Like everyone who joined the Classics Club Blog, I made a list of fifty classics. Unfortunately, I have ignored this challenge in the past three years, so I am nowhere near completion. Reading lists remind me of school, and I have enough reading lists to go through in graduate school. Because I predominantly read classics anyway, I don’t feel guilty about fudging the rules a bit to participate in the Classics Spins.
My list this time will include 20 classics that are on my physical and/or electronic TBRs. In January 2018, I implemented a challenge that has effectively slowed my book buying to a halt. And so far, I am quite pleased with the results. Borrowing has encouraged me to take more reading risks. I read more broadly and diversely than I did in the past.
Please note that some of the books on this list are relatively recent classics. Finally, the books are in chronological order by date of publication.
- Metamorphoses (c. 8 CE) – Ovid
- The Chronicles (c. 1370-1380) – Froissart (abridged by Penguin)
- Piers the Plowman (c. 1370-1390) – William Langland
- The History of King Richard III (c. 1513-1518) – Thomas More
- Notre-Dame de Paris [The Hunchback of Notre-Dame] (1829) – Victor Hugo
- North and South (1855) – Elizabeth Gaskell
- The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1888) – Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) – Oscar Wilde
- Life of St. Francis of Assisi (1893) – Paul Sabatier
- Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) – Edmond Rostand
- The Souls of Black Folk (1903) – W.E.B. Du Bois
- The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) by Baroness Emma Orczy
- The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle (1922) – Hugh Lofting
- Sous le soleil de satan [Under Satan’s Sun] (1926) – Georges Bernanos
- The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) – Thomas Merton
- The Old Man and the Sea (1952) – Ernest Hemingway
- Another Country (1962) – James Baldwin
- A Single Man (1964) – Christopher Isherwood
- The Chocolate War (1974) – Robert Cormier
- Howl’s Moving Castle (1986) – Diana Wynne Jones
I like the breadth of your selections – from Ovid to Diana Wynne Jones is quite a range. North and South is a really enjoyable book by the way
That’s a great list! I loved Cyrano de Bergerac and The Scarlet Pimpernel. The Dr Dolittle books were childhood favourites too. I hope the spin picks something good for you.
You always have such interesting titles. Dr. Doolittle threw me back in time, -I read it to my girls when they were little, and it’s so charming.
You have some I’m interested in reading myself, and I’m curious about the rest, and curious to see what you get.
I feel like some of these picks are pretty contemporary for you 😛
yes. Some were very contemporary. But I got Piers the Plowman which I’ve been told is a nightmare to read. Yay for me 🙂
Always with the difficult books