2023 What classics are you reading?

How is this topic only getting started now?

I'm beginning The Master and Margarita, which might belong in this category. The introduction reading is just about mandatory, one of those books with a great story behind the story.

In January I read these classics:

The Belton Estate, Anthony Trollope (1866); a re-read
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte (1847); a re-read
A Pair of Silk Stockings and Other Stories, Kate Chopin (1894)
The Doctor's Wife, Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1864)
The Highland Widow, Sir Walter Scott (1827), a novella

and these children's classics:
Understood Betsy, Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1916)
Caddie Woodlawn, Carol Ryrie Brink (1935)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain (1876)

My classics this month:

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass (1845)
Roughing It In the Bush, Susanna Moodie, (1852)
Framley Parsonage, Anthony Trollope (1861)
The Lady of Launay, Anthony Trollope (1878) --novella
Two Heroines of Plumplington, Anthony Trollope (1882) --novella

Modern classics:
The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West (1918)
West with the Night, Beryl Markham (1942)
What Mrs McGillicuddy Saw aka "The 4.50 from Paddington", Agatha Christie (1957)

>3 kac522:, I really need to get around to reading Frederick Douglass, feels like I've been saying that for years now.

Tripped across a list of "Best Agatha Christie you've never read" and feel like I need to pursue those, been a while since I've read her.

>4 Cecrow: The Douglass narrative is short--maybe 100 pages.

I have been trying to read one Agatha Christie a month for a while now, mostly in publishing order. But she wrote at least 1 a year between the 1920s and 1970s, so I have a ways to go. I am currently at 1940; the one I read this month was for an online group read (not LT), so I jumped forward to 1957. It was a good one (Miss Marple).

Dickens, Bleak House. It's a beefy old tome.

>6 L.Bloom: Mr Tulkinghorn--so, so evil. Love the mini-series with Charles Dance playing that role.

>3 kac522: & >4 Cecrow: I read the Frederick Douglass autobiography relatively recently and found it powerful. Even more moving, though, at least for me, was Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs.

>6 L.Bloom:, >7 kac522:, my favourite Dickens, I'd have to say, for its plot and atmosphere primarily. Plus spontaneous combustion!

My Classics this month:

The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane (1895)
Phoebe, Junior, Margaret Oliphant (1876)
The Last Chronicle of Barset, Anthony Trollope (1867), on audiobook
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare (1600)

Modern Classics:
The Patriotic Murders, Agatha Christie (1940)
Madame de Treymes and Three Novellas, Edith Wharton (1916)

I just recently got to Red Badge myself, finally figured out what the title was referring to. Surprised me that it had no element of "war is awful" in its theme, although there's certainly awful elements depicted.

I've started Great Expectations, second-last Dickens novel I haven't read yet.

>11 Cecrow: After I read The Red Badge of Courage, I then found a short story by Stephen Crane a year later (1896) called "The Veteran." Henry Fleming is again the main character, this time many years later as a grandfather and celebrated, but humble, war hero in his small town. Completely different feel to the story from the earlier novel.

And I'm currently listening to Barnaby Rudge, which is a re-read for me.

I picked up a modern classic in an English bookshop in Rome, Pereira Maintains, that is really quite good. I had not previously heard of Antonio Tabucchi and that appears to be a big gap in my literary knowledge. Highly recommended for anyone with any interest in Portugal, Fernando Pessoa and/or the interwar period in Europe.

>11 Cecrow: I recently read Great Expectations myself and it became my favorite Dickens. I feel like it is his true masterpiece. The narrative is lean and emotionally compelling in an almost Hemmingway-like way.

Currently reading The Tempest.

Currently reading Wilkie Collins' No Name.

Rather thin on classics this month:

Under the Greenwood Tree, Thomas Hardy (1872); a re-read on audiobook

Modern classics:

The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen, Elizabeth von Arnim (1904)
The Betsy-Tacy Treasury, Maud Hart Lovelace (1943) -- the first 4 books in the children's series
The Squire, Enid Bagnold (1938)

and have spent the month with Barnaby Rudge on audiobook--should finish in a week or so.

Reading currently

The Pickwick Papers
On the Road

finished recently As I Lay Dying

Pickwick is great, Barnaby was just okay but worth reading.

I'm going to try Jude the Obscure but not looking forward to it, lol. Never liked Hardy but that was years ago.

First time reading Moby-Dick. Wow. I'm about 3/4 through and it may be my new favorite book or tied for first. Lives up to all of the hype.

>19 L.Bloom:, glad to hear that. I read it in 7th grade (around forty years ago now) and have rosy memories of it as a great adventure story. I've since wondered if I read it wrong somehow, lol. Still call it one of my favourite novels though I've never gone back.

>17 KMcPhail: how did you feel about As I Lay Dying? It's the only Faulkner I've read, and I really didn't understand what people like about it. Although I don't get Hemingway either, and I always feel like I'm missing something.

After a recent trip to Scotland I'm reading Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.

>22 nrmay: Fun!

>22 nrmay: I liked Kidnapped better than Treasure Island. My edition (Modern Library) had a lot of notes and vocabulary list, which helped a lot.

Hi everyone! My first post in this group.

The classics I've read so far this year include long-overdue rereads of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre (what can I say? There was snow outside my window and cold wind - perfect!), and some new reading, too.

I've read a lot of Dickens, but never Great Expectations. I found it charming and engaging, though inexplicably wordy in some areas. I've read that Dickens literally got paid by the word in some instances - is that true?

Also, maybe not a "classic" classic but I read Not As a Stranger recently - dated, but well written, and good character development across the board.

Last week I finished The Great Gatsby and am currently working through Tender Is the Night. The latter is not as engaging as the former to me, but I am thoroughly enjoying F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing.

>21 Darth-Heather: Hi, I thought that As I Lay Dying was okay, and appreciated the storyline more than the only other Faulkner novel I've read: The Sound and the Fury. Not particularly compelling for me, either.

>17 KMcPhail: I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the novel!

>25 terriks: Welcome to the group! (Fair warning that this one can go silent for months at a time).

I'll be doing my first reading of the Brontes next month (finishing up Moby-Dick at the moment), what are your thoughts on the books? I'm most interested in Wuthering Heights.

I read Great Expectations and Bleak House over the winter. I did enjoy Great Expectations but overall determined that Dickens may not be for me after finishing Bleak House which was a brutal slog of a book.

>27 L.Bloom: Thanks for the welcome!

I re-visited Wuthering Heights and, wow - it had apparently been longer than I recalled. It's a good story. Complex characters, though not particularly sympathetic ones. And be prepared for some violence. It's not hard to appreciate the logic behind using the male pseudonym of Ellis Bell rather than flaunt the author's real name.

I liked it a lot.

I then turned to Jane Eyre, and it was a totally different experience. A charmer.

I've never read Bleak House, or even know much about it

My June classics, in order completed:

--Three Tales, Gustave Flaubert (1877)
--Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens (1841); re-read on audiobook
--Lady Susan, Jane Austen (1871 post); re-read on audiobook
--The Time Machine, H. G. Wells (1895)
--The Betrothed, Alessandro Manzoni (1840 revised edition)

Modern classic:

--The Girls, Edna Ferber (1921)

Gritting my teeth as I begin Jude the Obscure. I couldn't stand Hardy thirty years ago, but it's off to an engaging start at least.

>30 Cecrow:

I really got into Jude in undergrad. I wonder how I'd view it now. Hardy's novels are bleak but so well put together.

New here. Pocket bio: Retired humanities teacher, residing in Tlaxcala, Mexico, with two dogs and six indoor cats. Passionate about literature, history, philosophy, classical music and opera, jazz, cinema, and similar subjects. Nostalgic guy. Politically centrist. BA in American Studies from Yale; MAs in English and Education from Boston University. Born in northern New Jersey. Have lived and worked in San Francisco, Chicago, northern Nevada, northeast Wisconsin, South Korea.

Just finished and highly recommended: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It. Having greatly enjoyed the 1936 movie version, I took up the novel and was interested to discover that it is very different in many respects and covers a much longer time-span than even the two generations of the movie. A rich and wonderful reading experience, completely absorbing. One startling development that is not in the film knocked me right off my chair.

I especially relate to this novel because I have lived on its Northern Wisconsin turf. “Butte des Morts” is Neenah in the northeast, close to where I resided in Little Chute. “Iron Ridge” is Hurley in the northwest, the great northwoods area that I often visited. The timber and paper industries are at the core of the narrative.

Ferber is adept at what critics call “solidity of specification”, description of exterior elements as in Balzac. You always know how the rooms are furnished, how the characters are dressed. (I was surprised to have it pointed out that Trollope, even writing at the length he does, doesn’t much bother with this, and it is true.)

>32 PatrickMurtha: If you can find a copy, I read Ferber's The Girls last month (re-issued by Belt Publishing in 2023) and loved it. It's set in 1916 Chicago, but there's a fair amount of Chicago history and streets (driving up Michigan Avenue, for example) in it. Ferber's So Big is also eye-opening about early Chicago. Her book Fanny Herself is set in the fictional "Winnebago", which is based on Appleton, WI, where she lived as a teenager. That's one I hope to read soon.

Re Trollope: no, he's not very interested in furnishings. You'll find more of that sort of detail in Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell and even more in Margaret Oliphant.

^ Thanks! I definitely want to read more Ferber, and I’m very interested in Chicago fiction.

I was a member of the Appleton Rotary when I lived in that area. I didn’t notice that Ferber was much discussed locally, which is too bad.

>34 PatrickMurtha: She seems to be lost to Chicagoans, too. But kudos to the Chicago Public Library for ordering multiple copies of the new re-print of The Girls, which I found by accident when searching for Ferber titles to read for the June LT Monthly Author Challenge: https://www.librarything.com/topic/349888#

Ferber doesn’t get the love that Edith Wharton and Willa Cather do, but she deserves more attention. Middlebrow is back! But while the middlebrow writers * across the pond are having a moment (see Scott Thompson’s Furrowed Middlebrow website), their American equivalents are still mostly waiting.

* I might qualify, “female middlebrow writers”, because the men who fit the descriptor are under-discussed, and it makes me uneasy. I understand why Scott set up his website to catalogue the women writers, and he has done an amazing job, but there remains plenty of work to be done for the male middlebrow writers. I have seen online reading groups that similarly restrict to discussion of women writers (actually, I belong to one), and another middlebrow group that restricts its MEMBERSHIP to women, which strikes me as ridiculous (but I’m not looking to get into any fights 🙂 ).

Yes, I do love Furrowed Middlebrow--I've got a D. E. Stevenson Young Mrs Savage right now from the library.

I hadn't thought about middlebrow male writers, but I'm sure they are out there. One of my all-time favorite novels is A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr. I'm not sure if he's middlebrow or not, but he could use more recognition.

>32 PatrickMurtha: Speaking of Trollope, if you're interested there's a Group Read of The Claverings led by Liz that just started this week:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/351958#

^ Thanks! I read The Claverings a few years ago, loved it. Reading Phineas Finn now.

^^ James Hilton, Nigel Balchin, and Nevil Shute are perfect examples of male middlebrow.

>39 PatrickMurtha: OK. I have A Town Like Alice on my Summer TBR to read for another challenge. I'll start with that.

^ Nice! I’m currently reading Hilton’s Random Harvest.

>41 PatrickMurtha:

Welcome, Patrick!

I notice what I interpret as your attempts to link to a previous post in this thread. The way to accomplish this is to type a right-facing angle bracket immediately followed by the number of the previous post you are following up on. The html parser will turn this into a link.

If you hover over the number of an individual post, you will see the URL for that post. With this you can link to a post in this topic/thread from another thread using the standard <a href="... blah blah syntax, or of course to any other web resource like a news site.

In addition, you can include basic html markup in the text of a post to accomplish italics, bold, etc. Special characters can be included using either their numeric or mnemonic IDs: e.g. in these Talk threads, square brackets are parsed as touchstones to titles and so can't simply be typed. If you actually want to display brackets then you type

&#xx; where xx=91 for left and xx=93 for right.

Thanks for the guidance!

Reading this morning in Plutarch’s Lives, the Dryden / Clough translation in the old Modern Library Giant edition. Now that’s as classical as it gets. Long sentences with many clauses, you really have to pay attention. I like this quotation about empire: “And indeed there was nothing did more advance the greatness of Rome, than that she did always unite and incorporate those whom she conquered into herself.”

Along with books such as Plutarch, one might take a look at Moses Hadas’s helpful guide Ancilla to Classical Reading.

>44 PatrickMurtha:

I'm surprised that Dryden slipped up by separating an adverbial phrase from its verbs: "into herself" reads better if it immediately follows "unite and incorporate". ;-)

“Into herself” are the key words in the sentence, not “whom she conquered”, and come most effectively at the end.

>46 PatrickMurtha:

Hah! Of this are flame wars fueled.

Well, I’ve made my answer, and that’s all I’ll have to say.

>48 PatrickMurtha:

Too bad. I was going to suggest that we step outside to settle this; my weapon of choice would be pointed irony.

Flame wars are so 2005.

>50 PatrickMurtha:

Try telling that to some of the people here!

>45 librorumamans: Of course, it wasn't actually Dryden who slipped up. I'm pretty sure Dryden didn't actually translate the Dryden translation, it was instead a team of translators of varying ability. Dryden supplied the "life of Plutarch" in the original edition, so it is called "the Dryden translation" by custom.

>52 Betelgeuse:

Thanks! That's something interesting to keep in mind.

Here's what I love about LT, walking the fine halls among all this learned talk and thinking ... "I belong in Walmart."

Of the 19th Century British novelists who figure in the standard histories, Charles Reade (1814-1884), a good friend of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, is one of the least-read today. He is best known for an uncharacteristic production, the historical novel The Cloister and the Hearth, but essentially he was a contemporary social fiction writer who was all over the hot-button issues of his day, and quite a bit of a muckraker. I greatly admired the first Reade that I read, It Is Never Too Late to Mend, which achieves considerable power in its pictures of English prison life and the Australian goldfields. I just started Put Yourself in His Place, an industrial labor novel set in Sheffield (“Hillsborough”).

>55 PatrickMurtha: Put Yourself in His Place sounds interesting just because my son & family now live in Sheffield. And, my library has it!

The second chapter which I was reading last night has a bit of intensity - I’ll be vague - which is unusual in Victorian fiction.

And if you want want more Sheffield titles, catch this:

https://stevek1889.blogspot.com/2014/06/sheffield-novels.html

>57 PatrickMurtha: Interesting list. I think sisters A. S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble were from Sheffield, but don't recall any of their novels that I've read as being set in Sheffield, so maybe they don't qualify.

I have to go carefully through that very long list and take note of titles I am interested in reading (like I need more TBR titles, but oh well).

I recall that Drabble and Byatt have had a bit of a spatty sibling relationship, although not as bad as the Joan Fontaine-Olivia de Havilland thing. 😏

>55 PatrickMurtha: Sounds very interesting, making a note of the name...

>60 MissWatson: No one seems to read Reade, I don’t know why. The second chapter of Put Yourself in His Place which I read a couple of nights ago contains a bit of intensity - I’ll be vague - that is unusual in Victorian fiction.

Robert Smith Surtees has been pigeon-holed as a fox-hunting novelist, and perhaps partly because of that, has never "boomed," as the critic Edward Wagenknecht once pointed out. But Wagenkecht also astutely notes that it is easy to enjoy Surtees even if one thoroughly disapproves of hunting, because he excels at comic characterizations.

Surtees' slangy language is very dense for us and takes some getting used to; some references will be missed by non-specialists. But he is a joyously high-spirited writer, which is immediately noticeable and sustained me through the early going while I was getting used to the style. By the 100-page mark, I was reveling in the entire performance.

The book I chose for my initiation was Surtees' first, Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities, not a novel but a collection of fictional sketches that first started appearing in the New Sporting Magazine (which Surtees co-founded) in 1831, and that were gathered between hard covers in 1838. (The Pickwick Papers, very obviously influenced by Jorrocks' adventures, had made Charles Dickens' reputation in the meantime.)

John Jorrocks is a rumbustious Cockney grocer whose character develops over a number of Surtees' fictions, but at the beginning he is pretty much a flat-out idiot, though not lacking in a certain crude charm. At his social level, he is clubbable; his friends enjoy him, for his inanities as much as anything else. And every now and then amidst much foolish chatter he comes out with a bit of down-home wisdom: " - so come without any ceremony - us fox-hunters hate ceremony - where there's ceremony there's no friendship."

Only the first few of the 13 sketches in JJ & J are really hunting pieces; after that, Surtees starts to vary the game, so that we get Jorrocks at the seaside, Jorrocks on excursion in France, Jorrocks throwing a dinner party, and so on. Abundance of ingestion is a running theme; the man eats like one of his horses. He also dandies himself up as much as possible, doing his best to be a "man of mode" despite having (to put it mildly) no gentlemanly or intellectual qualifications.

But elan vital, now that he's got. And if Surtees can't help satirizing Jorrocks, he also admires him for the sheer life-force he represents; appetite for hunting, for food, for nice togs translates easily into appetite for life in general.

Like many a vigorous fellow, Jorrocks feels himself hobbled by his wife, which lends a good deal of marital comedy to the book's later passages: " - wish to God I'd never see'd her - took her for better and worser, it's werry true; but she's a d----d deal worser than I took her for."

In short, if you have any winking fondness for vulgarity at all, Jorrocks is your man, and you ought to make his acquaintance.

Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno / Sylvie and Bruno Concluded is not exactly a work you recommend so much as point out, because honestly, one in 500 people is going to care for this level of extreme eccentricity. Melville’s Mardi: and a Voyage Thither and Robert Browning’s Sordello are two other productions in this same WTF? class. However, it should go without saying by now that I am very fond of all these and similar demented creations. 😏

Sylvie and Bruno uneasily combines a daft fantasy with a realistic late Victorian novel, and ladles on the sentimentality in a way that many now find unappealing. But all that said, it is QUITE an experience. I even find Bruno’s oft-criticized baby talk very funny. ("I never talks to nobody when he isn't here! It isn't good manners. Oo should always wait till he comes, before oo talks to him!")

This morning, finished D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (which really should be called Men in Love with Each Other). Well, that was quite something. Although I would acknowledge it as a major novel, one dominant impression that I had is that all four main characters are repulsive, and I possibly won’t mind spending any more time with them. That is very rare for me to say. (I didn’t feel that way at the end of The Rainbow, preceding.)

Lawrence does not offer a very comforting view of romantic relations. Constant tension, out of which comes an occasional hot tumble, about which Lawrence himself gets mystically (sometimes near-ludicrously) worked up. There are few novels in which the protagonists yammer so much about what their relationships MEAN; one wants to slap them sometimes. And as if to serve them right for being over-analytic…well I shouldn’t say, but without going into spoilers I can point out that one NEVER feels that a “happy ending” is in the offing.

The novel never stops being compelling, though. I wanted to throw it at the wall, yes, but then pick it right up again. 🙂

I hadn’t read much Lawrence before The Rainbow, a few short stories and poems way back when. Now I shall move on to Sons and Lovers.

>64 PatrickMurtha:, perfect timing, I'll be reading Women in Love within a month or so. That's without the benefit of having read the Rainbow first, in my case, so it'll be all first impressions for me and we'll see if that makes any difference.

I read Lawrence once before, found him exasperating and uninteresting then (mind, that was thirty years ago) ... and it was Sons and Lovers.

The Rainbow and Women in Love are ostensibly a duology, but are very separate experiences and can certainly be read profitably in reverse order.

>64 PatrickMurtha:

Years ago I taught Sons and Lovers once? twice? to senior high school classes. It was not an experience that I cherish. I think that Lawrence is not an author who has aged well.

Subsequently, I was able to get Fifth Business onto the curriculum as the modern novel. That work has much more material to play with and, as a bonus, offers one of the funniest sex scenes that I'm aware of.

Since high school students will barely read a short story or essay these days, novels are kind of moot. Seriously, I am glad that my career as a high school humanities teacher wound up leaning in the history / social sciences / philosophy direction. But with the electronic distractions that have become ever more dominant since I taught my last high school class in 2015, it is good to be done, period. (I taught Business English to adults one-on-one here in Mexico from 2016 to 2020.)

As for the aging of texts, it is not much a concern of mine. I hardly ever use the word “dated”; I am dated myself, very much a pre-1990 guy. I turned 32 that year and don’t care for the turns the world took after that.

>68 PatrickMurtha:

Indeed. I left the classroom in 1987 burnt out mostly because, in order to maintain an acceptable marks profile, I was having to give 65's to work I would have refused to accept at the start of my career.

That was an interesting period to move into librarianship because that was when automation arrived in school systems, and so my computer know-how was in demand.

>69 librorumamans: I got started in the mid-90s and managed a few good years at an excellent public high school in Milton, Massachusetts. Also taught in some fine summer programs run by Summer Institute for the Gifted and Choate Rosemary Hall. In the early 2010s, had a nice three years as “Profesor de humanidades” at the Tec Prepa branch in Culiacán, where I enjoyed teaching philosophy, world history, art history, and intro to social sciences (all in English) - I was the all-purpose guy.

So overall, I have been lucky to have motivated students at certain times (I’ll leave out my less fortunate experiences, which were pretty hideous as you can easily imagine). I have discouraged friends who are still in the game. I wouldn’t advise anyone to go into education careers now.

Took advantage of a very hot weekend to make real progress with Barnaby Rudge and actually finished it. I liked it much better than some of his later stuff.

>71 MissWatson:, I'm puzzled by the title for that one, since Barnaby is largely a side character who has no real impact. Some of the background and secondary plots are good, though. The crow is fun, based on a real-life pet that Dickens had (currently stuffed and on display in a museum somewhere) and the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe's poem.

>72 Cecrow: Yes, but there are TWO Barnaby Rudge's, and one of them haunts many of the characters in the background throughout the novel. He shows up at the very beginning in the pub (unidentified) and is always lurking until near the end. I'm of the opinion that Dickens named the book with both father and son in mind, and the father/son theme is central to the book (John & Joe Willet; Mr Chester & Edward Chester; Mr Chester & Hugh; Barnaby Sr & Barnaby Jr).

Oh man. You thought Ulysses was difficult, but I assure you it has NOTHING on Robert Browning’s knotty narrative poem Sordello (1840), about 13th Century Italian politics and troubadouring. I used Arthur J. Whyte’s 1913 annotated edition - very helpful it was and very grateful I was for the help. But still, a tough go, lightened by beautiful lines and passages, but the difficulties always remain in view: Like, what is going on, what IS he talking about? Nonetheless, for true hardcore littérateurs, I unhesitatingly recommend.

Browning interrupts his narrative at the mid-point for a 400-line digression discussing whether he will finish it, which is not merely a modern but indeed a post-modern gesture, and has to be considered one of the most striking such oddities in any 19th Century text.

>74 PatrickMurtha: which is not merely a modern but indeed a post-modern gesture

That seems to have been in the air at the time. I recall thinking that Sartor Resartus had some evident self-referencing elements.

>75 librorumamans: Interesting! And of course Browning and Carlyle moved in the same circles (see Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month. I have both Sartor Resartus and Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris ready to read on my iPad.

>76 PatrickMurtha:

The most I can say about Sartor is that it's a bizarre journey!

>77 librorumamans: My type of book, then. 😏

I’m currently reading The Diary of John Quincy Adams: 1794-1845, a selected (but long) edition edited by Allan Nevins in 1951. JQA is an interesting case because he appeared to dislike politics and public life, frequently stating his preference for being a reader, writer, and scholar; yet when he had a chance to do that, after his Presidency and in his early 60s, he launched right back into a nine-term career as a US Representative that took him to his death at age 80. It is theorized that he suffered from depression, and he consistently seems to have sought out whatever conditions would make him most miserable. The family mantle always weighed heavily on him * , and although one might find his sense of public service admirable, he was privately quite cynical about political life and constantly frustrated by it. It is not just that he couldn’t achieve what he wanted through politics - that is common - but he took no pleasure in the process, as the more extroverted can. Meeting with supplicants, for example, was profoundly tedious for him.

So the effect of the diaries which he assiduously kept is sad, but also stimulating because he was a man of genuine cultivation and always “in the thick of things”.

* Not just on him. His oldest son committed suicide at 28, and his second son drank himself to death by 31.

I am finishing "The Confessions of St. Augustine," and I am 220 pages in to the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation of "War and Peace." I like this translation better than the one by Pever and Volkhonsky. I started with that one, but it just didn't "feel" right, and I could not find my old Constance Garnett.
I'm also reading "Le Comte de Monte Cristo" in French, and "La Casa de Los Espíritus" in Spanish.
I do love the old stuff!

>63 PatrickMurtha: I've read Sylvie and Bruno. I am at work and do not have time to comment, but you should be able to find my review here on LT. The book would be "The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll."
I liked that you like it because it is "demented." I'd just call it saccharine.

^ An interesting comparison is with Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, which is not that far off tonally and is also chock full of the author’s opinions.

I'm dividing my time between the Dryden translation of Plutarch's Lives, Vol. IV, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy-The First Partition

>83 Betelgeuse:

Well, Burton is a trip!

>84 librorumamans: That he is!

Years ago I was supposed to read the entirety of Boswell’s Life of Johnson for a course, but I was taking four graduate-level English classes and one education class that semester, plus teaching part-time, so I only managed excerpts. But I promised myself that I would get back to the text, and so I have, now halfway through the Oxford unabridged edition. A complete joy.

I will always be grateful that I got an excellent grounding in 17th and 18th Century British literature as an undergrad at Yale, so I have a head start on Boswell because the context and personalities are familiar.

I'm halfway through the unabridged 1898 version of Wells' "The War of the Worlds". Hard to believe it came out so long ago as the style of writing seems almost contemporary (except that he has this obsession with naming every town, every street, and every hillock his protagonist encounters...ad nauseam). I wonder whether or not he would have enjoyed the movies.

I just love the unrushed fullness of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy, so characteristic of fiction of the era both literary and popular, what people would now call “slow” because they’ve been conditioned by film and television. I’m currently well into the second volume, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan.

The street attitudes and language are absolutely reflective of the time and place depicted, early 20th Century Chicago, which would seem too obvious to even mention EXCEPT that many reviewers come off as shocked, SHOCKED, that books written in the past are OF that past. I used to argue with people about this, now I try to ignore. * The most heinous stuff in Studs Lonigan belongs to the characters rather than Farrell himself, but even if it did belong to him, I could easily deal with that. Being a historicist and all, I prefer my past full-strength. 🙂

* I find that this is delicate territory in almost all online groups. As a Burkean conservative who does not subscribe to the contemporary progressive agenda, I have to tread carefully - every day there are comments I decide against making, because it would look like picking a fight - but on the other hand, I don’t want to completely muzzle myself either. It’s not always the easiest place to be.

First half of 2023, I've read the following classics from January to June:
Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter - continuing my progress through the works of Greene.
Cormac McCarthy, Child of God - perhaps not his best work but an interesting early novel (RIP).
Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories - the Norton anthology, with some varied commentary. I've been reading a few other Chekhov stories in the Delphi edition, making my way through them all eventually.
Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid - an engaging translation.
Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires - an evocative work that should be more widely known and read.
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls - a flawed novel but one of the greatest of the 20th Century, I was completely engrossed and enjoyed the audible audio presentation.
Leo Tolstoy, A Confession - offering insight into the existential crisis of the author's later life.
Conrad, Joseph, Amy Foster - relevant in light of current immigration issues, but perhaps not in the same league with his greater works.
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon - a classic of noir, I wasn't completely convinced but if nothing else it set a standard for subsequent works.
Robert Bloch, Psycho - the basis for the Hitchcock film, surprisingly readable and certainly a classic of horror.
Leonard Gardiner, Fat City - a worthwhile read, a classic of boxing fiction.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry VI, Part 2 - making my way through the War of the Roses, I read these and saw them performed live by excellent ensembles.
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence - a mixed bag, but full of great insight into a vanished world. Accompanied by a visit to The Mount, her former home in the Berkshires.

Currently reading Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons.

>89 SCPeterson: Nice haul! I have read quite a number of those; currently reading For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was one of my gaps. The Henry IVs are easily my favorite Shakespeare plays. The Heart of the Matter is killer. 🙂

Hemingway is one of the great writers. Old Man and the Sea, Sun Also Rises, his short stories, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, all superb. I recently read Hills Like White Elephants. I still haven't read A Farewell to Arms, so that's next.

These Henry IV-VI plays are sadly neglected. I was fortunate to have actual live theater to see these performed.

My July classics were mostly re-reads:

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813)
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen (1818)
The Claverings, Anthony Trollope (1867)

and one new-to-me:
The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole (1764)

I have also finished Les Chouans this month. It was a bit of hard work with all those long-winded descriptions of the landscape and very confusing whenever Balzac uses three names for a person within the space of three paragraphs.

George Crabbe (1754-1832) is famed for bringing a new realism and down-to-earthness to English poetry, and indeed The Borough (1810), which I am reading just now, embodies those characteristics. The rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter give the book an easy readable “swing”. As usual, the sections about the religious controversies of the day are the least penetrable. * The sections pertaining to the village and the seaside are wonderful, and the latter famously provides the basis for Britten’s opera Peter Grimes.

* Matthew Arnold’s famed essay sequence Culture and Anarchy offers similarly difficult passages for anyone but a specialized religious historian.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a persistently sickly and convalescent individual who famously died young at age 44, but in reading his Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, one is struck by the fact that he simply could not stay in one place for long. He was constantly on the move at a time when travel was far more arduous than it is today. Some of that travel was to generate material for books, but a lot of it was intended for recuperation (spa towns, places with better weather, and so on).

It is hardly a deep insight to suggest that his chances of improving health would have been far better if he had just stayed somewhere, anywhere, instead of frenziedly pursuing well-being like a chimera. Yet this elementary point seems to have been ignored / resisted by both RLS and the people around him. Stevenson was obviously intelligent, a great writer, and heroic in his summoning of what little energy he had; but the need for novelty functioned in him self-destructively, like a substance abuse problem. One waits in the letters for a glimmer of realization: “Maybe I should just calm down.” It doesn’t come.

I'm interested in his Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes.

>96 Cecrow: Everything RLS produced was good at a certain basic level because as Henry James (!!) told him, he was a tremendous WRITER, sentence by sentence, word by word.

>95 PatrickMurtha: I have a collection of his essays Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1918 by Scribner's, which I hope to get to before the end of the year.

>98 kac522: That should be nice. I am reading his David Balfour (aka Catriona) right now, the sequel to Kidnapped.

>94 PatrickMurtha:

I've never looked at The Borough. Are you able to comment on how the Peter Grimes section was adapted for Britten's opera?

>100 librorumamans: I think I would need the libretto in front of me! But it is not a “close” adaptation. Bits and characters from other parts of The Borough show up in it. The endings are different.

The 2022 Royal Opera House production of Grimes, which I heard on BBC 3, updated the action to the present, which made no sense whatsoever to me. 🤔

Not all of Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires are science-fictional in nature; many are straight adventures, such as The Archipelago on Fire aka Islands on Fire, about the Greek War of Independence, which I am reading in the excellent new translation by Chris Amies. As always with Verne, there is a lot of factuality, specifically geography, and I am really brushing up on my Greek islands, let me tell you. Quiz me on the Cyclades versus the Sporades, I’m ready.

Recent decades have been good ones for English-reading Verne fans, with many untranslated works appearing for the first time, and new authoritative translations of the more famous works replacing older abridged, expurgated, or inaccurate ones. There are some of the novels, though, that you have to dig up in the old 19th Century versions because that is still all that exists. But Verne was prolific, we are lucky to now have just about everything in English, one way or another.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea was the first adult novel I ever read, in the summer between second and third grades. I became such a Verne fanatic that my mom special-ordered I.O. Evans’ Jules Verne and His Work for me, since our town library didn’t have it.

Midway through Emilia Pardo Bazán’s brilliant 1886 novel The House of Ulloa, a member of the decayed Galician landed gentry and his new bride visit an even grander and more decrepit family and mansion, and when the bride is offered seating in the alarming-looking drawing room, the worm- and insect-eaten ceremonial chair crumbles to dust beneath her.

Now this is the power of fiction in a nutshell. You should have heard my intake of breath. I might add that Spanish fiction of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, so neglected in the English-speaking world, abounds in moments of such force.

I have a bit of a problem now, though. Pardo Bazán wrote a sequel to this novel, Mother Nature (La madre naturaleza), which was translated and published by Bucknell University Press in 2010. There is no paperback or ebook. The list price of the hardcover is $114.00. Amazon has it new for $85.65; the cheapest price in the used book market appears to be $71.70.

Now I ask you, is this kind of punitive pricing any way to treat lovers of literature? I could see Bucknell slapping a $35.00 or even $45.00 price on the hardcover, with a paperback at 2/3 of that, but $114.00 is just ridiculous.

I am eager to read the sequel, but at these prices I simply don’t have access to it, and living outside the US, inter-library loan is not an option. I wish my reading in Spanish were up to tackling the original text, which I could have at a reasonable price, but I’m not quite that advanced.

Ah well, I guess the book just goes on my long “Challenges to Obtain” list.

Probably by now, anyone who reads my posts will have discerned that I have a soft spot for many books, obscurities and older classics, that probably not many people are drawn to nowadays (and that is putting it mildly). No matter, they have an enthusiast in me.

The historian James Bryce (1838-1922) first published his history of the Holy Roman Empire in 1864, and revised it several times over the coming decades. When I taught World History, of course I could not resist using Voltaire’s quip (“Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”); it is the sort of thing that students remember. But there is a lot more to the story, and although this Bryce treatment is demanding, it is not at all musty. Catch this tart comment:

“Men were wont in those days to interpret Scripture in a singular fashion. Not only did it not occur to them to ask what meaning words had to those to whom they were originally addressed; they were quite as careless whether the sense they discovered was one which the language used would naturally and rationally bear to any reader at any time. No analogy was too faint, no allegory too fanciful, to be drawn out of a simple text.”

When is a Western not a Western? When it’s a Northern!

The Wikipedia article on this subject is quite good:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_(genre)

“The Northern or Northwestern is a genre in various arts that tell stories set primarily in the late 19th or early 20th century in the north of North America, primarily in western Canada but also in Alaska. It is similar to the Western genre, but many elements are different, as appropriate to its setting. It is common for the central character to be a Mountie instead of a cowboy or sheriff. Other common characters include fur trappers and traders, lumberjacks, prospectors, First Nations people, settlers, and townsfolk.”

Some authors that are associated with this genre are Jack London, Rex Beach, Robert Service, Ralph Connor, and James Oliver Curwood. I am reading Beach’s The Spoilers at the moment, famously filmed five times (1914, 1923, 1930, 1942, 1955), the highlight always being an epic fist-fight towards the climax. The novel is rousing good fun, based on an actual incident of corruption during the Yukon Gold Rush * , which Beach had witnessed first-hand.

* The key malfeasor was Alexander McKenzie (1851-1922), whom I encountered in my recent reading in North Dakota history. A very nasty guy and machine politician who served prison time for corruption. He conspired, in collaboration with officials he helped place in office, to cheat Alaska gold miners of their winnings by fraudulently claiming title to their mines.

>105 PatrickMurtha:

I can strongly recommend two Northern titles that are unlikely to make it onto lists:

Samuel Hearne's 1795 A journey from Prince of Wales's fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean. There is a 1971 facsimile of the first edition with Hearne's maps that is well worth getting hold of through ILL or otherwise, if possible.

Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow, which is a wonderful book.

>106 librorumamans: Thanks kindly! The Internet Archive has various editions of the Hearne, including a 1911 Champlain Society issue that also appears to have all the maps from the original (and adds more).

I've read about a dozen non-fiction works by the late Pierre Berton, a popularizer of Canadian history, and he lived for that stuff. Many of his books draw upon those sorts of travelogues as source material.

>102 PatrickMurtha:

Always great to see another Verne fan. I always pick up one of his books when I'm in the mood for adventure or if I don't know what I want to read but want to be guaranteed some fun. I've been collecting all his books with the intention of reading them all. Fortunately I'm French so I don't have to worry about all the translation issues and can just read them in the original.

>108 Cecrow: I’ve read a couple of Bertons and enjoyed them very much!

>109 lilisin: That is great! I wish my reading French was up to the level of tackling novels in the original, but it would be very slow going for me.

The Beat Generation is one of my “things”. I just love reading about them. But between the Lucien Carr manslaughter situation, and William S. Burroughs killing Joan Vollmer, and Bill Cannastra getting himself decapitated, and Neal Cassady being Neal Cassady, I am thinking that JUST MAYBE it wouldn’t have been such a great idea to hang out with these people. Reading John Clellon Holmes’ Beat roman à clef Go just now, really entertaining - from a distance.

Holmes was the cautious guy, the observer in the group. Probably for every thousand people who have read Kerouac’s On the Road, one has looked at Go - but in its way it is just as good, and it came out a good five years earlier.

Anyone with a serious interest in literature and literary history should get a total kick out of Richard Altick’s 1950 study The Scholar Adventurers. Immensely informative and entertaining look at the byways of literary scholarship.

One of the delights of the Altick volume is a 13-page section of Bibliographic Notes. Any non-fiction book that contains especially good (end or foot)notes, (preferably annotated) bibliography, bibliographic notes or essay, etc, has my everlasting gratitude, because I really will comb through those for other materials I want to follow up on. Books are findable most of the time; journal articles are a bear (American colloquial for “difficult situation”). Fortunately I have JSTOR access through being a Yale alumni, that helps with some articles. I would like to collect old scholarly journals and such, but my financial resources are not unlimited. 😏

I am certain that I will order at least a dozen books mentioned in the Altick notes, not all immediately but eventually. Two other books I have recently found a wealth of follow-up in are Lewis Mumford’s The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (which has an impressive annotated Bibliography) and Rodman W. Paul’s Mining Frontiers of the Far West 1848-1880 (killer endnotes).

>106 librorumamans:

To my earlier suggestions I should add

Walter B. Cheadle's Cheadle's journal, being the account of the first journey across Canada undertaken for pleasure only, by Dr. Cheadle and Lord Milton, 1862/1863

The title sufficiently places the book in context. What it does not disclose is just what a nightmare travelling west of the prairies was initially. Milton wrote the first published account of their trip in which he paints a stalwart picture of himself. Cheadle's private journal did not appear in print until 1931, wherein Milton appears rather differently.

I see there are reprints available on ABE starting at $20.

>114 librorumamans: Also now added to my list!

I finished The Last Man. I can see why it never became the success that Frankenstien was.

Reading today in The Decameron, Third Day, in the excellent Penguin edition. Man, no one told us in high school how sexual certain classics were - Chaucer, Boccaccio, many Ancient Greek and Latin authors, and that’s not even getting into Asian texts. Decorous literature is very much a 19th Century thing; it’s not characteristic of literary history in general.

>117 PatrickMurtha:, that one Decameron fellow in particular who reserves for himself the last tale of each day can especially be counted upon.

>118 Cecrow: I’ll keep an eye out. I just read a story about an entire convent of nuns being serviced by a handyman…

I'm devouring Dracula. Such a thrilling book. Absolutely loving it!

>120 lilisin:, watch for the bit about the ship ... there's a related movie coming out about just that part.

>121 Cecrow:

Oo, that sounds interesting. The ship part was terrifying. I'm about 100 pages away from the end so will read half of that tonight and then the rest tomorrow.

Dracula holds up really well, I think! It has a nice variety of story-telling methods (diary, article, epistle etc.) and the story is awfully fun.

August was a slim month for classics:

Love and Youth: Essential Stories, Ivan Turgenev, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater; (1852 & 1860)
The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911); a re-read
Christopher and Columbus, Elizabeth von Arnim (1919)

After a wonderful ride with Dracula I'm now on a different kind of ride with Treasure Island. Already halfway through as it is a very quick (and fun) read. Didn't know Long John Silver was from this!

Almost done De Profundis, a letter written by Oscar Wilde while serving his jail term to the 'friend' who landed him there. Sad how blind empathy (or was it love?) can make us.

It's been re-reads for me so far this year:
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

At the moment, though, I've started Little Men, which is my first time reading it.

>127 Majel-Susan:, as a young lad I read Little Men thinking, "oh, that must be the one for boys", and not the other. Caught up later. I've only one crystal clear memory of Little Men now, but it might be a spoiler: there's a boy, name started with N(?), got himself into a spot of trouble but the disciplinarian said rather than strike him as punishment that he would apply the belt to himself, as punishment for not having taught him better, and N could not stand the thought, broke down in tears. I've reflected on that all my life, wondering if that would actually work.

>128 Cecrow:

That was the thinking, back when, of having whipping boys for princes — they'd behave in order not to see their friend being beaten in their place.

Les Miserables in the Denny translation.
I've seen the film and caught a performance of the play in London a few years back. So far (about 50% in) I can say I enjoy them all for different reasons. Hugo's writing gives me a very Tolstoy-like feeling. An utter delight to read and I'm glad it's as long as it is.

Every once in a while I decide to pull down from my shelves a classic I've never read. Doing that recently, I decided to read Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. I'm only about 65 pages into it. The novel is Defoe's scathing description of the horrid manner in which, in early 18th century England, an attractive young working class woman is made vulnerable to the sexual advances of young upper class men, and the lengths those men are willing to go to press their class advantages.

>131 rocketjk:

The book may start that way, but I think you'll find that Defoe changes tack. She's quite a woman, is Moll.

>132 librorumamans: Yes, I can see what you mean. I'm now a bit further in, and Moll has taken the message that men aren't be trusted and is beginning to chart her own course, as much as her class and gender allow, at any rate.

>133 rocketjk: If you think Moll is something, try Defoe's other naughty lady: Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress.

>134 JeffersonBallard: Sincere thanks for the recommendation. Nice to have that on my radar, as, other than Robinson Caruso, I really didn't know that much about Defoe's works at all. I have a large, toppling TBR stack, though, so I'm not sure if and when . . .

I'm reading the Divine Comedy by Dante. I found a very good 1931 translation by Jefferson Butler Fletcher. Previously, I was unable to make it through the last volume of Allen Mandelbaum's translation of Paradiso. This translation by Fletcher has no notes which makes for uninterrupted reading and I think I'll finish it this time.

Read The Red Pony by Steinbeck. The rumours are true, it's not a horse story.

I recently finished Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. The novel is interesting in that it is one of the first (if not the first) novel in British literature (first published in 1722) in which a male author creates a first-person female protagonist. Early 18th century London was a tough place to survive.

My classics in September:

Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens (1844) on audio; a re-read, that was somewhat improved on a 2nd reading
Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, Anthony Trollope (1874); short novel set in Australian bush
Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, Elizabeth Keckley, 1868; narrative by the former slave who became personal dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln

Modern classics:
Jamaica Inn, Daphne Du Maurier (1936)
A Streetcar Name Desire, Tennessee Williams (1947)
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym (1952); re-read, even funnier the 2nd time around
Good-bye, Mr. Chips, James Hilton (1933)

There is a group read starting of 5 stories by Elizabeth Gaskell and "The Lifted Veil" by George Eliot.

All welcome to join in here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/354038

I haven't given up yet, but Little Men drudging along a bit for me.

In the meantime, I picked up a "new" translation (Brian Hooker) of my old dear favourite, Cyrano de Bergerac. Always a winner in my heart.

I just finished the modern classic, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Superb and disturbing.

I am currently reading Belinda and I had no idea this would be so much fun.

Working way through LoA edition with 3 gothic novels by late 18c American novelist Charles Brockden Brown.

Currently reading Catch 22 by Joseph Heller and its hilarious!

My classics in October:

19th century:
Agnes Grey, Anne Bronte (1847); re-read
Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell (1853)
The Golden Lion of Granpère, Anthony Trollope (1872); re-read
The Odd Women, George Gissing (1893)
A Child of the Jago, Arthur Morrison (1896)--this is a short but powerful and well-written novel about poverty in the East End of London, by an author who grew up there. Not a comforting read, but masterfully executed in under 200 pages. I had to read it in small chunks.

20th century:
The Home-Maker, Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1924)

Currently reading Clarel and I am enjoying it as much as I enjoyed Moby Dick on a first read, which surprised me. Really extraordinary.

My Classics completed in November (by year):

As You Like It, William Shakespeare (1599)
Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens (1848); a re-read on audiobook
The Lifted Veil, George Eliot (1859); a re-read
Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery (1908); a re-read

Modern classics:
Heat Lightning, Helen Hull (1932)
Sad Cypress, Agatha Christie (1940)

And will have completed by the end of the week:
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (1850); a re-read on audiobook

Don't know if anyone else consider's E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia series to be classics, but anyway they've stood the test of time since being published around 85 years ago. At any rate, I've just read and enjoyed the fourth book in the series, Make Way for Lucia.

Currently reading The Decameron and the Divine Comedy. The latter is in a surprisingly good 1931 translation by Jefferson Butler Fletcher.

I just finished Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey. You can find a review, etc., on my Club Read thread. Here I'll just say that I enjoyed the reading.

Classics reading in December:

The Burglar's Christmas, Willa Cather, short story from 1896
Ralph the Heir, Anthony Trollope (1871)
Selected Stories, E. M. Forster (early stories from 1904 through 1920)
The Professor's House, Willa Cather (1927)
Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster (1927)--classic work of nonfiction, series of lectures given at Cambridge

Classic re-reads:
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (1843) on audiobook
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (1850) on audiobook
The Moorland Cottage, Elizabeth Gaskell (1850)

Classics reading in December:

The Burglar's Christmas, Willa Cather, short story from 1896
Ralph the Heir, Anthony Trollope (1871)
Selected Stories, E. M. Forster (early stories from 1904 through 1920)
The Professor's House, Willa Cather (1927)
Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster (1927)--classic work of nonfiction, series of lectures given at Cambridge

Classic re-reads:
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (1843) on audiobook
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (1850) on audiobook
The Moorland Cottage, Elizabeth Gaskell (1850)

Currently reading:
Bleak House, Charles Dickens (1853) on audiobook

I did pretty good this year:

A Trip to Scarborough
Adam Bede
Candida
The Exploits of Brigadier Gerad
Gladiator
Hard Times
The Forgotten Planet
The Prisoner of Zenda
The Sleeper Awakes
The Way We Live Now
The Last Man
MacBeth
New Arabian Nights
Northanger Abbey
Wives and Daughters