My list!

This sounds fun, so here's my list of books that have been niggling in the back of my mind. I'm hoping the second try for some of these will go much better than the first, since my reading comprehension is drastically better than what it was even 5 years ago. I'm taking a liberal view of the term "classic" for the newer stuff.

The Big Four-
A Romance of Three Kingdoms (got around a 1/4 through, forgot who everyone was)
Water Margin (2/5? books read, forgot who everyone was)
A Journey to the West
A Dream of Red Chambers (1/5 books read, still remember who everyone is, surprisingly)

Older Stuff-
Don Quixote (read excerpts in college)
Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio
The Iliad/The Odyssey (read excerpts in high-school, half-way through The Iliad)
The Aeneid
The Divine Comedy
Paradise Lost (On book 5)
The Canterbury Tales
Beowulf
The Tale of Genji (forgot who everyone was again)
1001 Arabian Nights (had to return the Penguin version to the library, read the first volume of Sir Captain Richard Francis Burton's translation)

Newer Stuff-
One Hundred Years of Solitude (tried to read this in Spanish, failed horribly)
2666 (listened to 19/38 parts)
Nightwood
Infinite Jest (started, then stopped for some reason)
Gravity's Rainbow (started, then stopped)
Dhalgren
I, Claudius
Blood Meridian
The Golden Notebook
Conan the Barbarian stories
The Shadow Over Innsmouth/The Shadow out of Time/ 3 short-stories (the stuff by Lovecraft I haven't read yet)

2.5/25 finished

Well done Anoplophora. You hit the nail on the head with 'niggling in the back of my mind'. This is exactly why I decided to create my list. I think it's a bit like a bucket list, once you have it written down, you make more of an effort to achieve it. There are a few books on your list I considered, but my list was getting very long, so I thought I should start small and go from there.

Good luck and happy reading!

Progress:

1 H.P. Lovecraft short story read.
1/38 parts of the 2666 audiobook listened to.
9/120 of Three Kingdoms read.
The Golden Notebook is still mocking me.

Excellent! Glad to see you're still sticking with it. You have quite a list.

I am reading another of Lovecraft's short stories and I am finishing Beowulf today. Life is too short to let another day go by without reading Beowulf when it is such an easy read.

True that.

And, Gilgamesh as well. You might as well read hitory's first known novel.

If I hadn't had read Gilgamesh already it would have been on my list. :). Gilgamesh is my favorite of all the epic poems I've read, although that list is very short.

My next goal is to finish The Iliad. I have the Fagles translation, and I was around page 200 when I got bogged down, put the book down, and didn't pick it back up. It's not difficult to understand, it was just hard to keep my eyes on the page.

I know some people have the mindset that if you aren't enjoying a book you should give it up, but I feel that books like The Iliad are just so influential that it is worth biting the bullet and forcing yourself through them. When I'm finished with it I'll have a better understanding of literature and greater capacity for enjoying it.

"Cheat" (like I did). Try an audio version. You will love it. And, speaking of cheating, seek out any audio criticism, you can find, ie, Teaching Company, Modern Scholar and the like.

You'll never wake up and think of the rosy fingers of dawn the same way, again.

Rosy fingers of dawn. :D

I looked up what you meant, and it's what's known as an epithet, both an aid to memory and a useful tool for making the meter work.

Wikipedia has a list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epithets_in_Homer

I've never considered audiobooks "cheating," if anything they're going to extra mile. You spend so much longer with a book if you listen to it. I'm going to stick with my book though. It was a birthday present and if I abandon it for the audiobook I'll feel like I've hurt its book feelings.

LOL! That's how those folks recited the entire work, from memory.

You won't hurt the book's feelings. Just pormise it that, some day, you shall return...

Finally finished the damn Iliad. On to The Golden Notebook.

Some books feel like a victory to finish, don't they? :)

I thought about putting that one on my list, but then decided against it. What was your opinion of it? I think I'd still like to give it a go one day.

It's on my list for next year, but I'm going with a prose version. I haven't a talent for absorbing meter.

It's worth reading for its literary merit. The Iliad is extremely culturally relevant and connects to so many other works. I've been able to draw parallels ever since I started it. Also, I'm happy I now know what is in it, because I was wrong. What it is about is right there in the title. The Iliad for Ilium, or Troy. It's not called The Achillead for good reason.

However, it wasn't very interesting in itself. I got so bogged down by the fight scenes. Page after page of so-and-so getting his guts pulled out and so-and-so's brains splashing against his helmet. Yes, it illustrates the brutality of war, but it felt like there were hundreds of these scenes, one after another. I couldn't care.

Sandydog suggested I should listen to the audiobook, and I think it was a good suggestion even if I didn't follow it.

Interesting. Thanks for the insight.