2024 What classic are you reading?

I didn't see a thread for this year, so I took the liberty of creating one.

I have started the year with a classic Danish author, Herman Bang, and read Sommerfreuden. A lovely tale of a small town in Northern Jutland where the local innkeeper wants to profit from the new fashion for summer resorts.

And because it's the bicentenary of Wilkie Collins' birthday, I plan to re-read some of his novels over the following months.

In a few days I'm going to start reading Time Regained, which will finally put In Search of Lost Time to rest after three and a half years of reading it off and on.

Classics I read in January:

--A London Child of the 1870s by Molly Hughes (1934); a memoir
--North and South (Norton Critical Edition), Elizabeth Gaskell (1855); a re-read
--2 stories by Elizabeth Gaskell: "The Manchester Marriage" (1858) and "Mr Harrison's Confessions" (1851)

and currently finishing up:
The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle (1891); an adventure tale set during the Hundred Years' War

I have finished The woman in white which was different from what I remembered, in some ways. Which means I'm probably mixing it up with the TV version in my head. What is really scary to a modern reader is to see how the women are completely at the mercy of their menfolk.

February Classics--all re-reads this month:

Bleak House, Charles Dickens (1853); on audiobook
Nina Balatka, Anthony Trollope (1867)
Hard Times, Charles Dickens (1854); on audiobook
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (1883); on audiobook
Lady Susan, Jane Austen (1871); on audiobook

Modern Classics--two new, one re-read:

Evil Under the Sun, Agatha Christie (1941)
John Bull's Other Island, G B Shaw (1904); play
Pygmalion, G B Shaw (1914); play; a re-read

I have read La femme de trente ans and was grateful for the copious notes and introductions which explained the genesis of the book. The disparate episodes would have made little sense otherwise. Not a favourite.

I just finished my second novel by Herman Bang Am Weg, and it is every bit as great as the first. I'm really glad to have discovered this author.

With a reading group on Zoom, I am working through De Anima, Aristotle's exploration of psychology in general, and human psychology in particular. Well worth the effort.

I have finished Guy Mannering which is a delightful romance set in early 1780s Scotland.

I'm not sure everybody will consider this a classic, but I finished Homage to Catalonia which, as most here will know, is George Orwell's memoir of his time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. I very much enjoyed and was interested in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell writes with clarity, a terrific eye for detail and description, and humor. You very much get the feel for what it was like to be in those mountain trenches, despite (or maybe because of) Orwell's understated, wry writing style. He describes the mood of optimism, togetherness and idealism of Barcelona when he first gets there, and observes with regret that when he returned from the front lines just a few months later, the whole mood of the revolution had dampened, and class divisions were already reasserting themselves. Orwell also tells us of his bewilderment and eventual irritation at Spanish politics, but his great and abiding affection for the Spanish people.

>10 rocketjk:

I, for one, have no doubt that anything Orwell wrote is a classic. Thanks for your description; that title is still on the virtual TBR pile.

Classics I read in March:
A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe (1722)
Waverley, Sir Walter Scott (1814)
Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens (1857); on audiobook read by Simon Vance

20th century Classics:
My Uncle Silas, H. E. Bates (1938)
The Quiet American, Graham Greene (1955)

>12 kac522:, nice list, I've just started Waverley.

>13 Cecrow: Waverley started out slow for me, especially with the dialects. But it picked up at about the half-way point and then flew by. Interestingly, sometimes I found Scott's writing in the historical notes in his appendix easier to read than the style he used in the novel.

>14 kac522:, I was just coming back to say, he's rather stiff at the beginning but now it's improving.

I have finished Le rêve which has rather more than its fair share of purity and virginity and incredibly beautiful young people. Not to mention embroidery techniques.

>16 MissWatson: It’s quite a shock if you’ve just read L’Assommoir or La Terre, isn’t it? I first read it years ago when I knew nothing about it but had the vague idea that Zola was French and shocking, and I kept expecting the shocking bit to be in the next chapter…

I’m just getting into Death comes for the archbishop, my first brush with Willa Cather.

>17 thorold: I haven't gotten round to them yet, but I found the greed in L'argent shocking enough to be surprised by this one.

Read Two Treatises of Government and a Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke earlier this year. Bit of a tough read, especially the First Treatise, but definitely very interesting.
Starting The Prince and Other Writings by Niccolo Machiavellie.

Reading the abridged version of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which will be more than enough for me to chew.

I'm starting Pearl for a discussion group later in the month. I knew that it's Middle English and thought "Oh well, that won't be a problem," but it's Western Midlands Middle English, not Southern Middle English, so this will be more challenging than I expected.

Archive.org has come to the rescue with a fairly literal translation that will help.

Classics I read in April:

"Oedipus the King" from The Three Theban Plays by Sophocles (ca. 432 B.C.E.); translated by Robert Fagles
The Dead Secret, Wilkie Collins (1857)
The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope (1875)
Mad Monkton and Other Stories, Wilkie Collins (1881); a collection of ghost and mystery stories
How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis (1890); classic nonfiction journalism and photography of slums in New York City

Modern Classic:
Young Anne, Dorothy Whipple (1927)

I plan to read a few more Wilkie Collins selections this year, as it is the 200th anniversary of his birth year.

In April I read Captain Blood, classic pirate adventure.

Thomas Paine Collected Writing - Library of America

I'm a good way in to Volume 1 of the Mardrus/Mathers version of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. Not a faithful translation for sure, but as an engaging collection of fantastic tales it works wonderfully.

I tend to split up multi-volume works by reading shorter works in between each volume. Next on my list is the John Jay Chapamn translation of The Antigone of Sophocles.

>10 rocketjk: I would consider George Orwell's Homage To Catalonia an aged contemporary work. (wink)

>19 Rome753: Goodness, you spent the Spring with an angel on one side of you and a devil on the other!

I would appreciate your thoughts, reading Locke and Machiavelli back to back.

After you've successfully recovered, of course! (wink)

>24 DanielOC: What a timely read in lieu of our present political climate. Do share your thoughts. Mr. Paine was on my mind today after dusting off Thoreau!

I am currently reading De Officiis by Marcus Tullius Cicero.

>28 theWoesandtheFuries: Paine’s Common Sense and Age of Reason have an immediate and contemporary feel that I didn’t expect. And I was shocked by the direct nature of his attacks on the monarchy/authoritarian rule and his contempt for revealed religions and their testaments. His tear down of the Bible is particularly ruthless and expert. His deism is on full display, promoting the natural world as revelation and its study as the true religion, and he gives a window into its influence on the founders.

>27 theWoesandtheFuries: Got to say, it was very interesting to read these back-to-back. It was interesting to see the similarities and differences between the two.

One thing that I found interesting was that both Locke and Machiavelli both argued that the property of people shouldn't be harmed or touched, albeit the reasoning as to why was different between the two. Locke argued throughout that being secure in one's property was a natural right and was a main reason that societies formed governments. Machiavelli, conversely, said that a ruler shouldn't touch property in order to avoid creating resentment among people. To quote a section from Chapter 17 of the Prince, if a ruler "...is obliged to shed someone's blood, he should do so when there is proper justification and manifest cause, but above all, he must abstain from taking the property of others, for men sooner forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony."

Going beyond that, there were definitely huge differences. Locke was focused on limiting the power of rulers, and while Machiavelli was focused on rulers securing and maintaining their own power. Locke placed high value in the consent of the governed, while Machiavelli placed little value in it.

Overall, it was definitely interesting reading these two works so close together. It helped to be able to compare and contrast the competing viewpoints and outlooks of the authors.

Classics I read in May:

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813), a re-read on audiobook, read by Juliet Stevenson
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (1859), a re-read on audiobook, read by Simon Vance
Washington Square, Henry James (1881), a re-read
The Silverado Squatters, Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

Modern Classics:
High Wages, Dorothy Whipple (1930)
They Came Like Swallows, William Maxwell (1937)
The Moving Finger, Agatha Christie (1942)

I loved my re-reads, of course, but I was particularly delighted by new-to-me reads High Wages and They Came Like Swallows.

Finished reading The Persian Expedition by Xenophon. It's an account about a group of ancient Greek mercenaries baking their way back to Greece through the Persian Empire.
Started reading 1984 by George Orwell.

All my classics this month were 20th century "classics":

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911); re-read on audiobook
The Prussian Officer & Other Stories, D. H. Lawrence (1914); Lawrence's first published collection of short stories
Greenery Street, Denis Mackail (1925)
Five Little Pigs, Agatha Christie (1942)

>33 Rome753:, "Baking their way back to Greece" made my day. :)

>35 Cecrow: I'm sure there was plenty of baking along the way. :)

I have finished La conquête de Plassans which is one of the lesser-known books in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. I found it very interesting and engaging.

I finished In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (a title originally translated into English as Within a Budding Grove) by Marcel Proust, the second entry in Proust’s famous 7-book reverie, In Search of Lost Time. I read the first book, Swann’s Way, in the original translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. Happily, for this second book, I was able to find a used copy of the Penguin Classics edition with a more modern translation by James Grieve.

Our nameless protagonist is looking back at his young adulthood with longing, remembering two particular segments of his early experiences with love while delving deeply into the nature of memory and of the relationship between thoughts, perceptions and reality. Proust’s expositions of the tensions between the splintering “realities” of anticipation, actual experience and memory are often fascinating although, at least to me, sometimes repetitive and dull. This, however, seems to be woven into Proust’s intent: the fascination each of us has with our own memories, and our proclivities, even delight, in delving into them over and over again, even when they bring us pain, or the regret of missed opportunities, or of pleasures that will never come again. Sometimes we are indulging in the delight of experiences long past, and sometimes we are endlessly putting our tongue onto the throbbing tooth.

It's all a long, slow wander, with plot, what there is of it, subordinate to reverie. There are long passages of natural descriptions, which we strongly suspect are not meant to accurately represent the narrators observations at the time, but instead are heavily invested with the longing and enhancements rendered by time as the narrator looks back at them. The first part of the book takes place in Paris. The second segment brings our narrator, with his beloved grandmother, to a seaside town in Brittany. Because he is in poor health, his physical abilities are limited, helpful for an author constructing a novel of a young man who spends way too much time inside his own mind. The problem is that we often don’t really sympathize much with this poor fellows problems. I mean, sure, we can empathize with someone overthinking (to put it mildly) his nascent relationships with potential romantic partners. But the fellow is of a well-to-do upper middleclass family, and his observations of the prejudices and complications of the French upper class society do not make compelling subject matter for most of us these days. So there is a matter of, I guess you’d call it, willing suspension of disapproval in the reading.

Classics I read in July and August:

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (1811), re-read
Sylvia's Lovers, Elizabeth Gaskell (1863)
Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens (1865), on audiobook, narrated by Simon Vance; a re-read
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (1869), re-read

Modern Classics:
The Rector's Daughter, F. M. Mayor (1924)
Greenbanks, Dorothy Whipple (1932)
Celia, E. H. Young (1937)
Towards Zero, Agatha Christie (1944)

...and I loved them all....

I finished up the very enjoyable The Fortune of the Rougons, the first book in Emile Zola's 20-book Les Rougon-Macquart series about life in France during the Second Empire. I've posted a review on my Club Read thread.

I've decided to stick with my classic French series, moving back into Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time with the third book in the series, The Guermantes Way. This is another doorstop, of course, checking in a 595 pages in my 2005 Penguin Classics edition (with a modern translation by Mark Treharne). The book is comprised of Part I, Part II: Chapter 1 and Part II: Chapter 2. Given that Proust's prose is does not always provide the swiftest reading, and given how long it took me to read through the series' second entry, I think I'm going to break this book up and read it one of those three sections at a time. So I'll start with the 300 pages of Part I and then break things up with something else, and so on. I knew you'd all find this fascinating. :)

I read two books in August:

Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov (1957)
The Awakening, Kate Chopin (1899)

For September I'm currently reading my third Woolf, The Waves. So far (halfway through) I'm not enjoying it quite as much as I did To the Lighthouse or Mrs Dalloway, but I'm keeping an open mind. I'm also reading One Hundred Years of Solitude (very enjoyable!) along with The Bhagavad Gita (very introspective.) for school.

Also, I'm new here! I'm looking forward to interacting in this group and discussing some good books :). Sometimes being a reader can be a bit lonely, ha.

>41 lianove3:

Welcome! With an online group over this past summer, I spent six or seven weeks discussing To the Lighthouse. I was eighteen when I last read it (over fifty years ago) and had little or no appreciation of how brilliant a book it is. I'll be interested to read what you have to say about The Waves. It has now become a priority on my virtual TBR pile.

>41 lianove3: To the Lighthouse remains among my favourite books. Also enjoyed Mrs Dalloway. Are strange things happening while you read A Hundred Years of Solitude? It did with me. Good reading! Also enjoyed Baghavad Gita (in German translation).

>42 librorumamans: Yes! I also read it at eighteen, though admittedly, that wasn't as long ago. The Waves is always said to be her masterpiece (and E.M. Forster says so, on the back of my copy), so I have high expectations!

>43 Buchmerkur: To the Lighthouse absolutely floored me. I finished it in a Dunkin Donuts and had to hide my tears! It's my favorite book.

I can't say I've noticed anything strange yet, but I'll look out... Each night when I pick up One Hundred Years I'm astonished at how little I've read when so much has happened. It reminds me of reading Foundation.

Classics I read in September:
The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, Ann Radcliffe (1789)
A Month in the Country, Ivan Turgenev (1855); a play, translated from the Russian by Isaiah Berlin
A Bad Business: Essential Stories, Fyodor Dostoevsky; translated from the Russian by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater; various stories, originally from 1862-1876
Can You Forgive Her?, Anthony Trollope (1865); a re-read on audiobook

Modern Classics:
The Annotated Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery (1908); annotated by Margaret Doody, Wendy Barry & Mary Doody Jones; the classic was a re-read, but the annotations and additional materials were new (and excellent!)
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton (1911); a re-read
Poems of the Great War: 1914-1918
My Mortal Enemy, Willa Cather (1926)

Currently in the midst of The Last Chronicle of Barset.

>40 rocketjk: I am on the third volume of the series, The Kill, using the OUP translations. The Fortune of the Rougons fascinated me from a structural standpoint, the doubling-back-on-itself narrative technique pointing forward to Faulkner among others.

Just finished the first of six volumes of George Bernard Shaw’s Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead, 1963), including Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, The Man of Destiny, and Buoyant Billions.

One’s chances of seeing even Shaw’s most famous plays in adequate stage productions these days is slight. Heartbreak House, for example, requires 10 top-notch actors: Not cheap or easy to assemble.

So reading is the way to go, but even among confirmed readers of the classics, plays (outside of Shakespeare) don’t seem to get the attention they merit. It is too bad. Shaw is hardly just dialogue - his stage directions are exquisite and enable one to readily visualize a production.

The same thought occurs to me as I read each of these Shaw plays, and indeed when I read almost ANY classic play: Where would the audience for this be found today? Because the demands on the audience are pretty intense: A rapt level of attention, an intense sensitivity to verbal nuance, a high level of cultural literacy and sophistication, the willingness to work for the art instead of just letting it wash over you.

>45 kac522: My Mortal Enemy is among my favorite Cathers. I love that mid-1920s stretch of her work, also including A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House.

Because I read a lot of books “at once”, I can make fun juxtapositions. For example, at the moment I am reading both the first volume of Anaïs Nin’s Diaries (the 1966 edition) and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. I’m only just started on the Miller, but well into the Nin, which is impressing me greatly. I put off trying Nin for years because I thought she wouldn’t appeal to me, but I was flat wrong. Terrific writer. Admittedly, the l’amour fou angle in the Anaïs-Henry-June triangle kind of sails past me because it is foreign to my sensibility and life experiences - I have never been into big old passion * - but that is only one strand of the Diaries.

* I recently read a chapter of John Cowper Powys’ A Glastonbury Romance that is all mystically revelatory sex - the earth moved, the mystery of life was revealed, etc - and as with the similar passages in D.H. Lawrence, I felt way outside the text. From my POV, orgasm is nice and all, and that’s about it. I have never thought to freight it with such significance.

>48 PatrickMurtha: One’s chances of seeing even Shaw’s most famous plays in adequate stage productions these days is slight

Perhaps you could add to your bucket list a visit to Shaw Festival in Ontario, although the 2025 season only programs Major Barbara. Some seasons do a little better than that.

>51 librorumamans: Yes, I have heard of that festival, and would love to go if it were possible!

One of Ours turned out to be, by a considerable margin, the least satisfactory of Willa Cather’s novels that I’ve read. I had to laugh when I came across one Goodreads review that characterized the protagonist Claude Wheeler as “a mopey, discontented bore”. Up to a point, I sympathized with his vague desires to escape the Nebraska farm life he was born into, but that vagueness and indirection wear on one after a while. Make up your mind, Claude! Like Vance Weston in Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed, Claude doesn’t make any good decisions, and again like Vance, his marriage decision is the worst - although at least Vance was starry-eyed for his bride; Claude drifts indifferently into wedding a frigid young religious woman who won’t allow him to touch her. Those chapters were painful. I seem to be reading about a lot of hasty bad marriages lately. 🤔

Anyway, I perfectly well know that Claude’s hundreds of pages of dissatisfaction and frustration are a set-up for his eventually finding meaning when he packs off to World War I. But imagining war was simply not in Cather’s wheelhouse. She undertook to do it because she was wrestling with the death in battle of her cousin Grosvenor Cather, who “could never escape from the misery of being himself, except in action”, and who was the model for Claude Wheeler. I accept that this was material she felt impelled to work on, but I don’t think she pulled off what she was trying for. Writing a long novel about a consistently miserable character is maybe not the best way to engage the reader, and capping it off with an account of wartime that seems distant and unreal and completely outside the author’s experience (because it was) makes matters worse. Hemingway HATED those chapters, and I can’t say he was wrong to do so.

So while I am glad I read the book, as a completist and a Catherite, it was rather a let-down. And guess what? This is the novel she won the Pulitzer for. Go figure.

I’ve started Procopius’ The Secret History. Seems pretty tasty so far.

The Landlord at Lion’s Head is one of the least-known novels ever published in the Signet Classics series, not even among the most recognizable William Dean Howells titles (The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Hazard of New Fortunes, A Modern Instance). It is a powerful study of a young “alpha male” type, Jeff Durgin – amoral, practical, shrewd, but not born into name or money, and not possessed of any striking intellectual gifts that would enable him to become a successful lawyer, doctor, or such. He is therefore powerfully handicapped in the 19th Century world, despite being handsome and self-possessed. But this doesn’t anger him; he is always confident that he will “find a way”. I was reminded of Trollope’s similarly situated Phineas Finn, and both men angle forward by playing off their sexual magnetism, not giving a second thought if this involves “making love” to several women in the same time-frame.

Howells contrasts Durgin with a fastidious older artist, Westover (often taken to be a Howells self-portrait). I can’t say as I’d be friends with either man – Durgin is too shallow and brutish, Westover a passive priss. But their relationship fuels the novel effectively. The settings in rural New Hampshire (where the Durgin family inn is located, hence the book’s title) and urban Boston (especially Harvard, which Jeff uneasily attends) are also tellingly contrasted. A sharp and compelling novel overall. I am a big Howells fan.

In A Pair of Blue Eyes, Thomas Hardy offers here one of the most disenchanted and anti-romantic novels predating Modernism – although discussing how is well-nigh impossible without major spoilers.

However, one dimension of the anti-romanticism that can be mentioned is the central character Elfride, who is the love focus for four men. Elfride may be pretty, she sure as hell ain’t charming. One reviewer at Goodreads aptly describes her as fickle and vapid, and honestly there can be few characters in all of 19th Century fiction who are THIS annoying.

Hence, although A Pair of Blue Eyes is a fascinating performance, I do have difficulty in seeing WHY all these men are so taken with Elfride. Is prettiness enough? *

* I will admit that as a gay male reader, enchanted love-object descriptions of young women in 19th Century novels often fly right past me unless the women have intelligence and character to match their looks. When they don’t - Elfride here, Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, Lorna Doone in the eponymous novel - well let’s just say that those passages are not my focus or my road into the story.

>56 PatrickMurtha: I have read none of those works; but, I venture to suggest that vapid beauty vs female intelligence/agency was quite an upcoming theme at the time. Intelligence and agency being largely frowned upon and undesirable by male standards. As a female of riper years, a good many males seem to tolerate it at best, still adhering to the overpowering desire for arm candy as some sort of symbolism of male prowess. Also, those men that engage in domestic abuse and coercive control seem to view it as a challenge to take-down and degrade both the beauty they seek and intelligence/agency. They demand beauty for the world to see; but, tear it down when no one is looking.

>57 EGBERTINA: Thank you for those thoughts! I daresay that the stereotype of male desire then (and still today, among some men) did not include female intelligence and especially not agency, since the male was supposed to have the agency. Of course, there are many heroines in 19th Century fiction who DO have those qualities; I think of Helen Graham in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, who is intelligent, artistic, mature, beautiful rather than “pretty”, and who has had defining, trying life experiences that have made her self-sufficient, and no one’s shrinking partner. A very appealing human being, in short; it is no wonder to me that Gilbert Markham falls strongly for her. The novel also benefits from her being seen as both object (in Markham’s letters) and subject (in her own diaries); it is even-handed.

>58 PatrickMurtha: Yes many female authors (and probably male, too) began writing their heroine's, differently. I've been afraid to read Thomas Hardy, uncertain where he lies on the spectrum of heroines. I know "Tess" is raped in one of his works. A tendency of LT recommendations is to lump all Bronte, Austen, Elliot genre books as though they are all similar. (I tend to dislike the ones in which the women are passed around, even if it is allegedly their own agency.)

There are also 19C novels by men about victim women: I think Tolstoy's portraits are particularly sensitive in Anna Karenina and Resurrection; Moore's Esther Waters; Hardy's treatment of both Alec d'Urberville and Angel Clare is pretty unsparing in Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
There's another title that's escaping me just now, French I think, and not Flaubert.

I am always trying to fill in my gaps of “minor” 19th Century novelists, although I don’t really believe in “minor” - it makes a writer sound dismissible. Two of the books I have going right now by authors I haven’t read before overlap interestingly on the theme of inheritance, which could be a very big deal if a family had a fair amount of money. The Entail, by the Scottish writer and businessman John Galt (1779-1839), shapes up as tragic, with the ghastly character of the monomaniacal Laird, Claud Walkinshaw, dominating the proceedings. Ravenshoe, by Henry Kingsley (1830-1876), is comical / adventurous in tone.

Interestingly, both Galt and Kingsley (brother of the more famous Charles) spent time in the colonies, Galt in Canada and Kingsley in Australia (where he set some of his novels). Galt’s son Alexander was one of the key figures in the founding of the Canadian Confederation.

I’m finishing Anthony Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset and am hating it more with every page turned.

>62 varielle: Wow. Sorry to hear that. It's one of my very favorite Trollope novels.

I am in a bleak mood so I am reading Wuthering Heights yet again! I am reading it slowly though, because I am reading some other books at the same time.

I can’t find an English edition of Summerfreuden! It sounds lovely.

Why do you hate it, Varielle? I haven’t read it.

>66 historyhound7: Tedious, unlikeable characters making ridiculous decisions. All the relationship angst and senseless moral quandaries wore me out.

>67 varielle: I admit I didn't like the Crosbie/Demolines subplot, and enough of Johnny Eames already. But I do love Grace Crawley and Major Grantly; I love the way Mrs Grantly gets the Archdeacon to come round about various issues; love good Dr & Mrs Thorne; and of course dear Mr Harding. But old Josiah Crawley could wear anybody out, including himself.

In October I participated in Victober--reading Victorian literature in October, so I have lots of 19th century titles this month:

The Heir of Redclyffe, Charlotte Mary Yonge (1854)
My Lady Ludlow and Other Stories, Elizabeth Gaskell (1859) (originally published as "Round the Sofa")
Phineas Finn, Anthony Trollope (1869); a re-read on audiobook
❤️Man and Wife, Wilkie Collins (1870)
An Eye for an Eye, Anthony Trollope (1879)
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, Robert Louis Stevenson (1879), nonfiction travel memoir
A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle (1887) on audiobook
❤️The Mystery of Mrs. Blencarrow, and Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond, Margaret Oliphant, two novellas (1890 & 1886)

And one modern classic:
Father, Elizabeth von Arnim (1931); a re-read; one of my favorites by von Arnim

Of the above new-to-me titles, Man and Wife and the novellas by Mrs Oliphant were pleasant surprises, as they were unexpectedly good. I always love Trollope, but An Eye for an Eye was rather dark. I had heard lots of raves for The Heir of Redclyffe, which I liked, but didn't love.

I’m reading The Secret History by Procopius. Justinian reminds me of a certain orange politician.

I finished War and Peace yesterday (which I really enjoyed) so starting today I will be starting Kidnapped as a nice shorter fun work to refresh my classics palate.

over a week back Tanglewood Tales, next one Lifted veil by George Eliot, I've been meaning to read something by her for years

>71 lilisin:, I should probably tackle that one again someday, read it so long ago my memory is foggy but I do know I liked it too.

Presently reading a different doorstop, The Tale of Genji, and loving to hate this guy. A thousand pages from a thousand years ago in Japan.

>73 Cecrow: Genji is on tbr, just trying to find the room to read it

I am reading The Adventures of Gerard a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's Brigadier Gerard stories.
Part of Doyle's forgotten non-Sherlock stories.

>75 nx74defiant: New to me. I always picture him with Sherlock Holmes.

I've finally finished The Guermantes Way, the third novel in Marcel Proust's famous In Search of Lost Time opus. I found it slow going, of course (as it's intended to be, I think) but enjoyable, though not as memorable as the series' second entry, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.

>76 mnleona: Poor Doyle resented that Sherlock overshadowed everything else he did.

My classics this month:

The Merchant of Venice, Wm Shakespeare (1600); a re-read
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle (1892); on audiobook, read by Simon Vance; a re-read

20th century classics:

Fanny Herself, Edna Ferber (1917)
Thank Heaven Fasting, E. M. Delafield (1932)
The Provincial Lady in London, E. M. Delafield (1932); a re-read
The Spinoza of Market Street, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1962), stories
All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot (1972) (maybe not a "classic" quite yet, but it's over 50 years old now, and has become a well-beloved series)

> 79

And I'm struggling through Spinoza's Ethics !

>80 librorumamans: Ha! The title story "The Spinoza of Market Street" is about Dr Fischelson who has been studying a copy of Ethics (in Latin) for 30 years. When he goes to the market, he carries a basket in one hand and a copy of Ethics in the other:

He knew every proposition, every proof, every corollary, every note by heart. When he wanted to find a particular passage, he generally opened to the place immediately without having to search for it....The truth was that the more Dr. Fischelson studied, the more puzzling sentences, unclear passages and cryptic remarks he found."

So I guess you're in good company!

>81 kac522:

Dr Fischelson is a newly discovered soul mate.

>77 rocketjk:, finally, someone else who agrees the 2nd volume was a high point! It's my favourite, followed by the last.

>79 kac522:, please, let Herriot not be a classic yet, else I'm a classic myself at this point.

>79 kac522: Thanks for the laugh. I feel the same way

>83 Cecrow: I admire you for having made it through the entire opus! I'm probably (maybe) going to make my way through the rest, little-by-little. Sorry to hear that Guermantes is the high point until the 7th book, though. You're not helping! :)

I have just finished Spinoza's Ethics, begun September 9, so three months to the day.

audio drama of Jane Austen's novel Emma: A BBC Radio 4 Full-Cast Dramatisation

I finished, and enjoyed, Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe.

My classics in December:
Christmas at Thompson Hall and Other Stories, Anthony Trollope (collected 2014; stories orig. publ 1866-1882); re-read
The Eustace Diamonds, Anthony Trollope (1872), on audiobook
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (1843); re-read on audiobook

Modern classics:
Anne of Avonlea, L. M. Montgomery (1909); re-read
The Sunny Side: Short Stories and Poems for Proper Grown-Ups, A. A. Milne (1921)
Death Comes as the End, Agatha Christie (1945)
A Girl of the Limberlost, Gene Stratton-Porter (1909)