Thanks to Karen @ Books and Chocolate for running this challenge again! Last year it was a great motivator to read more classics (including some that I had been putting off), so I’ll be entering again this year. Here is my (very tentative) list of what I will be reading for each category:

  • A 19th century classic – Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow by Jerome K. Jerome
  • A 20th century classic – Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
  • A classic by a woman author – Silas Marner by George Eliot
  • A classic in translation – Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
  • A children’s classic – The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
  • A classic crime story – The Grifters by Jim Thompson
  • A classic travel or journey narrative – The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
  • A classic with a single-word title – Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
  • A classic with a color in the title – Black No More by George S. Schuyler
  • A classic by an author that’s new to you – Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
  • A classic that scares you – The Metamorphoses by Ovid (I read a really lousy translation once so I’m going to try again)
  • Re-read a favorite classic – The Poetic Edda  by Anonymous (Translated by Lee Hollander)

11 thoughts on “Back to the Classics Challenge Entry”

    1. I really enjoyed my time with War&Peace. Thankfully, I had a great edition that listed everyone right on the first page, along with all their nicknames, so that helped tremendously…

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      1. I’ll have to look for something similar if I go that route…between patronymics, given names, nicknames, titles, etc. all Russian characters seem to have at least three names! Do you remember what edition you had?

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      2. I don’t off the top of my head. Let me go check to see if I was keeping track of editions back then…

        It might have been the Signet Classic? That is what my edition shows up as in Calibre. However, that was from ’03 and back then I just chose whatever edition I liked the cover of best.
        On booklikes, I have an edition with an isbn of: 9780517399934
        translated by Rosemary Edmunds.

        Neither of those are the edition I “think” I read, but I can’t tell for sure!

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    1. Thanks! I’m going to try to do Canterbury Tales in the original non-updated English…I have an edition with parallel original and a modern “translation” for if I get completely lost, but I’ve read Middle English before and din’t find it to be too difficult for the most part.

      I’ve read both Marlowe’s and Goethe’s version of the Faust legend and am interested to see Mann’s more modern take on it.

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      1. You’re welcome! Yep, I get that, I had to study it, so I did it that way. I recommend reading a lot of it aloud to be honest- a lot of the words are the same/similar, they’re just written with different letters (eg “v” is often “u” if I’ve remembered correctly). Anyway, when you read it aloud it just sounds like you’re reading English with a funny accent.

        Cool!

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