classics club

So yesterday, when I was linking around to finishing the Classics Club Spin #3, I found out that it was Classics Club Spin #4. So, since reading War and Peace made me smarter, I thought I’d do it again. Of course, yesterday was the day they picked the spin number and I clicked that post first (stupidly), so I made my list and then used random.org to pick a new number so I couldn’t be accused of influencing my outcome. Geoff saw my random.org selection, so he can vouch for me for not cheating.

I picked books that I have on my shelf. Luckily, all my Solzhenitsyn books are on a shelf that I didn’t get to, so there was no chance of another long, Russian, hyper-realistic novel on the list.

  1. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  2. Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  3. The Good Earth by Pearl Luke
  4. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
  5. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  6. The Warden by Anthony Trollope
  7. 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
  8. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  9. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
  10. The Overcoat and Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol
  11. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  12. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
  13. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
  14. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  15. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
  16. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
  17. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
  18. The Sound and the Fury by William Falkner
  19. Tess of the d’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
  20. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

And the lucky number was fourteen. So I will be reading The Scarlet Letter.

Also, saddened by how few women are on this list, if I do Classics Club Spin #5, I’m going to make an all-woman list and choose from that.

So, wish me luck. This seems more doable in the time frame suggested (by January 1) than War and Peace.