Classics Club Spin #4

I just joined a wonderful group called The Classics Club and I am participating in my first "spin".

 

For this spin, the rules are the following:

 

1.  Go to your blog.

2.  Pick twenty books that you've got left to read from your Classics Club List.

3.  Try to challenge yourself: list five you are dreading/hesitant to read, five you

      can't WAIT to read, five you are neutral about, and five free choice (favourite

      author, rereads, ancients --- whatever you choose.)

4.  Post that list, numbered 1-20, on your blog by next Monday.

5.  Monday morning, we'll announce a number from 1-20.  Go to the list of twenty

      books you posted, and select the book that corresponds to the number we 

      announce.

6.  The challenge is to read that book by January 1, even if it's an icky one you

      dread reading!  (No fair not listing any scary ones!)

 

 

 

 

I used the random list organizer here to choose the 20 books from my master list.  After having to drop a few books for various reasons (out of series order, they are scheduled with a group at a certain time, etc.) my list looked like this:

 

  1. The Bucanneers (1938) - Edith Wharton
  2. Paradise Lost (1667) - John Milton
  3. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) - Ann Radcliffe
  4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 - 1885) - Freidrich Nietzsche
  5. The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) - Charles Reade
  6. Common Sense (1775 - 1776) - Thomas Paine
  7. Slaughterhouse Five (1969) - Kurt Vonnegut
  8. Travels with a Donkey in Cévennes (1879) - Robert Louis Stevenson
  9. The Mill on the Floss (1860) - George Eliot
  10. Bleak House (1852/53) - Charles Dickens
  11. The Moonstone (1868) - Wilkie Collins
  12. Tales of Ghosts and Men (1910) - Edith Wharton
  13. Antigone (441 B.C.) - Sophocles
  14. Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son (1894) - Sholem Aleichem
  15. The Warden (1855) - Anthony Trollope
  16. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) - T.S. Eliot
  17. Essays (1580) - Michel de Montaigne
  18. We (1921) - Yevgeny Zamyatin
  19. Utopia (1516) - Thomas More
  20. The Pilgrim's Regress (1933) - C.S. Lewis

 

Then I broke them into the listed categories …….

 

 

5 Books I'm Hesitant to Read:

  1. Paradise Lost (1667) - John Milton
  2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 - 1885) - Freidrich Nietzsche
  3. Common Sense (1775 - 1776) - Thomas Paine
  4. Essays (1580) - Michel de Montaigne
  5. Utopia (1516) - Thomas More


5 Books I Can't Wait to Read:

  1. Travels with a Donkey in Cévennes (1879) - Robert Louis Stevenson
  2. The Bucanneers (1938) - Edith Wharton
  3. The Pilgrim's Regress (1933) - C.S. Lewis
  4. The Warden (1855) - Anthony Trollope
  5. The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) - Charles Reade

 

5 Books I Am Neutral About Reading:

  1. The Mill on the Floss (1860) - George Eliot
  2. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) - T.S. Eliot
  3. We (1921) - Yevgeny Zamyatin
  4. Slaughterhouse Five (1969) - Kurt Vonnegut
  5. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) - Ann Radcliffe

 

5 Free Choice:

  1. Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son (1894) - Sholem Aleichem
  2. Bleak House (1852/53) - Charles Dickens
  3. The Moonstone (1868) - Wilkie Collins
  4. Tales of Ghosts and Men (1910) - Edith Wharton
  5. Antigone (441 B.C.) - Sophocles

 

 

Please God, don't let me get Montaigne's Essays.  That will kill me, especially with the January 1st deadline.  I await the number to be chosen with trepidation and hope it is one of the books that I already have in progress (The Pilgrim's Regress and Tales of Men and Ghosts), although I know that is not the purpose of the spin.  Normally I would be happy to be challenged, but with Christmas just around the corner I wonder if I will be able to accomplish it.

 

 

 

Strangely this is a little like gambling ………..  although, safe gambling with a purpose of higher education.  No wonder it's so fun!