Reading the classics

Reading the classics:

This is my application to become a member of the inspiring Classics Club:

theclassicsclubblog.wordpress.com

My plan is not as precise as it might be.  It may have glaring omissions that have been caused by my recent reading.  I hope to read at least one novel by novelists and a significant number of poems by poets.  With people like George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, I plan to do some of each.  When I have not specified titles it is because I have read the books in the past and will do rereading.  I’ve read everything by Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Dickens.   Rereading is always in order but how to tell if on any particular day I long for Daniel Deronda or Adam Bede?   Books I have completed are indicated in purple text.  I am only indicating the books read from 2016 forward.

 

1. Lewis, Sinclair:  a significant number of works. Our Mr. Wrenn; The Innocents, Main Street, Babbitt
2. Marquand, John P:  The Late George Apley
3. Stendahl:  The Charterhouse of Parma
4. Arnold Bennett
5. Barbara Pym Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women, Jane and Prudence
6. Elizabeth Taylor Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
7. Willkie Collins
8. John Galsworthy
9. Thomas Hardy
10. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
11. Daphne De Maurier
12. Henry James
13. Rose Macauley
14. Somerset Maugham
15. Herman Melville
16. George Meredith
17. Nancy Mitford
18. Toni Morrison
19. Iris Murdoch
20. Vladimir Nabokov   Pnin
21. VS Naipaul
22. Edward Rutherfurd
23. Carol Shields
24. CP Snow
25. Leo Tolstoy
26. William Trevor
27. Anthony Trollope The Last Chronicle of Barset
28. Sarah Waters
29. Thornton Wilder
30. AN Wilson
31. George Eliot
32. Gibbon (excerpts)
33. Thackeray
34. Updike
35. Roth
36. Richard Yates
37. Joyce, Ulysses
38. Dickens
39. Mann:  Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain
40. Conrad
41. Faulkner
42. Hemingway
43. Turgenev
44. Pushkin
45. Robert Penn Warren
46. Dostoevsky
47. Jane Austen
48. John Cheever
49. Peter Taylor
50.  Pulitzer Prize winners—fiction and poetry and drama
51. Man Booker winners and short list and long list selections

STORIES:

Chekhov

Katherine Mansfield

Jane Gardam

Poetry

1. Anthony Hecht, both early and late poems
2. Wordsworth:  shorter poems and The Prelude
3. Keats:  the Great Odes
4. Robert Browning:  significant dramatic monologues
5. Seamus Heaney
6. Tennyson
7. Robert Frost
8. Yeats
9. TS Eliot
10. Wallace Stevens
11. George Szirtes
12. ee cummings
13. WH Auden
14. Elizabeth Bishop
15. Philip Larkin
16. Theodore Roethke
17. John Berryman
18. Shakespeare’s sonnets
19. Thomas Hardy
20. George Meredith
21. Gerard Manley Hopkins
22. Algernon Charles Swinburns
23. Matthew Arnold
24. DG & Christina Rossetti
25. John Hollander

DRAMA:

Shakespeare

Ibsen

Williams

Pinter The Caretaker

Ben Jonson

Chekhov