Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Classics Club Spin Challenge

On Friday, the administrators of the Classics Club challenge are going to post a random number from one to twenty. Those of us enrolled in the Classics Club Challenge( reading fifty classics of our choosing within five years) have been asked to list twenty of the books left on our to-read list.  We are then challenged to read that number on our list which matches the random number posted on Friday.

Here below are my twenty possibilities!

  1. The Aeneid, Virgil
  2. The Histories, Herodotus
  3. The Conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar
  4. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, Edward Gibbon
  5. One Thousand and One Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy
  6. The Prince, Machiavelli 
  7. The Seven-Storey Mountain,  Thomas Merton
  8. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  9. The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
  10. The Swiss Family Robinson, Johann David Wyss
  11. Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
  12. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
  13. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
  14. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
  15. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  16. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  17. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  18. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
  19. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  20. Love Among the Ruins, Walker Percy
I'm working on one of these presently, so perhaps I'll get wildly lucky and get it.  I am doing well on my challenge,  staying right on target: I'm hovering at the 50% mark with two and a half years left.   

6 comments:

  1. Fascinating challenge and list. Good luck. I might look into joining the challenge group. Very intriguing concept!

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  2. Read 1....... Own 7. Will read some..... relatively soon.... [lol]

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  3. @Tim I've found it helpful as both an inspiration and a reminder. I'm looking forward to what lies ahead.

    @Cyberkitten: I omitted a lot of English and American lit from this list since I'll be focusing on those in April and July respectively...otherwise you would recognize a lot more! The biggest obstacles for me will be Moby-Dick and the Russians...those are all enormous.

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  4. I have 2x 10 groups coming up (which contain a few classics) and then a batch of 10 classics which will be quite a challenge for me I think. In the next 12 months I imagine my 'bag' of classics will be greatly enlarged!

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  5. Henry Adams sounds interesting. Good luck!

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    1. Thanks! I'll need it. Quite the wordsmith, Henry is..

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