Reading the Classics

Somewhere around my early teens I decided to read all of the “classic” books. I knew at the time that people were still writing books, but had it in my mind that it would be possible to read all those considered really good. Now, I know that I’m not even aware of some of the great books being written, much less have the time to read them all in one lifetime. Still, I thought it might be interesting to review what I read and see if others have suggestions for their “classic” or favourite books.

Among the “children’s” (I don’t really like classifying books by age) books I would include Black Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, Huckleberry Finn, Heidi, Treasure Island, The Three Musketeers, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Water Babies, A Girl of the Limberlost, and I could go on. Often when I found a book I liked, I’d read others by the same author: Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, L. M. Montgomery and so on. I didn’t read books intended “just for girls” but anything that was called a “classic” such as Two Years before the Mast, and Gulliver’s Travels. If in a book I was reading, another book was mentioned, I often sought out the latter. For example, I read Pilgrim’s Progress as a result of reading Little Women.

One year in elementary school (in those days there wasn’t a main school library, but each classroom had a few shelves of books in the back) I decided to start with the first book on the classroom library shelves and read all the way through to the end. A few, such as some of Shakespeare’s stories, gave me a rather hard time, but I persisted. Also, in those years our “readers” often contained excerpts of books or a short story by an author I liked. I’d try to search those out and read more by that writer (Albert Payson Terhune, The Heart of a Dog).

In a few years I realized there was no way I’d be able to read all the “classics” but I kept searching them out. And I know now that not everyone likes the same books. A few more of my favourites are A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Buddenbrooks, a lot of Herman Hesse, much of Colette. I read and tried to read others that were considered good literature – The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren because Simone de Beauvoir had an affair with him (I still have the book but haven’t managed to finish it), Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos because of the name of the band. At university I took a “European Novels in Translation” class and read Stendhal, Balzac, and Goethe. My father brought a complete set of Goethe from Germany, which I now have, but I don’t think my German is good enough to read all of them.

Goodreads lists some of the popular 20^th century books. From their list I’ve read: The Great Gatsby (never one of my favourites), Lord of the Flies (searing; I thought Ender’s Game was a kind of modern LOTF), The Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye (also not a favourite), Silent Spring, The Sun Also Rises, Of Mice and Men, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mrs. Dalloway (worth seeing the movie before reading the book), The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (just read it recently; interesting to compare with To Kill a Mockingbird), The Good Earth, The Secret Garden, Brave New World, Tortilla Flat and so on.

So much reading to do, not enough time!