Category Archives: Books

The Classics Club 13/95

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[post updated on 3 June 2013]

Today I complete my first year of five for my Classics Club reads. In this past year I have read 13 out of the original 50 books I had planned. Many of the books in my original list were on the lighter side since I had not been in the mood to tax myself with too much heavy reading. However, as of today, I have updated my list with books I ought to read as a future teacher of English Literature. While the list is not particularly exhaustive (there is a lot more I could add to it) I think it fairly covers a bit from all over the world. I have retained 36 books from the original list and have divided my list into two sections; classics pre-1950s and modern/contemporary classics post-1950s. I tend to neglect reading literary fiction from the last 60 or 70 years and I think it is a fault I need to mend. As for the classics, I have added well known must-reads that I have never touched. This means, no re-reads on this list. If I should re-read any classic that would be great, but it won’t be noted here.

You might have noticed that I don’t have any Shakespeare on this list. This is because I intend reading his complete works and have a separate project for that.

From a list of 50, today’s update is going to increase the list to 95 books. I might add a few more to make it a whole 100 later.

 

[post updated on 5 August 2012]

I officially signed up to be a part of The Classics Club (originally hosted by Jillian at A Room of One’s Own) a month ago. My main reason for joining the club is really to discover other lovers of literature and discuss books we’ve read in common. I’m really looking forward to exploring the blogs of other members of the club. :)

Now, to the list. The club demands that we have, at the least, a working list of 50 classics to be read in the period of 5 years. While we’re encouraged to have a way longer list I’ve decided to stick to a list of 50, averaging at 10 classics a year. This leaves me with plenty of room to read other kinds of books, and to not feel constricted.

So, my 5 years would begin from 4 June 2012 to 4 June 2017. My list follows. But a heads up…it’s a flexible list, quite susceptible to drastic changes. However, I will be sticking to 50 classics.

As I complete each book I will add the link to my thoughts on it and note the date I finished it on.
[List updated on August 18, 2012 with 14 titles changed.]

Pre-1950s

  2. Austen, Jane – Mansfield Park
  3. Bronte, Anne - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
  4. Bronte, Charlotte – Villette
  5. Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
  6. Bunyan, John – The Pilgrim’s Progress
  7. Cather, Willa – My Antonia
  8. Chopin, Kate – The Awakening and Selected Short Stories
  9. Collins, Wilkie – The Moonstone
  10. Crane, Stephen – Red Badge of Courage
  11. Dante, Aligiehri – Inferno
  12. Dickens, Charles – Barnaby Rudge
  13. Dickens, Charles – David Copperfield 
  14. Dostoevsky, Fyodor – Brothers Karamazov
  15. Dostoevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment 
  16. Du Maurier, Daphne – Rebecca [August 27,2012]
  17. Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
  18. Eliot, George - Daniel Deronda
  19. Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
  20. Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
  21. Fitzgerald, F Scott – Tender is the Night
  22. Fitzgerald, F Scott – The Beautiful and the Damned
  23. Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
  24. Forster, E M – A Passage to India
  25. Forster, E M – A Room with a View
  26. Gaskell, Elizabeth – Mary Barton
  27. Gaskell, Elizabeth – North and South [August 10, 2012]
  28. Gogol, Nikolai – Dead Souls
  29. Hardy, Thomas – Far from the Madding Crowd [October 9, 2012]
  30. Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the D’urbervilles
  31. Hardy, Thomas – The Return of the Native
  32. Hemingway, Ernest – The Sun Also Rises
  33. Homer – The Illiad
  34. Homer – The Odyssey
  35. Hugo, Victor – Les Miserables
  36. Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes were Watching God 
  37. Jerome, Jerome K – Three Men in a Boat [August 31, 2012]
  38. Joyce, James – Dubliners
  39. Kipling, Rudyard – Kim
  40. Lawrence, D H – Women in Love
  41. Leroux, Gaston – The Phantom of the Opera
  42. Mansfield, Katherine – Selected Stories
  43. Maugham, W Somerset – Of Human Bondage
  44. Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
  45. Milton, John – Paradise Lost
  46. Montgomery, Lucy Maud – Anne of Avonlea [August 3, 2012]
  47. Montgomery, Lucy Maud – Anne of the Island [August 6, 2012]
  48. Montgomery, Lucy Maud - Anne’s House of Dreams [August 20, 2012]
  49. Montgomery, Lucy Maud – Anne of Ingleside [February 26, 2013]
  50. Montgomery, Lucy Maud – Rainbow Valley (r) [March 13, 2013]
  51. Montgomery, Lucy Maud – Rilla of Ingleside (r) [March 16, 2013]
  52. Orwell, George – 1984
  53. Orwell, George – Animal Farm
  54. Plutarch – Plutarch’s Lives
  55. Poe, Edgar Allen – Selected Short Stories
  56. Sabatini, Rafael – Scaramouche [October 18, 2012
  57. Spyri, Johanna - Heidi (r) [August 1, 2012]
  58. Sterne, Laurence – Tristram Shandy
  59. Thackeray, William Makepeace – Vanity Fair
  60. Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
  61. Trollope, Anthony – Barchester Towers
  62. Trollope, Anthony – The Warden
  63. Voltaire – Candide
  64. Wallace, Lew – Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
  65. Wharton, Edith – House of Mirth

Post-1950s

  1. Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
  2. Adichie, Chimamande Ngozi – Half of a Yellow Sun
  3. Adiga, Aravind – The White Tiger
  4. Bulgakov, Mikhail – The Master and Margarita
  5. Desai, Kiran – The Inheritance of Loss
  6. Dewitt, Helen – The Last Samurai
  7. Fielding, Helen – Bridget Jones’ Diary
  8. Hailey, Alex – Roots
  9. Heller, Joseph – Catch-22
  10. Ishiguro, Kazuo – The Remains of the Day
  11. Le Carre, John – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
  12. Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
  13. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – A Hundred Years of Solitude [September 8, 2012]
  14. Martel, Yann – Life of Pi
  15. Mitchell, David – Cloud Atlas
  16. Momaday, N Scott – House Made of Dawn
  17. Morrison, Toni – Beloved
  18. Murakami, Haruki – Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
  19. Pamuk, Orhan – My Name is Red
  20. Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
  21. Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
  22. Roy, Arundhati – The God of Small Things
  23. Rushdie, Salman – Midnight’s Children
  24. Scott, Paul – The Jewel in the Crown
  25. Seth, Vikram – A Suitable Boy
  26. Singh, Khushwanth – Train to Pakistan
  27. Steinbeck, John – East of Eden
  28. Steinbeck, John – Grapes of Wrath
  29. Stone, Irving – The Agony and the Ecstasy
  30. Walker, Alice – The Color Purple

I’ll be ticking off books from this list as and when I read them. Any changes I make will also be done in this post.

[original post first published on June 3, 2012 @ 19:08]

Classics Club June Question: Favourite Opening Line.

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It's been many months since I last answered a Classics Club question. This month's question had me really excited. Three quotes jumped into my mind almost at the same time! I'm sure they're all well known even if most haven't read the books.

  • “Call me Ishmail.” I haven't read above nine chapters in Moby Dick, but these three words…so common, so simple, so ordinary, and YET so lyrical. I love to say those three words aloud!
  • “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” You'll find this quote on my side bar as well! I loved it so much because I thought it encapsulated the protagonist's character so well, and gave me a sense of what to expect from him. This one opens Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche.

  • “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” Most know the first twelve lines that open this long sentence. I read this passage over and over and over again when I began A Tale of Two Cities, reading it aloud, and enjoying the rhythm and nuances of this passage. Dickens sets the stage and background in just a few lines, AND the mood is set. Just WOW.

 

 

February Turn of the Century Salon: On Lucy Maud Montgomery

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I haven't done any solid reading for the Turn of the Century Salon, so far. But I have been continuing with my reading of the Anne of Green Gables series. I have just finished reading Anne of Ingleside, and am half way through Rainbow Valley. So, why does this matter?

Since we're reading and talking of writers from the 1880s to the 1930s I figured Lucy Maud Montgomery falls well within the timeline. I think, perhaps, this is the only Canadian literature I have ever read, and each time I pick up Montgomery, I long to see Prince Edward Island. I wonder…does the Island still look the way it seems to have during Montgomery's day? Or would it be sheer disappointment to look at it now after reading all that gorgeous, heavenly scenery in Montogmery's novel? I think more than the Anne series, it is the scenic descriptions of The Blue Castle that has stuck with me. Perhaps, because, I read it at a time when I was ready to appreciate pages and pages of words written only on the weather and the scenery. On re-reading some of the Anne books I found I took much delight in these pages, in absolute contrast to the boredom with which I flipped through them when I was in my young teens.

I also find the everyday-ness of the books, cozy, re-assuring, charming and funny at times. One speaks of novels representing their time and age. How much do Montgomery's novels stay representative of P.E.I. and a tiny community of people? As I mentioned in my last review (on Anne of Ingleside), there is much about the tales of this community that rings true with all small towns. City people never know what is happening in the lives of their neighbours. It would be surprising if they even know the names of the people next door! However, in a small town, names of new neighbours are known even before they move in; their family history is the talk of the neighbourhood before a week is up; and all the juicy details of the many lives of every family in that town is public property. Trust me. I'm not speaking off the top of my head. My parents are leading retired lives in a lovely little town. As a child I disliked going there because every one seemed to think it was their business to talk about the things we did and wore. But as an adult I feel the charm of such a place. A walk down a short lane would take at least twenty minutes, because every few feet you meet with someone and stop for a brief chat of that day's news (I think newspapers are redundant in such places!). People drop in for some amiable gossip every day. Sometimes, you're the one doing the dropping in. The sense of community is strong, and while it can be tiresome that people know all your business, there is also a strong support system for people who need it. It's a quiet place, where time strolls leisurely through the town unlike in the city where it is rushing through constant traffic, trying desperately to allow space for a life. It's a place where one can go to recuperate, to relax, breathe in some fresh air, enjoy the beauty of the surrounding hills and fields. Yes, I know what Montogomery is talking about in her novels, and while P.E.I. might be thousands of miles away from where I am, it's little towns-folk are no different from the ones of the litte town this side of the world.

I have never been one to discover the life of the writer behind a novel. But often I find myself wondering about Lucy Maud Montgomery. What was her life like? Was she like the story girl? She must have been. What made her decide to be a full time writer and forgoe a family? Why could she not have had both? Would she then have ended up like Anne? What was her inspiration? Did writing provide her with a joy for living?…because her novels are always so full of life, imagination and adventure. And speaking of her books being representative of some lives, I love how her stories are so wholesome. There are wedding, births and deaths in equal number, and they all are so true of life. There is a huge spectrum of the manner in which various marriages work or don't work, the many deaths, the reactions to various folk, some people become endearing, others are tiresome, and others just grown on you. Perhaps, when I'm done with the Anne series I might try my hand at The Alpine Path…an autobiography of L M Montgomery.

 

Anne of Ingleside

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Anne of Ingleside (Anne of Green Gables, #6)Anne of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm not sure, now, what it was that had put me off reading the sixth book in the Anne series. I was inclined to be querulous about it, to go all out and tear it to pieces. Perhaps it was the knowledge that this particular book was written years after the original six, and so I was afraid the old charm could not be maintained. Perhaps it was my experience of Anne of Windy Poplars which was the other book of the series that was written years after the original six — I had found it to be a bore, I had found it too saccharine, and there were just too many people and too many kindred spirits.

So, my experience through the first few chapters of this book was simply so-so. I had a moment of ranting when I wrote the following:

There are many times when I do dislike Anne Blythe. She is nice when it is convenient for her. And as long as folk are going along with her fantasies she is absolutely peachy. The incident of the obituary really put me off. So, here was a woman who wanted something pretty said of her dead husband. She obviously had loved him in her own way, and had understood that he was of a gentle, poetic nature, unlike herself who was something of a peasant woman. Wanting something special written about her husband, and not thinking the regular kind of obituary good enough for him, came to Anne Blythe. Anne writes a poetical piece, with no substance I might add, and gives it to the woman who says admiringly that it is 'sprightly' (which offends our poet who cannot understand a person who does not speak her language and interests). When the obituary is put in the papers it is found that there is an extra verse tagged on to the end of the poem, that is specific about what this man meant to his wife. Anne and the entire Ingleside household is offended. I thought that unfeeling and selfish. Anne Blythe gets on my nerves, she does! If a person isn't her kindred spirit then they are simply labeled unworthy of any consideration. BAH!

Looking back, I still see my point as valid, but…I realised that quite a bit of the episodes revolving around Anne (save the last one) I found rather annoying. However, most of the chapters in the books revolve around Anne's children. These chapters are an absolute delight. We grow to know the Ingleside children (except for Shirley, the third boy and last but one child of the family) deeply — their interests, their quirks, their little foibles, and troubles. Anne makes for a lovely mother. She always seems to know how to work with her children and help them solve their tiny-people problems. However, she isn't perfect, and I think the incident I loved best with Anne was the last one in the book with Gilbert. It was so normal. This was a normal marriage, where, when work takes over one's life, one can some times forget the simple pleasure of a loving spouse.

I think one can tell that once I was well into the book I began to relax and enjoy it all. I found I loved reading of the so many tales, the gossip and rumours about folks of Four Winds Harbour. I wondered what it would be like to live in the small town my parents have retired to. Exactly like Four Winds, no doubt! It's a place where one gets to hear what's happening in every single family. It's deliciously scandolour to go home and hear all the 'gossip'. This is the sort of book one should really enjoy for its everyday-ness, it's little stories that make up the lives of ordinary people in an ordinary society.

I am so eager to delve into the last two books of the series. Having got to know Jem, Walter, Di, Nan and Rilla in Anne of Ingleside, I am looking forward to adventuring with them through Rainbow Valley, and then re-acquainting myself with an older Rilla and Walter and Kenneth Ford in Rilla of Ingleside. This last book was my first of this series, and as I remember it, perhaps to remain my favourite. I hope.

 

The Classics Club: Question for February

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What classic has most surprised you so far, and why?

 

I believe it has to be Three Men in a Boat.

Mom had this book in her shelf for years and years and I never bothered to pick it up because…well…three men in a boat doesn't really sound like much fun. For one thing, I know nothing of boats. For another, a story about three men confined in one space? How boring!….or so, I had thought until I finally picked up this book.

I cannot tell you what prompted me to read it finally. I hadn't a clue what it was about, save for what the title said…and that it was humorous — though I was quite skeptical about that. (I had conveniently forgotten having read essays by Jerome K Jerome and finding them hilarious.)

However, having once picked it up I found myself laughing so much (more than I have done over a book in a very very long time!), nodding in agreement with much of J K Jerome's little snippets of life-sayings, and being quite blown away by how wonderfully, and beauteously poetical Jerome was prone to get. I was also quite startled to find that it was actually a creative travelogue of a journey down (or was it up?) the River Thames. Had I known this, again, I might never have touched this book. But having learnt of it only on the reading, I was really glad of it, and it has actually inspired me to pick up and read other creative travelogues! My first book in 2013 was Around India in 80 Trains, and I am hoping to read some William Dalrymple in the near future, plus I have also been inspired to give Around the World in 80 Days a go.

So, there you have it! In a nutshell — Three Men in a Boat which turned out to be a fun romp down the R. Thames and inspired me to start reading other creative travelogues.

Have any of you read Three Men in a Boat? What did you think of it? Do you read travelogues? What's your take on this non-fiction genre?

 

On having read and then watched “Twelfth Night”.

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Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think Twelfth Night was the first story of Shakespeare I had ever read. I say story because it was just that. A prescribed paraphrase of Shakespeare’s play that I read for the first time at the end of December 2012.

The story is about disguises, mixed identities and love lorn lovers.

Viola and her twin brother, Sebastian, are parted from each other during a ship wreck. Viola is rescued and brought ashore onto a strange land. She believes her brother is dead, and as they had no parents she decides to seek her fortune in this foreign land. However, her plans are not particularly long term. She thinks of survival and Illya is a policed place lorded over by Duke Orsino. So Viola decides to become a man, and serve the duke. She becomes something of his court musician and his confidante. She learns that he is pining away for a beautiful woman called Olivia, but his love is unrequited. Loathe to give up, Orsino charges Viola (posing as one called Cesario) to makes his pleas to Olivia. But when Olivia sees Cesario is falls in love with him. Hers also becomes a love unrequited as quite naturally Viola is a woman and, in her turn, hopelessly in love with Orsino. The rest is for you folk to read. :)

There is a sub-plot as well. Olivia’s uncle, his friend and Olivia’s woman-in-waiting are all quite put off with the butler, Malvolio . They are annoyed with his superior airs and decide to teach him a lesson. They drop, in his path, a letter supposedly to have been written by Olivia. On reading it, Malvolio becomes convinced that she is in love with him and he makes a fool of himself with her. She is puzzled and think that perhaps her dear butler has gone insane. With concern she asks Maria to take care of him, and he is put into a dark room. The rest of the story pans itself out at the end of the play.

I must admit, I did not care much for the play as I read it. It left me cold and wondering if it had been worth it. It didn’t even give me, at the end, a sense of satisfaction of my having read yet another Shakespearean play . I was terribly disappointed with it, thinking that in many places it had been unbelievable, in others it had been to slap-stick for my taste, and there wasn’t a single character I had liked.

Then, I recalled having started reading Romeo and Juliet with much dislike. But once I had watched a couple of clips of the 1960s move with Olivia Hussey as Juliet, I realised how the play ought to be read — with the stage in my mind’s eye. Thus, the rest of my reading had become quite pleasurably. Sadly, though, I was not able to work with this reading concept while tackling Twelfth Night. However, I recalled mom having mentioned the 1996 movie version of Twelfth Night and decided to watch it.

Again and again, watching Shakespeare proves more and more profitable to reading Shakespeare. I loved this movie. The plots were no longer unbelievable. Imogen Stubbs (many Austen fans might remember her as the conniving Lucy Steele from the 1995 movie version of Sense and Sensibility) is an amazing Cesario (a.k.a. Viola), and somehow the make-up artists contrived to make her and Steven Mackintosh (playing Sebastian) look absolutely identical. Feste the clown is played by Ben Kingsley, and oh I just loved him! He portrays Feste in a way I simply could not imagine on merely reading the play. Orsino is played satisfactorily by Toby Stephens and Helena Bonham Carter makes for a passionate Olivia. While I cannot say that this play (as watched NOT read) did not send me into whoops like Much Ado About Nothing (1993) did, I thought it was beautifully made. I enjoyed the music, especially the pieces sung by Feste, and on the whole Twelfth Night back a very pleasurable experience.

Allow me to tell you that if you, at any time, find any of Shakespeare’s plays dry, boring, hard or incomprehensible, watch his plays in performance, either on stage or as a movie; you’ll understand them perfectly. Then, I suppose, going back to reading the play will make everything different, and allow you to comprehend other nuances of Shakespeare’s art.

Below is a video of the scene where Viola comes to plead Orsino’s case with Olivia for the first time.

On a side note: I watched a wee bit of a stage performance of this play on youtube with Helen Hunt playing Viola/Cesario. This version made the above scene a lot more comical. But I preferred this one a great deal more.

This play is the second one read for the Let’s Read Plays challenge.

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Around India in 80 Trains

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Around India In 80 TrainsAround India In 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had never read travelogues before I picked up Three Men in a Boat. And had I had an inkling that the book was something of a creative travelogue of the River Thames, I would never have read it. But since I hadn’t known, I read it and enjoyed it so much I gave it five stars on Goodreads. To know why, just check out my review.

Now, having got a taste of how interesting a travelogue could be with just the right amount of humour and creativity, I decided to give this non-fiction sub-genre a deliberate try. While browsing through my online book store I came across Around India in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh. I figured it would be very interesting, especially as the writer travelled all over India, and this country is incredibly diverse geographically, culturally and linguistically. I slipped it into my wishlist, and finally took the plunge and got it delivered at my door on the last day of 2012. I couldn’t resist it.

Monisha is an NRI (Non-Resident Indian) who identifies herself as English having been born and brought up in England. Her experiences to India, before her 80-trains project, had been brief and mostly with family and relatives. She decided to on this project when she read in a new article that 80 cities and towns in India were connected through domestic flights. Knowing that the Indian Railways is the largest in Asia, and reaching into India’s vast interiors, she decided to journey by 80 different trains through India states.

Rajesh’s writing makes for light-hearted, enjoyable reading. Her language is spot-on, and her narrative is scattered with pretty phrases and sentences here and there — not too much that this book sounds over-the-top, but enough to make the reading a pleasure. She ventures out with a Norwegian friend whom she dubs Passepartout after the side-kick in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. Their various journeys are not only frought with various peoples and kindly strangers, but also becomes a sprititual quest for Rajesh, especially triggered off by her companion’s pro-atheist outlook.

Personally, I thought the spiritual aspect of this whole book brought down my rating from four to three on goodreads. While one cannot separate India from religion (all its varied cultures are based heavily on religion), religion is always a controversial topic. It was inevitable that I would disagree with both the writer and her companion regarding spirituality. And that marred the reading for me. I will not go into detail about this aspect of the book. As I’ve just mentioned religion will always be a controversial topic and I do not want to get controversial now.

Something else about this book, or rather the writer, that struck me was her penchant for identifying herself as English, but getting quite offended if she was not seen as Indian. Does that make sense? I felt she was a bit like the proverbial cat on the wall. For the most part though, she identified her home and loyalties as England.

On the whole, this was an interesting read. I was so surprised at the various kinds of trains India has! I’d never heard of the toy trains in the north or the Lifeline Express, which apparently is a hospital on wheels that runs through the rural areas of India, providing free medical aid and surgeries for the poor. I really enjoyed learning about the various trains in my own country, and I’ve made a note of a few. I think I’ll be taking this book out to consult it for trains some time!

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