Monday, February 25, 2013

The Classics Spin!

Fallen Asleep While Reading (1872)
William Powell Frith

Though I'm currently inundated with a variety of projects, both professional and personal, I'm longing for an entire week of nothing but leisure reading. Hopefully, my March schedule will ease up (keep your fingers crossed for me!) so I can indulge in some good -- nay, fantastic -- books. Ah, what luxury.

Even if it's a bit late, I've decided to join The Classics Spin! The concept is to select twenty unread titles from your Classics Club list: five titles one is dreading, five highly anticipated titles, five titles to which one is different, and five wild card titles (a category of one's own choosing). I'm not particularly dreading any titles on my list, but I'm most intimidated by chunksters right now as I worry that my easily distracted brain will abandon them after a few brief chapters. Time to face my fears. I also mentally chastise myself for not reading the wealth of children's classics sitting on my shelves, so that genre will be represented in my wild card selections.

The Classics Club randomly selected #14 as the title for participants to read, but I'm stealing a page from Cassandra's book by having a random generator decide which title I read so I can still experience the luck of the draw. The goal is to read the text in its entirety before April 1st.

Behold, my chosen titles...

Five Chunksters:

1. The Brontes by Juliet Barker
2. No Name by Wilkie Collins
3. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
4. Cecilia by Fanny Burney
5. Patronage by Maria Edgeworth

Five Titles I Can't Wait to Read:

6. The Warden by Anthony Trollope (barely made a dent in this in January!)
7. Adam Bede by George Eliot
8. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
9. The History of Pompey the Little by Francis Coventry
10. A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne

Five Titles About Which I Am Currently Indifferent:

11. The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
12. The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
13. Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith
14. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
15. East Lynne by Ellen Wood

Wild Card -- Five Children's Classics:

16. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
17. The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
18. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
19. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
20. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

And now my randomly generated number: 5

I will be reading Patronage by Maria Edgeworth in March. I swear I didn't cheat! I was sort of hoping I'd 'get stuck' with a chunkster, as I need a gentle push to get going with these. I usually end up loving chunksters, so a little nudge is appreciated. I'm quite happy with this result. :)

If you're also participating in the spin, I'd love to hear what you'll be reading and your feelings about it. Are you apprehensive? Excited?

6 comments:

Cassandra said...

Muahahaha! I've started a new trend! I knew it :P
Good luck with your chunkster (I'm so relieved I didn't get one of those...I could have ended up with Don Quijote!)

Diana said...

Haha, yes you have! I must admit that reading a Maria Edgeworth novel sounds more appealing than Don Quixote. I hope you enjoy Catch-22.

JoAnn said...

Thankfully, I ended up with a 'quickie' - The Picture of Dorian Gray. Not quite sure what to expect, but I hope to read it next week. Good luck with your spin book!

Diana said...

Ooh, I loved The Picture of Dorian Gray. I hope you enjoy it too.

Michelle Stockard Miller said...

My spin pick was Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, which was on my 'books I felt neutral about' section. It's a relatively short read so will allow me to get more books read in March. I'm happy with it, I think!

I love choosing reads with random generator. I do it all the time with books from my home library of over 3000 books. It's so hard to choose between so many!

Good luck with your spin selection and thanks for visiting my blog.

Diana said...

My pleasure, Michelle!

I read Cold Comfort Farm last year and enjoyed it. I can't say it was a favourite, but certain bits had me in stitches (especially the part where one character goes on a hilarious tangent about the Brontes). I hope you enjoy it!

I like that you regularly choose books with a random generator. I should implement this practice more often.