Wow – this one came around really fast! This is my 18th time participating in this event – I have chosen 20 books from my list of classics, all of which are currently on my shelves at home waiting to be read. Whichever number is posted tomorrow, I will read the corresponding book before the 22nd of September. It’s quite exciting waiting to find out which one will be picked! My books for this challenge are:
This was the book selected for me by the most recent Classics Club spin – #37. It is one I picked up from a charity shop some years ago and has sat on my shelf ever since so I was happy to have an excuse to actually read it. It is a memoir, written during WW2, after Winifred was forced to leave her beloved home in the south of France when Germany invaded. She had been living there for some years, and enjoyed annual summer trips (and one winter one) to the high alps, where she stayed in very basic accommodation with a friend, some dogs, and several servants. It was quite remote, but there were occasional locals about who brought food, etc. The book is very descriptive of the mountains, lakes, wildflowers, driving conditions and weather, as well as the general life of privileged expats in the 1920s and 30s, looking for a simple life, but with servants!
I did enjoy this book as it was well-written and provided an interesting window into a time that is long past. I was easily able to imagine this woman, in her 50s, sitting in freezing cold England in wartime and reminiscing about those wonderful times in the sunny south of France. My copy has some pretty terrible black and white photos, mostly of landscapes, but they did help to confirm how remote and beautiful the area was/is.
I have listed below 20 books from my Classics Club TBR, and tomorrow a number will be spun, and I will read the book relating to that number. The book selected needs to be completed by 3 March, so I am hoping for one of the shorter books as I already have quite a number of books committed for the next few weeks for other challenges. This is my 15th spin, so I will definitely read whatever comes up!
I picked up an old hardback version of this book from a local little free library, as I have had a long interest in China and knew Pearl Buck’s books to be interesting and well-written – she won the Nobel Prize for Literature! This was my pick for the most recent Classics Club spin, but I discovered that it is actually a sequel, so went on the hunt for the first novel, Dragon Seed. Luckily I found an audio version and was glad I did, because it was all about the background of the main characters appearing in The Promise. So, I managed to finish both books in time to claim success in completing Classics Club Spin #35.
I am hopelessly remiss and slow in blogging, mostly because I would rather be reading than writing, but have tried to at least blog about my Spin reads. At the time of writing this, it is months since I completed the book, so it’s just lasting impressions that are included here. I found the story fascinating, because it depicts the experiences of various members of a Chinese family during a little-known (to most westerners) period of WW2. This description is taken from the Goodreads blurb:
The Promise chronicles a band of Chinese soldiers who are sent to rescue a British-American platoon, pinned down in Burma, while the Japanese army attacks Burma Road during World War II. The dangers that await the brave soldiers are heightened, as they encounter unthankfulness and ingratitude from the foreign soldiers that they hadn’t expected. Confronted with an impending attack from the Japanese, growing tension from the Anglo-American forces, the Chinese soldiers must make a difficult choice: abandon their posts or continue on with a suicidal mission.
Pearl Buck (who was American but grew up in China and lived there for many years as an adult) always demonstrates a deep understanding and love for all levels of Chinese society, but particularly for the peasant class. Her skill was in describing the lives of people in a society very different from our own, but in such a way that we can easily relate to them as people just like us in terms of their human desires and weaknesses, and the difficulties in dealing with the complexity of family relationships. So, although the novel’s storyline is about the war, what remains in the mind are the internal struggles of the characters who are faced with a variety of very confronting situations. Themes of racism and colonialism are very evident, and somewhat stereotypical, though this is hardly surprising as the book was published in 1944 while the war with the Japanese was ongoing.
I really enjoyed this book, and its prequel, and it reminded me to look out for more books by this Nobel prizewinner.
This is the Classics Club’s 35th CC Spin – I have been participating for some years now and always look forward to it.
What is a CC Spin?
Simply pick twenty books that you’ve got left to read from your Classics Club List.
Post that list, numbered 1-20, on your blog before Sunday, 15th October.
A number from 1-20 will be announced.
Read that book by 3rd December, 2023.
I am onto my second set of 50 classics, and this is my list for this spin – I have removed the longest books because I am currently trying to manage multiple reading challenges and probably would struggle to fit in some of my longer books. Here is my list for this challenge:
This book was my pick for the Classics Club Spin #34. It is an Australian classic, set in the 1920’s and apparently based on the author’s own early life, travelling around country Victoria with her sister, both dressed as men (though rarely fooling anyone), and working at various seasonal agricultural jobs. The descriptions of the countryside, the lifestyle (poverty-stricken) and especially the other characters living a similar life were quite fascinating, but the book was actually a hard slog and took me 10 days to get through. I usually only take 2-3 days for a book of that length, but for this one I needed some light relief in between. The narrator, preferring to be known as Steve, is a difficult character, expressing herself very frequently through poetry, which distracted and irritated me. Throughout the novel the language is very descriptive, often floridly so, but also often very funny, especially the descriptions of lots of engaging and eccentric characters of the type that appear in many novels about this era – that part I did enjoy! Both sisters, though trying to pass themselves off as men in order to apply for jobs, are actually looking for love, but the itinerant nature of the work makes relationships difficult, and Steve is heartbroken for much of the novel. She desperately wants romance and love, but is not at all keen on the drudgery of wifedom and motherhood that she has seen in marriages around her. I was surprised to read about how diverse the other itinerant workers were – there seemed to be more Italians, Indians and others than there were Australians, and the sisters become quite well versed in Italian as a result, as well as learning lots about the food and traditions of other cultures.
Overall I found this book quite tedious because of the over-the-top language and poetry, but I did enjoy some aspects, especially knowing it was written from real-life experience.
In August 2019 I signed up with the Classics Club to read 50 classic books of my choice within 5 years, and I achieved this in May 2023. I haven’t blogged about all the books because I find that writing about the books takes up too much time that could otherwise be spent reading, and I average three books per week, so I am just not prepared to spend the required amount of time blogging. I do usually blog about the books I read for the quarterly Classics Club Spin events as that is part of the challenge, but otherwise it’s pretty random! The 50 books I read for my “first 50” challenge, in order of reading, are as follows:
The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
The Best Short Stories – Rudyard Kipling
The Shiralee – D’Arcy Niland
The Good Shepherd – CS Forester
The Best Short Stories – Jack London
Tales from the Thousand and One Nights
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
Tiburon – Kylie Tennant
Walkabout – Charles & Elsa Chauvel
Dr Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Pavilion of Women – Pearl S Buck
Jane and Prudence – Barbara Pym
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea – Randolph Stow
Around the World in 80 Days – Jules Verne
Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
The Yellow Joss & Other Tales – Ion L Idriess
The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead
Beyond the Black Stump – Nevil Shute
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
The Englishwoman in America – Isabella Bird
The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling – Henry Fielding
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
To the Islands – Randolph Stow
Beowulf – Unknown
Notre-Dame of Paris – Victor Hugo
The Art of War – Sun Tzu
Of Human Bondage – W Somerset Maugham
The Trumpet-Major – Thomas Hardy
Man Tracks – Ion L Idriess
The 39 Steps – John Buchan
A Passage to India – EM Forster
North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
Coonardoo – Katharine Susannah Prichard
The Last of the Mohicans – J Fenimore Cooper
The Iliad – Homer
The Beckoning Shore – EV Timms
The Swiss Family Robinson – Johann David Wyss
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Bronte
The Birds & Other Stories – Daphne du Maurier
A Damsel in Distress – PG Wodehouse
Adam Bede – George Eliot
The Watch Tower – Elizabeth Harrower
The Well Dressed Explorer -Thea Astley
Lorna Doone – RD Blackmore
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth – Leo Tolstoy
Miss Mackenzie – Anthony Trollope
I have now made a new list to be completed over the next five years, as follows:
On the Wool Track (Australian) – CEW Bean 1910
Agnes Grey – Anne Bronte 1847
The Professor – Charlotte Bronte 1857
Shirley – Charlotte Bronte 1849
The Promise – Pearl S Buck 1944
The Poetical Works of Robert Burns – Robert Burns 1859
The Story of the Stone V2 – The Crab-Flower Club – Cao Xueqin 1791
The Story of the Stone V3 – The Warning Voice – Cao Xueqin 1791
The Story of the Stone V4 – The Debt of Tears – Cao Xueqin & Gao E 1791
The Story of the Stone V5 – The Dreamer Wakes – Cao Xueqin & Gao E 1791
Don Quixote – Cervantes 1605
The Box-Car Children – Gertrude Chandler Warner 1924
The Leopard – Tomasi di Lampedusa 1958
Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens 1844
Barnaby Rudge – Charles Dickens 1841
Stories and Sketches – Charles Dickens & others 1830-55
Christmas Stories – Charles Dickens & others 1850-67
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 1844
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 1844
Daniel Deronda – George Eliot 1876
Mountain Madness – Winifred Fortescue 1943
Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell 1848
My Apprenticeship – Maxim Gorky 1916
I, Claudius – Robert Graves 1934
Claudius the God – Robert Graves 1934
The Quiet American – Graham Greene 1955
King Solomon’s Mines – H Rider Haggard 1885
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo 1862
The Art of Seeing – Aldous Huxley 1943
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James 1881
Hereward the Wake – Charles Kingsley 1865
The Pea-Pickers (Australian) – Eve Langley 1942
Seven Pillars of Wisdom – TE Lawrence 1922
Palace Walk – Naguib Mahfouz 1956
Sugar Street – Naguib Mahfouz 1957
An Outback Marriage (Australian) – AB (Banjo) Paterson 1906
This was my pick for Classics Club Spin #33 – the 13th I have participated in. I had assumed this book was an autobiography, but it is actually a novel, written when Tolstoy was a young man. Despite this, it is written in the first person and is clearly closely based on his own life and upbringing. I found the book really interesting in terms of the lifestyle of wealthy families in 19th century Russia, often moving between homes in Moscow and country farms, and always involving lavish parties. Characteristic of Tolstoy and especially relevant and moving in this book are the many instances detailing the main character’s inner life. There is lots of description of feelings of guilt, grief and general confusion, and lack of understanding even of his own behaviour when in situations involving some sort of social, family, academic or religious pressure – all of which are easy to relate to as universal experiences.
I hadn’t read any Tolstoy until a few years ago when I finally read Anna Karenina, followed a couple of years later by War and Peace. He writes very descriptively and I have enjoyed everything I’ve read of his, so am keen to get into the short stories, still languishing on my TBR shelf.
Me, My Shelf and I 