#dickensindecember...The Decision

So I had a poll up on my sidebar for a while and people voted, quite a lot of people in fact, and The Pickwick Papers won. Only just, but win it did, so sorry Little Dorrit (a very close runner up) but on we go with Samuel and Co. Because it is longer than A Tale of Two Cities, and because the whole finishing Dickens before Christmas thing seemed to work well last year, I'm actually planning to start mid November and post on Mondays with the introductory post around November 17th and the first section the week after. We'll have to read about twelve chapters a week to make it work out over five weeks, finishing on December 22nd. I'm really hoping that some of you are going to join me with this, because I really don't think I have the motivation to attack this tome alone! Don't make me do it on my own!

Just to entice you in, here's a little bit of info which I have gleaned from the ever-reliable source of Wikipedia... 

The novel's main character, Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, is a kind and wealthy old gentleman, and the founder and perpetual president of the Pickwick Club. To extend his researches into the quaint and curious phenomena of life, he suggests that he and three other "Pickwickians" (Mr Nathaniel Winkle, Mr Augustus Snodgrass, and Mr Tracy Tupman) should make journeys to places remote from London and report on their findings to the other members of the club. Their travels throughout the English countryside by coach provide the chief theme of the novel.

With the introduction of Sam Weller in chapter 10, the book became the first real publishing phenomenon, with bootleg copies, theatrical performances, Sam Weller joke books, and other merchandise.

If you're like me and a Little Women fan you will also probably remember the chapter where they talk about the Pickwick Club. I will admit that as being my primary motivation for wanting to read this book, and if it's rubbish I'm going to have to seriously reconsider the amount of trust I put in Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Those who are regular readers will know how much of an impact this is likely to have on me, so for the sake of my children please readalong with me! Just so I have support if it's rubbish... 

If you're interested in reading along with me, please link up your blog (or twitter, tumblr, whatever) in the linky below so I can visit you all! Feel free to nick the button above and stick it on your blogs or whatever. Equally if you're better at graphics than I am (not hard) please feel free to make a better one and use that. Either way, see you back here in November for a schedule type thingy...

The Classics Spin

Theoretically, I'm a pretty good member of The Classics Club. Like, I participate in the monthly meme and comment on other people's lists and reviews and stuff, I just suck at reading stuff that's actually on my list! The Club is doing a spin, whereby you list 20 books that you have yet to read from your list (if you want to see mine, it's in the tabs up top!) and then on Monday they post a random number and you have to read the book on your list which matches up to the number. Easy, right? And I'm a sucker for lists, so I was always going to do this! 

They say you have to list 5 books  you're dreading, 5 you can't wait to read, 5 you feel neutral about and then 5 free reads - in my case 4 rereads and one which is just calling to me. The idea is to challenge yourself, so in the interests of that, my list is thus:

5 Dreaded

• Dr Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
• Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
• The Well of Loneliness - Radclyffe Hall
• A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
• Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

5 I Can't Wait to Read

• The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Alice Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
• The Hours - Michael Cunningham
• The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
• The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster

5 I am Neutral About

• Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
• Robin Hood - Henry Gilbert
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
• The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Professor - Charlotte Bronte

5 Freebies

• Walden - Henry David Thoreau
• The Children of the New Forest - Captain Marryat
• Swallows & Amazons - Arthur Ransome
• Charlotte's Web - E.B White
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry - Mildred D. Taylor

And here's a random list all mixed up and stuff:

1. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
2. The Scarlet Letter
3. Walden
4. Swallows & Amazons
5. Doctor Zhivago 
6. The Professor
7. A Tale of Two Cities
8. The Children of the New Forest
9. Alice Through the Looking Glass
10. The Master and Margarita
11. Cold Comfort Farm
12. The Well of Loneliness
13. The Hours
14. Roll of thunder, Hear my Cry
15. Charlotte's Web
16. Les Miserables
17. Mrs Dalloway
18. Robin Hood
19. The Phantom Tolbooth
20. The Beautiful and Damned

There are loads on here that I really wouldn't mind being voluntarily forced (yes, that's a thing!) to read. But please please not Les Mis! I have some kind of mental block when it comes to this book, and I should love it because I seriously have an obsession with the stage show. I have seen it in the West End a grand total of six times, and I'm not done yet, but I just. cannot. take. the book. :-/ So not 16, please!!

The Classics Club August Meme

I've been meaning to get around to this for a few weeks now but things have been (and still are, really) a little hectic around here! We're in full on baby countdown mode now- he's due to arrive in 6 weeks and 3 days and it's all a little bit terrifying! Anyway, The Classics Club has a new(ish) blog all of its' own, and I swear I could lose hours looking through lists of reviews, new members etc. I love it. Some people are making insane progress with their lists. I've been stuck half way through Agnes Grey for about two weeks now and I'm really not sure why because it's great and tiny, but that's just the way things go sometimes I guess. I'm thinking about starting on one of the children's series I have on my list soon, but I may wait until baby arrives and read to him while feeding or something.

The question for August is what is my favourite classic book and why? I've been thinking really hard about this, as my knee jerk response was (obviously) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Any of you who read my blog will probably have heard me go on about how much I adore this book and there are a couple of reasons for it. Firstly, it was the first book that I ever read by myself in one sitting. It took me two hours and I was incredibly proud of myself. Secondly, my mum read it to us when I was about six or seven; she would sit in an armchair and we would all gather around her, much like they do when Marmee is reading their fathers' letter home in the book. There is something in Little Women which affects me. Every time I read it I get something different from it, and it is my comfort read. At least twice a year I sit down and read through all four books, and it always, always makes me feel better. The last time I read them, I started with Good Wives (I've finally, finally worked out why it is that American's think this is part of Little Women rather than a seperate volume; because in America, it is, so there we go) because the whole marriage and baby having and attempting to be an independent adult seemed to have more relevance to my situation, and that's pretty much the explanation for why I love the books so much I think. I can totally see myself in all of them. A lot of the time, they represent the way I want my life to be, and especially in the case of Little Women, how my childhood was. My siblings and I were very into imaginary games, outdoor pursuits and writing and acting our own plays. My younger sisters have just pulled together an amateur production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar, for which they directed, organised the band, did all the vocal work, stage managed, and created all of the props and scenery, to fundraise for their church. I would have been totally involved had we lived closer, so there we go. My love for Little Women will probably endure forever, and I will admit that one of my first thoughts when we found out we were having a boy was that he probably wouldn't love the books as much as I do, but you never know.

So that's the obvious answer, but I have another which I always forget to mention. I discovered To Kill a Mockingbird when I was around twelve, back when I was a Girl Guide. I bought the book from a sale we had at Guides for about 50p I think and immediately fell in love with it. I think originally it was the fact that the narrator is a child that I so loved; it makes the story so relatable. On re-reading it earlier this year I realised how absolutely beautiful and lyrical the writing is. Harper Lee sets such evocative scenes in your mind that you can literally see the story happen while you're reading it. I didn't read the book for years between ages 16 and about 22, because it was our study book for GCSEs which meant that I knew pages of it off by heart, and also that I'd annotated and highlighted my copy beyond all recognition. I remember being so excited when I heard we'd be studying it, because I already knew it so well and had thought so much about the issues and themes contained in it, and that's really the reason why I loved it so much. Atticus Finch is one of my greatest heroes. I'm the kind of person who's given up watching the news because it just makes me sad, and often I wish that I had the... willpower, strength of character, whatever you want to call it to fight more for the things that I know are right, and the concept of anybody having the strength to fight such a losing battle is just amazing to me. The hideous unfairness of what happens in the novel still gets me every time. It still makes me emotional, makes me angry, and makes me wish that I could change the world to be a better, fairer place.

The Classics Club :-)

***This is my original post which I've left up for posterity. I have since revamped my list and you can find the current one here***

Jillian from A Room of One's Own has come up with the brilliant idea of a Classics Club, where people make their own list of 50, 100 or 200+ classics that they want to read within a 5 year period. I adore list making, and there are a lot of classics I want to read. I also love the totally unstressed nature of this project, and the fact that a 'classic' is whatever you define a classic as. Because of this, my list has probably ended up with a lot more rereads of series I loved as a child than it otherwise would have, but I tried to limit myself to books I actually want to read, rather than titles I feel I should have read as I know that they'll just sit on the list intimidating me for five years and I'll feel guilty about not reading them for five years... Hence the addition of such titles as Ian Fleming's James Bond series (they are classic spy fiction), and L. Frank Baum's Oz books, which I never read the entire series of as a child! 

Anyway, here's my list. Currently I have 142 books, but the number may grow. I'm hoping that as so many are children's books they won't actually take me that long to read!

Titles I own are in bold; ones I have read are struckthrough with a link to the review, if I've got around to it!

      20th Century

1. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

2. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

3. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

4. Alice Through the Looking Glass * by Lewis Carroll

5. Ariel by Sylvia Plath

6. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

7. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

8. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

9. Charlotte's Web * by E.B White

10.Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

11.Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

12.Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

13.Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

14.Forever by Judy Blume

15.For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

16.Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier

17.Gone with the Wind * by Margaret Mitchell

18.Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood

19.Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

20.Kid by Simon Armitage 

21.Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H Lawrence

22.Let the Circle Be Unbroken * by Mildred D. Taylor

23.Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winnifred Watson

24.Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

25.My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

26.Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm * by Kate Wiggins Douglas

27.Robin Hood by Henry Gilbert

28.Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry * by Mildred D. Taylor

29.Save Me The Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald

30.Tell me the Truth About Love by W.H Auden 

31.The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

32.The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

33.The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

34.The Bell Jar * by Sylvia Plath

35.The Cocktail Party by T.S Eliot

36.The Collected Poems, 1909 - 1962 by T.S Eliot

37.The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

38.The Enormous Room by E.E Cummings

39.The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

40.The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

41.The Great Gatsby * by F. Scott Fitzgerald

42.The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

43.The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

44-57.The James Bond Series by Ian Fleming (Casino Royale *, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds are Forever, From Russia with Love, Dr. No *, Goldfinger, For Your Eyes Only, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, The Man with the Golden Gun, & Octopussy and the Living Daylights )

58.The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald 

59-66.The Little House Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House in the Big Woods *, Little House on the Prairie *, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of the Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, & The First Four Years)

67.The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bugakov

68.The Outsiders by S.E Hinton

69-82.The Oz Series by L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz *, The Marvellous Land of Oz *, Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, The Road to Oz, The Emerald City of Oz, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Tik- Tok of Oz, The Scarecrow of Oz, Rinktink in Oz, The Lost Princess of Oz, The Tin Woodman of Oz, The Magic of Oz, & Glinda of Oz) 

83.The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

84.The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

85.The Road to Memphis * by Mildred D. Taylor

86.The Silmarilion by J.R.R Tolkien

87.The Story of Doctor Doolittle by Hugh Lofting

88.The Stranger by Albert Camus

89-101.The Swallows and Amazons Series by Arthur Ransome (Swallows and Amazons *, Swallowdale *, Peter Duck *, Winter Holiday, Coot Club, Pigeon Post, We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea, Secret Water, The Big Six, Missee Lee *, The Picts and the Martyrs: Or Not Welcome at all, Great Northern?,  & Coots in the North)

102.The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

103.This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

104.Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

105.Ulysses by James Joyce

106.Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M Forster

19th Century

107.A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

108.Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

109.Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

110.Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant

111.Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

112.Grimms' Fairytales by Jacob & Willhelm Grimm

113.Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

114.Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

115.Nights with Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris

116.North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

117.Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

118.Quo Vadis? * by Henryk Sienkiewicz

119.Shirley by Charlotte Bronte 

120.Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe

121.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

122.The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

123.The Awakening by Kate Chopin

124.The Children of the New Forest * by Captain Marryat

125.The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

126.The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G Wells

127.The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

128.The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

129.The Professor by Charlotte Bronte

130.The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

131.The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

132.The Time Machine by H.G Wells

133.The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley

134.Villette by Charlotte Bronte

135.Walden by Henry David Thoreau

136.War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

18th Century

137.Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

17th Century

138.Macbeth by William Shakespeare

139.Tales of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault

1st Century B.C (approx)

140.The Aeneid by Virgil

8th Century B.C (approx)

141.The Odyssey by Homer 

142.The Iliad by Homer

* = re-reads (some so distant I only barely remember that I've ever read the book, and not at all what it was about!)