Read a Classic Challenge discussion

Optional Monthly Themes:

These are optional suggestions to provide some fun to this year’s challenge. Any classic can be logged at any time. If you have a specific classic in mind, you’re a ‘one classic a year’ kind of participant, or you're an ‘I’m going to read every book from a single author this year’ kind of participant, then bravo, carry on. But if you like some variety and are not adverse to suggestions, please feel free to participate.

• JAN: Fables, Fairytales, Myths, and Legends
• FEB: Black Authors (for Black History Month)
• MAR: Women Authors (for Women’s History Month)
• APR: Science Fiction/Fantasy
• MAY: Nonfiction/Autobiography/Biography
• JUNE: Comedy/Satire
• JULY: Victorian
• AUG: International Authors (Limited American/British authors, except for books that focus on international travel/cultures.)
• SEPT: Banned or Challenged Books (for Banned Books Week)
• OCT: Revenge/Obsession
• NOV: Little Known Works from Famous Authors
• DEC: Children's Classics

Suggested reading for January:

Disclaimer: There is *no way* to comprehensively list all the fables, fairy tales and legends of the world, so do not consider this to be the end-all be-all for the topic. In fact, I encourage everyone to bring any title recommendations to the group’s attention or suggest subtopics explored by websites and other resources (like books!).

For this list, I attempted, whenever possible, to use either original texts (usually in translation) or classic compilations. However, as is the joy of oral tradition, there are far more versions of varying quality out there to explore.

Fables

Classic:
Aesop’s Fables (many editions)
Jataka Tales [India]
One Thousand and One (Arabian) Nights
Complete Fables of Jean Le Fontaine
Modern:
Fables (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Fables For Our Time (James Thurber)

Fairy Tales

Collected Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
Les Contes des Fees (Madame d’Aulnoy)
The Complete Fairy Tales (Hans Christian Andersen)
Complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales (Jakob & Wilhelm Grimm)
Norwegian Folktales (Asbjornsen & Moe)
American Fairy Tales (Frank L. Baum)

Myths/Legends

Gilgamesh
Theogony (Hesiod)
Odyssey/Iliad (Homer)
The Aeneid (Virgil)
The Metamorphoses (Ovid)
Beowulf
The Song of Roland
La Morte d’Arthur (Thomas Mallory)
The Edda (prose or poetic) [Norse]
African Myths of Origin (ed. Stephen Belcher)
The Children of Odin: The Book of Northern Myths (Padraic Colum)

Classic Re-Tellings and Re-Imaginings

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court (Mark Twain)
Crystal Cave (Mary Stewart)
The Once and Future King (T. H. White)
The Silmarillion (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Grendel (John Gardner)
Wicked (Gregory Maguire) – too soon? :)

Classic Books On The Theme (for our classics of nonfiction readers!)

The Golden Bough (Sir James George Frazer)
Mythology (Edith Hamilton)
The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)

Websites with more suggestions and texts:

Aesop’s Fables
http://www.umass.edu/aesop
An interesting project demonstrating the relevance of these fables in the creation of art. There are some book recommendations under the History link.

American Folklore
http://www.americanfolklore.net/
Well organized collection of homegrown American stories, with a useful A-Z story index.

FolkTexts
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html
No-frills, highly detailed site that explores shared themes in folk tales.

Canongate Myth Series
http://www.themyths.co.uk/
Many current authors have participated in the series of adapting classic mythological motifs.

Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library List (via LibraryThing)
http://www.librarything.com/publisher...
Many of these volumes are out of print, but it is a classic and globally-inclusive series that will give you plenty of ideas.

Sur La Lune Fairy Tales
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/
Annotated fairy tales that explore themes across cultures.

Encyclopedia Mythica
http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/
Online encyclopedic resource with a global scope. No texts here, but contains over 7000 entries related to myths and folktales worldwide.

February Suggested Reading – Black History Month

Fiction
Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart
Alice Walker – The Color Purple
Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man
James Baldwin – Go Tell It On the Mountain
Zora Neale Hurston – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Richard Wright – Native Son
Toni Morrison – Beloved
Octavia Butler – Kindred

Non-Fiction
W.E.B. Du Bois -- Souls of Black Folk
Booker T. Washington – Up From Slavery
Frederick Douglass – Narrative of the Life Of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Richard Wright – Black Boy
Alex Haley – Roots
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (w/Alex Haley)
Why We Can’t Wait – Martin Luther King, Jr.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou

Drama/Poetry
August Wilson – Fences
Lorraine Hansberry – A Raisin in the Sun
Langston Hughes – Collected Poems
James Weldon Johnson – The Book of American Negro Poetry
Claude McKay – Complete Poems
Sterling Brown – Collected Poems
Phyllis Wheatley – Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

Websites for more suggestions and reading ideas:
http://www.playbill.com/features/arti...
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmlit...
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmpeo...
http://www.nypl.org/locations/tid/64/...
http://aalbc.com/books/thebesttitles.htm
http://aalbc.com/books/thebestauthors...

I read Red River by Lalita Tademy last month so I'm counting that as my Black History selection even though it's not a classic. She also wrote Cane River which I read several years ago. They are both excellent historical fictions set near Natchitoches, Louisiana. Natchitoches is celebrating their tricentennial this year. This is where I went to college and I love the area. If you're interested in Black History, I highly recommend these books based on Ms. Tademy's ancestors.

Sorry I missed posting the March Suggestions for Women Authors.

Suggested Reading for March
Women’s History Month

Pre-1700
• Sappho
• St. Hildegard of Bingen
• St. Catherine of Siena
• Julian of Norwich
• Margery Kempe
• Juana Ines de la Cruz

18th Century
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Anna Laetitia Barbauld

19th Century
• Louisa May Alcott
• Kate Chopin
• Emily Dickinson
• Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Jane Austen
• Mary Shelley
• Anne Bronte
• Charlotte Bronte
• Emily Bronte
• George Eliot
• Elizabeth Gaskell

20th Century
• Edith Wharton
• Willa Cather
• Virginia Woolf
• Agatha Christie
• Doris Lessing
• Iris Murdoch
• Zora Neale Hurston
• Sylvia Plath
• Katherine Anne Porter
• S. E. Hinton
• Margaret Mitchell
• Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Harper Lee
• Pearl S. Buck
• Ayn Rand
• Carson McCullers
• Flannery O’Connor
• Toni Morrison
• Maya Angelou
• Octavia Butler
• Ursula K. Le Guin
• Anne Tyler
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Joan Didion
• Marion Zimmer Bradley
• Amy Tan
• Madeline L’Engle
• Sandra Cisneros
• Margaret Atwood

Various “Best Of” Lists around the Internet:
http://www.thebookescape.com/Feminist...
http://neurotaylor.com/2013/02/04/50-...
http://www.nypl.org/.../celebrating-w......
Contributions of women to pre-modern Asian literature included here:
http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/....

Aprils Book Suggestions for Sci-Fi and Fantasy (per Dave). If you want some personal recommendations comment below with your interests and we can reply with specific suggestions.

April is the cruelest time...so many books and so little time. Your moderators are all professed (confessed?) fans of the SF/Fantasy genre, making a suggested reading list a veritable nightmare to compile without leaving something out. So your librarian is going to punt this month and direct you to some lists that (for the most part) cover the essentials.

For our more seasoned fans, check out the link I just posted below as well as a personal favorite site of mine
(https://www.worldswithoutend.com/list...).

For the heavyweight classics of the genres, dig in to one of these lists, courtesy of sffjazz.com (which amazingly has not been hacked by either objectivists or scientologists):
http://fantasy100.sffjazz.com/lists_b... -- Click the sidebar to see the most popular fantasy series list.
http://scifilists.sffjazz.com/lists_b... -- Can’t get enough? Check out the sidebar for the next 100 as well as best genre films and other stuff.

Just in case you want to spice up your reading for our upcoming SF month:

http://io9.com/great-unsung-science-f...

May

Here is Dave's List:

Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! It's a little late, but here is your suggested reading for May, which is (for those playing along) Nonfiction/Biography Classics Month. You will see some Biography/Memoir at the end. If you see something good there, I say go for it!

Gale's Nonfiction Classics for Students was very helpful in pulling this list together.

Social Science
Marc Reisner – Cadillac Desert
John Kenneth Galbraith – The Affluent Society
James Baldwin – Notes of a Native Son
Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique
Abbie Hoffman – Steal This Book
Science/Nature/Math
Richard Rhodes – The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Annie Dillard – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Rachel Carson – Silent Spring
James D. Watson – The Double Helix
Henry David Thoreau – Walden
D’Arcy Thompson – On Growth and Form
G. H. Hardy – A Mathematician’s Apology
Philosophy/Psychology
Walter Lippman – A Preface to Morals
Timothy Leary – Design for Dying
Sigmund Freud – Interpretation of Dreams
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance
John Rawls – A Theory of Justice

History
W. E. B. DuBois – The Souls of Black Folk
Arnold Toynbee – A Study of History
John F. Kennedy – Profiles in Courage
William Carlos Williams – In the American Grain
Dee Brown – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Rebecca West – Black Lamb & Grey Falcon

True Crime
Truman Capote – In Cold Blood
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – News of a Kidnapping
Norman Mailer – The Executioner’s Song
Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward – All the President’s Men
Vincent Bugliosi & Curt Gentry – Helter Skelter

Religion/Mythology
Elaine Pagels – The Gnostic Gospels
James Frazer – The Golden Bough
William James – Variety of Religious Experience
Joseph Campbell – The Hero With a Thousand Faces
C. S. Lewis – Mere Christianity
Bertrand Russell – Why I am Not a Christian & Other Essays

Language/Literature
E. M. Forster – Aspects of the Novel
Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own
Ralph Ellison – Shadow and Act
H. L. Mencken – The American Language
William Strunk & E. B. White – Elements of Style
T. S. Eliot – Selected Essays, 1917-1932

Art
E. H. Gombrich – Art and Illusion
Giorgio Vasari – The Lives of the Artists
John Berger – Ways of Seeing
Tom Wolfe – The Painted Word
Robert Hughes – The Shock of the New

Biography/Memoir
Frank McCourt – Angela’s Ashes
Richard Wright – Black Boy
William Styron – Darkness Visible
Anne Frank – Diary of a Young Girl
Robert Graves – Goodbye to All That
Frederick Douglass – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Eve Curie – Madame Curie
Isak Dinesen – Out of Africa
Helen Keller – The Story of My Life
William Butler Yeats – Autobiography
Malcolm X [Alex Haley] – Autobiography of Malcolm X
Richard Rodriguez – Hunger of Memory
Victor Klemperer – I Will Bear Witness
Gertrude Stein – Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Mark Twain – Autobiography
Samuel Pepys – Diary of Samuel Pepys
Lytton Strachey – Eminent Victorians
Mark Mathabane – Kaffir Boy
Elie Weisel – Night
Vladimir Nabokov – Speak, Memory
Marie Vassilitchikov - The Berlin Diaries (John recommends)

June

(Here are Dave's Notes cobbled from his posts on Facebook).

Hey everyone, it's Satire/Humor month! I was astounded by how much stuff covered in previous months also would qualify for this month and I'm inclined not to repeat myself. Here are 20 to get you started (plus a remark about everyone's favorite Bard). Look for the file and a couple links and feel free to discuss.

Lysistrata (and other plays) – Aristophanes
The Pot of Gold (and other plays) – Plautus
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
Tartuffe – Moliere
Candide – Voltaire
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Pickwick Papers – Charles Dickens
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain
The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
My Uncle Oswald – Roald Dahl (Not for kids!!)
In God We Trust (All Others Pay Cash) – Jean Shepherd
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty – James Thurber
P.G. Wodehouse – My Man Jeeves
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
Heartburn – Nora Ephron

Before somebody calls me out on my deplorable lack of women authors on the just-posted list...
http://www.theguardian.com/books/book...

Shakespeare, of course, has written many comedies. However, as I learned back in grade school, “comedy” sometimes just means the main character doesn’t die. Of course, there is always the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” if you want to laugh over your Shakespeare.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPbhhp...)

Well, I apologize that I missed posting the last two month's themes (available on Facebook), but here is September list courtesy of Dave.

-----------------

Hi everyone and welcome back to school (if applicable). This month we focus on Banned and Challenged Books. To kick things off, here's a list of the most challenged books of the 21st century thus far:
http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlyc...
Now before you all start reading Captain Underpants, the most recent #1, allow me to break out the classics that show up of these lists to give you a starting point (most recent appearance given in parentheses). Many of these appeared multiple times on the list.

The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison (#2 - 2013)
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie (#3 - 2013)
Bless Me Ultima - Rudolfo Anaya (#9 - 2013)
Beloved - Toni Morrison (#10 - 2012)
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (#7 - 2011)
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (#10 - 2011)
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (#6 - 2009)
The Chocolate War - Robert Cormier (#2 - 2007)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (#5 - 2007)
The Color Purple - Alice Walker (#6 - 2007)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou (#8 - 2007)
Forever - Judy Blume (#2 - 2005)
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (#10 - 2004)
Go Ask Alice - Anonymous (#6 - 2003)
Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Patterson (#10 - 2003)
Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry - Mildred D. Taylor (#9 - 2002)
Julie of the Wolves - Jean Craighead George (#10 - 2002)
Summer of My German Soldier - Bette Greene (#5 - 2001)
More recent books that will probably earn classic status that also appeared:
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (#6 - 2012)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (#3 - 2009)
His Dark Materials trilogy - Philip Pullman (#2 - 2008)
Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling (#2 - 2003)
Fallen Angels - Walter Dean Myers (#2 - 2004)

I looked up the group on Facebook - looks fun! Trying to avoid stalkers there, so I'll be posting my stuff on Goodreads. Thanks for maintaining the book group!

Doing a bit a caregiving, these last few years, reading a lot of books aloud. This month, we're going through the Harry Potter series. Dear J.K. Rowling, bless ya'.

Currently reading: (8 Sept 1999 - US, 435 pages)

Here is October's List from Dave.

October is our month for obsession and revenge! At first I thought this might be a difficult list to build, but it kind of built itself. Anyway, if you are reading along with the monthly themes, here's some suggestions for your October classic (other than the World Series...another kind of October Classic).

Homer: The Iliad
Homer: The Odyssey
William Shakespeare: Hamlet
William Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos: Dangerous Liaisons
Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca
Charles Portis: True Grit
Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Stephen King: Carrie
William Goldman: The Princess Bride
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

Short on time? I think there are a few short stories by Poe that might do the trick.
Like

Were there any suggestion lists for November and December? :)

Sorry I thought I had posted November.

NOVEMBER - From Dave

"Good morning, classic readers. There's still two months left to read a classic book. While the themes have been popular and some folks have read more classics than I have read books (classic or otherwise) this year, don't forget that we just want to encourage everybody to take the time to read ONE classic. That's all it take to "win" this challenge.
Our November theme is Little (or Lesser) Known Works by classic authors. This makes for a ton of possibilities, all relative to one's knowledge of a given author. I will provide a few here, many of which stand in stark contrast to a much better known work. Please feel free to add your own suggestions. After all, if I knew all of the books, they probably wouldn't qualify for this month's theme!
Louisa May Alcott - An Old Fashioned Girl
Charlotte Bronte - Villette
Miguel de Cervantes - The Works of Persiles and Sigismunda
Charles Dickens - The Mudfog Papers
Rudyard Kipling - The Day's Work
C.S. Lewis - The Great Divorce
Herman Melville - Redburn: His First Voyage
Robert Louis Stevenson - The Black Arrow
JRR Tolkien - Beowulf: A Translation & Commentary
Edith Wharton - Custom of the Country"


DECEMBER - From Dave

"I assume everybody is busy Christmas shopping, wrapping up the semester, or both, since we've been a little quiet here....myself included!
December is the final month of the Read a Classic Challenge. As of this writing, there are just under three weeks to go. Since the challenge is to read one classic work at some point during the year (not who can read the most, impressive as some of you are), we want to make sure everybody gets a chance to "win". Therefore, this is "Children's Classics" month. We've already seen quite a few of these appear during the course of the year.

I can post a list early next week if you are struggling for ideas, but in the meantime, look back through the postings here and I'm sure you will find some great ideas."


Some classics from John include:

A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens, always popular)
The Gift of the Magi (O Henry)
Christmas in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (Washington Irving)
Little House in the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash: where A Christmas Story originated (Jean Shepherd)
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
The Little Match Girl (Hans Christian Andersen)
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (Maya Angelou)

There are probably a number of poetry options about the holidays (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa) as, well but I am not as familiar with them.

Here are some other linked suggestions:
- http://classiclit.about.com/od/christ...
- http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&p...

Thank you!