Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion

It is October! Time for fall and spookiness! What are you all planning to read? I've finished up my challenges and am rather burnt out on themes, so I'm not going to be doing much other than focusing on more contemporary reads and maintaining a good mix of book lengths.

Post 2021 Challenge Reading

Shorty Short (200 pages and under)
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric - Claudia Rankine (completed 10/5/21)
The Proof of the Honey - Salwa Al Neimi (completed 10/10/21)
Rust - Gui-ja Yang (completed 10/10/21)
Out on Main Street: And Other Stories - Shani Mootoo (completed 10/26/21)
Spring Garden - Tomoka Shibasaki (Currently Reading)
In The Name of the Mother - Mahasweta Devi

Middle Road (201-400 pages)
The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 4 1944-1947 - Anaïs Nin (completed 10/3/21)
Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge - Eleanor Herman (completed 10/12/21)
The Other Typist - Suzanne Rindell (completed 10/24/21)
You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett (completed 10/30/21)
The Wind Through the Keyhole - Stephen King (Currently Reading)
Zoli - Colum McCann

Substantial (401-600 pages)
To the End of the Land - David Grossman (completed 10/19/21)
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village - Samuel R. Delany (Currently Reading)
Gate of the Sun: Bab Al-Shams - Elias Khoury

Ever On (600+ pages)
We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen (completed 10/20/21)
The Mirror & the Light - Hilary Mantel (Currently Reading)
Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela

Aubrey wrote: "It is October! Time for fall and spookiness! What are you all planning to read? I've finished up my challenges and am rather burnt out on themes, so I'm not going to be doing much other than focusi..."

Aubrey, I don't think I've ever met anyone else who has read To The End of the Land. I loved it and am almost afraid to ask if you're enjoying it.

WILL FINISH IN OCTOBER:

1.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

2.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

3.
Righteous by Joe Ide

4.
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

WILL READ BUT WON'T FINISH IN SEPTEMBER:

Sourcery by Terry Pratchett
The Andromeda Evolution by Daniel H. Wilson
The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Shining by Stephen King
The Best American Mystery Stories 2020 edited by C.J. Box and Otto Penzler
Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come by Richard Preston
A Column of Fire by Ken Follett

Milena wrote: "Aubrey, I don't think I've ever met anyone else who has read To The End of the Land. I loved it and am almost afraid to ask if you're enjoying it."

Well Milena, it took me a bit to adjust to Grossman's prose style, but it turned out to be very appropriate for the subject material. He's tackling some extraordinarily tough topics in this, so it'll be interesting to see whether he effectively handles them all the way through or not.

I took a few day's rest, so now I must speed through another list of books.

Read
1 The Caiman by Maria Eugenia Manrique
2 The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes
3 The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan-American Highway by Teresa Bruce
4 Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History by Paul Horgan
5 Angelitos: A Graphic Novel by Ilan Stavans and Santiago Cohen
6 Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
7 The Mexican American Orquesta: Music, Culture, and the Dialectic of Conflict by Manuel H. Peña
8 The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazán
9 Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World by Rita Golden Gelman
10 The Fall by Albert Camus
11 The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict
12 Between the Lines by Lindsay Ward
13 The Heidi Chronicles by Wendy Wasserstein
14 The Umbrella Man and Other Stories by Roald Dahl
15 Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol
16 The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life
17 Coraline by Neil Gaiman
18 The Book of Tea by Kakuzō Okakura
19 The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy
20 Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan by Rebecca Corbett

(2021) (1913) (2017) (1954) (2018)
(2020) (1999) (1886) (2001) (1956) (2021) (2121) (1988) (1986) (2011)
(1931+) (2002) (1906) (1905) (2018)

Reading.
1 Get Out of That Pit: Straight Talk about God's Deliverance by Beth Moore
2 Helmets and Lipstick: An Army Nurse in World War Two
3 The Bone People by Keri Hulme
4 Hissing Cousins: The Untold Story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth by Marc Peyser

I have some seasonal reads going:
The Sundial by Shirley Jackson
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

We're doing a buddy read of
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

So those will keep me busy, but I will soon finish
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin
and then start some more essays:
The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing by Margot Livesey

I'd like to start The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

Then there are the possibilities:
Paradise by Toni Morrison
Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers
The Bride Price by Buchi Emecheta

So Henry James, balanced by a whole bunch of women. :-)

October:

I already read The Destructors by Graham Greene

I am still reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Sometimes when I really like a book I hold onto to it because I don't want it to end.

Maybe Flatland or one of the books from my Old and New Challenge. Not sure.

I think I will reread Poe's "Gold Bug". It's been years.

Currently finishing off Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. Will be readingFlowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, for one of the sci fi book clubs on here. I also will have to read The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, for my IRL book club, although I only really care about one of them (the Ishiguro book, not to mention, it seems like everyone is reading them. There's basically no copies in Bristol that have it on their shelf! Will have to book them at some point).
Presuming I can be bothered/actually have the will to read this stuff, potentially I may also read:

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Maybe Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

All of these are hard maybes, and all for various book clubs, depending on their availability and whether I have the will to live at the end of the month to actually bother.

My personal list of things I'd love to start reading includes Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert, having read the first book and loved it, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, having watched the recent film 'adaption' and loved it, and maybe another Atwood book after Cat's Eye, probably The Blind Assassin, but maybe The Handmaid's Tale, simply because it's shorter and who knows if i'll get round to all of these.

Priority will be to finish off some of my Library books:

Over the Rainbow: Money, Class and Homophobia by Nicola Field
Two Tribes by Chris Beckett
Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig

I've also got Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, to finish, which has been brilliant so far (especially loving the essays by Terry Eagleton, Alex Callinicos, Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek and Savas Michael-Matsas in particular. Maybe too i'll try and finish Selected Poems and Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, whose work so far has been staggering, and, being poetry, should be fairly easy to speed through if one put's one's mind to it.

In short, i'm an idiot, completely overstretching myself, and i'll probably not even get round to even half of these, but I find planning to read something for a club makes it easier to actually do so, rather than just staring gormlessly at my shelves in bewilderment at the choices, or meandering my way through a half-interesting book, wasting precious weeks.

Andrew wrote: "...but I find planning to read something for a club makes it easier to actually do so, rather than just staring gormlessly at my shelves in bewilderment at the choices, or meandering my way through a half-interesting book, wasting precious weeks."

Sounds like you'll have a good time when this group makes its 2022 challenges announcement. You could also fiddle around with the 2021 ones, if three months doesn't seem like too short a time for some of the less intensive ones.

So far for October:

Victober reading:
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Elizabeth and Her German Garden, and the Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim (and I will be reading Elizabeth and Her German Garden)

The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon by Jane Austen for the Reading From The Stacks group (I will be reading Sanditon)

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff for Miranda Mills' YouTube channel

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen for Ciara Foster's YouTube channel

So fun seeing what everyone else is reading!

Here are a few of the books I plan to finish before the end of the month:

The Picture of Dorian Gray
This Side of Paradise
Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates
The Code of the Woosters
The Remains of the Day
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I typically jump back and forth between books, so those are ones I've all started. :)

I'm still slowly working my way through The Decameron and War and Peace but I'm giving myself until the end of the year to finish those.

It's usually around this time of year that I help the library review Young Adult books for the state award, so those will start taking up a lot of my time. :)

Michaela - I listened to Long Walk to Freedom a couple months ago and really enjoyed it. I learned so much about South Africa and Nelson Mandela. It was a great book and the narration on the audio was fantastic.

RJ - I read The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston years ago and still consider it the most terrifying book I've ever read!

Cynda - That looks like a fun list! I'd like to reread The Scarlet Pimpernel. I adore the movie but I haven't read the book in over 20 years. I don't remember much so it would be fun to revisit.

Lynn - I'm planning on rereading The Gold Bug as well. It will be interesting to revisit. I have very "meh" memories of it, so we'll see if that holds true. :)

Andrew - I'm currently reading my first Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day. He is a very popular author. The book is not at all what I was expecting.

I really liked Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. The story was horrifying. I wish it shocked me more that something like that could happen.

I also love Sense and Sensibility. I reread it a couple years ago and was surprised at how witty and humorous it was. I missed that when I read it the first time.

Janice - That looks like a great list. A couple years ago I reread all of Jane Austen. It was a lot of fun.

Natalie wrote: "Cynda - That looks like a fun list! I'd like to reread The Scarlet Pimpernel. I adore the movie but I haven't read the book in over 20 years. I don't remember much so it would be fun ..."

Natalie, if you want to buddy read in the second half of the month, I would like that! Let me know. . . .

Andrew wrote: "Currently finishing off Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. Will be readingFlowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, for one of the sci fi book clubs..."

Andrew, I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I read this edition which includes Kesey's orginal graphic art:



The art adds a level of intensity to an already tense text. That can be read either as a suggestion or a warning. . . . .

Cynda - Let me know when you're starting and I'll see where I'm at. October can get busy when I start helping with the reviews. :)

That is good to know about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I'm currently listening to the audio but next time I go to the library I'll try to find a copy with the illustrations. I'd like to see those.

I am taking it easy this month. I am currently reading Look Homeward, Angel and listening to Hunger. I will probably add a couple more books as the month progresses, but I haven’t decided what yet. I

Okay Natalie. I will let you know when I plan to start The Scarlet Pimpernel ;-)

If you do find and read the illustrated One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I will see your review and will be interested in your thoughts.

Natalie wrote: "Janice - That looks like a great list. A couple years ago I reread all of Jane Austen. It was a lot of fun."

Thanks :) I'd be surprised if I am able to read all the books listed this month. :)

Janice wrote: "So far for October:

Victober reading:
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Elizabeth and Her German Garden, and the Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim (and I..."

I love your "Victober" list, Janice!
I've read all of them but "Elizabeth and Her German Garden" and "The Watsons" (I've actually not even heard of that one!).
You have lots of good reading to look forward to in October :)

Terris wrote: "Janice wrote: "So far for October:

Victober reading:
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Elizabeth and Her German Garden, and the Enchanted April by Elizabeth V..."

Thanks :)

Natalie wrote: "RJ - I read The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston years ago and still consider it the most terrifying book I've ever read!"

Yes, it was really good. I'm thinking about giving it a "re-read" on Audible.

I have finished Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I am reminded of The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende--another old house where others have dreams/visions.

About halfway through the month, and I'm four books finished, all of them on the shorter side while I plod through two chunksters. I'll be finishing up those two in the coming week just in time for me to start an even chunkier load, but when it comes to focusing on long neglected sections of the TBR, oftentimes the works left behind are on the longer side. As long as I stick to my above page length regimen, I should have quite the list of achieved reads by the end of 2021.