Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion

Quest for Women, People of Color Old and New, NYRB Classics New to Me, Fiction/Nonfiction...maybe some more.

Quest for Women - 18/20

Century - 10/10
1800s - Castle Rackrent - Maria Edgeworth* (completed 7/6/22)
1810s - The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng - Lady Hyegyeong (completed 2/25/22)
1820s - Ourika - Claire de Duras (completed 6/10/22)
1830s - Widow Barnaby - Frances Milton Trollope (completed 9/17/22)
1840s - Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë* (completed 8/27/22)
1850s - The Bondwoman's Narrative - Hannah Crafts (completed 4/2/22)
1860s - The Amber Gods and Other Stories - Harriet Prescott Spofford (completed 2/26/22)
1870s - Six Months in the Sandwich Islands - Isabella Lucy Bird* (completed 3/17/22)
1880s - Ramona - Helen Hunt Jackson (completed 8/9/22)
1890s - Memoirs of a Highland Lady, Volume One - Elizabeth Grant (completed 4/18/22)

Decade - 10/10 - Complete 7/30/22
1962 - The Pumpkin Eater - Penelope Mortimer (completed 4/4/22)
1963 - The Girls of Slender Means - Muriel Spark* (completed 3/24/22)
1964 - Desert of the Heart - Jane Rule (completed 6/18/22)
1965 - Miss MacIntosh, My Darling - Marguerite Young (completed 2/17/22)
1966 - Valley of the Dolls - Jacqueline Susann (completed 3/14/22)
1967 - The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton - Fawn M. Brodie (completed 7/18/22)
1968 - The Nice and the Good - Iris Murdoch* (completed 7/30/22)
1969 - The Kindness of Strangers - Salka Viertel (completed 5/26/22)
1970 - Crick Crack, Monkey - Merle Hodge (completed 4/23/22)
1971 - Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor (completed 3/5/22)

* - Previously Read Authors

People of Color Old & New - 14/14 - Complete 8/20/22

1899 and earlier
1. The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu - Kenreimonin Ukyo no Daibu (1233) (completed 7/28/22)
2. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali - Mamadou Kouyaté (1255) (completed 6/16/22)
3. Complete Prose Fiction - Alexander Pushkin* (1828) (completed 7/22/22)
1900-1999
4. The Master of Go - Yasunari Kawabata* (1951) (completed 1/16/22)
5. Palinuro of Mexico - Fernando del Paso (1977) (completed 8/20/22)
6. The War of the End of the World - Mario Vargas Llosa (1981) (review)
My Wild Card Six
7. The Coldest Winter Ever - Sister Souljah (1999) (completed 2/11/22)
8. Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela (1994) (completed 3/19/22)
9. Last Words from Montmartre - Qiu Miaojin (1996) (completed 4/8/22)
10. Fault Lines: A Memoir - Meena Alexander* (1993) (completed 1/21/22)
11. Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man - U.R. Ananthamurthy (1965) (completed 1/23/22)
12. Portrait of a Turkish Family - Irfan Orga (1950) (completed 6/29/22)

Alternates
A-1. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories - Hisaye Yamamoto (1988) (completed 4/29/22)
A-2. The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon (1956) (completed 2/8/22)

* - Previously Read Authors

Expand Your Horizon With New Authors - NYRB Classics - 5/6

1. Proud Beggars - Albert Cossery (completed 1/9/22)

2. Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man - U.R. Ananthamurthy (completed 1/23/22)

3. Last Words from Montmartre - Qiu Miaojin (completed 4/8/22)

4. The Kindness of Strangers - Salka Viertel (completed 5/26/22)

5. The Pumpkin Eater - Penelope Mortimer (completed 4/4/22)

6. TBD

Fiction/Nonfiction?

Nonfiction classics 2022 - https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...

Nonfiction classics general - https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...

Getting my brain into publication date mode several months ago means I have an excess of possibilities for my more rigorous chronology challenges, such as Quest for Women. I've a pretty good idea of what is going to end up being my final lists for both Century and Decade, but I'm going to put the extraneous works under a spoiler tag just in case.

Filled out my NYRB Classic new authors challenge with what's already been slotted in for other 2022 challenges. Still have one more empty slot, but I'm going to wait and see what kind of reading mood I'm in before I commit to the nearly 900 page work that's currently enticing me the most.

Oh my, it's going to be fun to follow your reading, Aubrey. Aside from Pushkin and Vargas Llosa, I don't even recognize your POC authors, so looking forward to learning!

In your Quest for Women, I'm most interested in The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea. I read an ok Margaret Drabble novel about her, The Red Queen which piqued my interest. And I did enjoy The Nice and the Good.

And NYRB ... someday I'd love to join their bookclub. The Pumpkin Eater sounds interesting.

Enjoy!

Love your lists and discovering NYRB...I just might need to tweak my challenge selections to accommodate some new to me titles... :-)

Kathleen wrote: "Oh my, it's going to be fun to follow your reading, Aubrey. Aside from Pushkin and Vargas Llosa, I don't even recognize your POC authors, so looking forward to learning!

In your Quest for Women, I..."

Cheers, Kathleen. It turns out I did enough 'this would be good for a classics challenge' preemptive purchasing during the course of the past year to make filling out my decade/century rather painless, but I'm still getting to quite a few long awaited works between them and my PoC O&N.

I'll admit to having caved to purchasing NYRB directly for the first three works in my challenge (they had a sale, and I had more than a few books that I had been looking for for a long time), but I get the vast majority as used non NYRB editions. "Pumpkin Eater" was one of the latter that I mainly grabbed for its 1962 publication date, so I guess I can thank my highly specific brain retentiveness for drawing me towards a work that would kill two birds with one stone.

Jeri wrote: "Love your lists and discovering NYRB...I just might need to tweak my challenge selections to accommodate some new to me titles... :-)"

Heh heh, glad to hear it, Jeri. NYRB Classics can be so utterly enticingly novel, can't they.

Very interesting lists! I'm especially intrigued by Last Words from Montmartre. Might have to put that on my xmas wish list.

Cheers, Leni. LWfM was one of the works that I wanted so badly and had spent many fruitless years attempting to track it down that I caved when the publisher offered a sale on their editions. One can never be fully confident when it comes to not having buyer's regrets, but I'm fairly close to feeling such.

Jillian ❀‿❀ wrote: "Wow, Aubrey, such ambitious choices! I especially love your women's/people of color challenges. All the very best with this! :-)"

Cheers, Jillian. This is probably the fastest I've been able to wrangle the planning for these two challenges, especially the quest for women chronology. Seems the practice of previous years has made perfect.

Dove into my longest 2022 challenge read for my Decade of Women Quest and one of my shorter ones for my NYRB Classics Expanded Horizons. Hoping to maintain some sort of balance between the two.

Finishing off February by finally making some headway with my Quest for Women challenge, in addition to some progress with my People of Color Old & New. I have a feeling March is going to be a bountiful reading month for the buffet, what with my longest boulder of a book out of the way.

At the end of March, I'm a third of the way through my Quest for Women and my Expand Horizon with NYRB Classics and nearly half way through my People of Color Old & New. Currently reading at least one work per challenge at the moment, so progress is promising for April.

Great progress, Aubrey! I see you slogged through Long Walk to Freedom. Parts of it is very interesting and parts a long read...

What did you think of Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont? I think it is my favourite so far by Elizabeth Taylor.

Thanks, Carolien. LWtF was indeed long, but after getting through the true slog of the Young work, I was glad for something with a much less overloaded typeface and content worth learning, as well as getting through a work that's been waiting around since 2013 off my shelves.

I unfortunately wasn't a fan of the Taylor, for one reason or another. I may try another of hers, but it won't be until I get through a good amount of my existing TBR.

Aubrey wrote: "Thanks, Carolien. LWtF was indeed long, but after getting through the true slog of the Young work, I was glad for something with a much less overloaded typeface and content worth learning, as well ..."

I'm sure the 700 odd pages seemed like a breeze after 1000 and a few!

Hi Aubrey. I read Ourika and reread Mansfield Park in 2020 to compare very different foster parents. . . .but I won't spoil it for you. . . Looking forward to what you make of the short book.

@Carolien: Haha, that's certainly one way to put it!

@Cynda: Interesting to hear about an already very interesting novella, Cynda. MP was very engaging in a less than instinctually Austen style of enjoyment way, so I'm looking forward to seeing how the two compare.

Closing out April by being a little more than halfway through all my buffet challenges. I may be on track to finishing this all up in August, but we'll see.

I'm now at least three quarters through all of my buffet challenges and currently reading through works in two of the three. Still very interested in the rest of what I've planned, but but I'm close enough to the end to be greatly looking forward to starting in on the 21st century reading I'll be partaking in the rest of the year.

And with that, both my People of Color Old & New and the Decade portion of my Quest for Women challenges are complete for 2022. I technically have three challenges left, but with a mere six unfinished works shared amongst them, I'll be moving on to more modern reading pastures in no time.

Woohoo! Good for you, Aubrey! You're "Powering Through in '22"! Haha!

Congratulations, Aubrey!

Do you have your contemporary reads planned out or do you just go with what jumps out at you?

Congratulations, Aubrey!

Well done, Aubrey!

Thanks everyone :)

Annette, I'm pulling from a few categories at the moment. I've got a (mostly) modern women in translation one set up for August's ongoing Women in Translation Month. For the rest of 2022, I have a Tier 1 selection of modern works I want to focus on (largely because they've been on my to read shelf for forever) and a Tier 2 if I really do need more options.

Beautiful challenge accomplishments, Aubrey. I enjoyed "shopping" through your Tier 1 list and found a couple I can't wait to read, so thanks!

Haha, cheers, Kathleen. Hope you enjoy your pickings.