Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion

Looking for accountability, ideas, or recommendations? This is the place to find inspiration and inspire others. What would you like to read this month?

My list is very tentative this month. There are three Group Reads that I have already read. They are all books that I liked, but there are so many things I haven't read yet.

1. I want to complete. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1859)

2. I definitely want to reread Mimsy Were The Borogoves by Lewis Padgett (1943)


I might reread either of these:

3. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (2003) - previously read
4. The Machine Stops by [author:E.M. Forster|86404 (1909) - previously read

There are many possible books I might start, so this month is quite uncertain at the moment.

I don’t think I’ll be finishing anything that I start this month.

Start, but not finish
❂ Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
❂ I Cheerfully Refuse
❂ The White Mosque
❂ White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

Continue and finish
❂ Fathers and Children
❂ Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
❂ Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

Continue, but not finish
❂ Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919
❂ Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?
❂ Code Name Hélène

Planned reading for May, to be added to at whim and as time permits 😊

1. Continue The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (April Group Read)

2. Mimsy Were The Borogoves by Lewis Padgett, narrated by William Shatner (May Group Read)

3. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (May Group Read)

4. The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst

May Goals

Challenge Books
✔️Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Tove Jansson Edition (1865)
✔️Padgett: Mimsy Were The Borogoves (1943)
✔️Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
✔️Seuss: Horton Hears a Who! (1954)
✔️Achebe: Things Fall Apart (1958)
✔️Tawada: The Bridegroom Was a Dog (1993)
✔️Sedaris: Naked (1997)


Non-challenge Books
✔️Wodehouse: Uneasy Money (1916)
✔️McCarthy: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)
✔️Roethke: "The Far Field" (1964), from The Collected Poems
✔️Weis/Hickman: "Dragons of Autumn Twilight" (1984), from Dragonlance Chronicles
✔️Acker: Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996)
✔️Krilanovich: The Orange Eats Creeps (2010)
✔️Pratchett: I Shall Wear Midnight (2010)
✔️Ali Smith: Girl Meets Boy (2015)
✔️Diane Seuss: Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018)
✔️Herrera: Season of the Swamp (2022)
✔️Adonnia: The Seers (2025)
✔️Baglin: On the Clock (2025)
✔️Buckley: One Boat (2025)
✔️Hewett: No Names (2025)

Long Reads
Proust: The Guermantes Way (1920)
Preciado: Dysphoria Mundi (2025)
DuPlessis: The Complete Drafts (2025)

And maybe...
Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959) <-- Challenge
✔️Baldwin: The Fire Next Time (1963)
✔️Tawada: The Emissary (2014)
✔️Mochizuki: The Full Moon Coffee Shop (2020)
✔️Wiswell: Someone You Can Build a Nest In (2024)


Challenges Completed This Month
Challenge #6 - Group Reads, Buddy Reads, or Moderators Run Amok - 5/26/25
Challenge #8 - Travel the World One Continent at a Time - 5/16/25
Challenge #12 – Fiction/Non-Fiction - 5/28/25
Challenge #13 – Old and New Linked Categories - 5/28/25

My plans for May are:

Currently reading
Ned fra himlen (Danish Broadcasting Corporation Novel Prize Nominee)
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (audio)
Nattevagt

To read
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (old&new challenge)
Ser du?
Hamnet (Womens Prize for Fiction challenge)
The Fixer (pulitzer challenge)
Olavs drømme (nobel laureate, Nordic Prize for Literature)
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global - Warming
The House on the Strand (group reads challenge)
How to End a Love Story (goodreads challenge)
On the Road (bingo challenge)
Mrs. McGinty's Dead (series challenge)
Døden i Venedig (group reads challenge)
Little Fires Everywhere (audio, ongoing birthyear challenge)
A Grave Mistake (series challenge)
Call Me Joe (group reads challenge)
Annas sang
Images of women in literature (includes The Story of an Hour) - started
Dommen og andre fortællinger (short stories, include Meditation and A Hunger Artist)
A Psalm for the Wild-Built (audio)
There There (audio, ongoing birthyear challenge)
The God of the Woods (goodreads challenge) - started
Døde sjæle synger ikke
The Wedding People (audio, goodreads challenge) - started
Erindring om kærligheden (old&new challenge, nordic council literature prize, reading my bookshelf) - started

Finishing:
Now in November Josephine Winslow Johnson ****
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family Thomas Mann *****
Fundamentally Nussaibah Younis ****1/2
The Antidote Karen Russell ***
Kaputt Curzio Malaparte
Everything is Illuminated Jonathan Safran Foer ****
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories Angela Carter *****
Attila Aliocha Coll ***
Lost Illusions Honoré de Balzac ****
Scattered Snows, to the North: Poems Carl Phillips ***
The Night Alphabet Joelle Taylor
God's Little Acre Erskine Caldwell **
Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You Fred Chappell ****
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Simone de Beauvoir
Dream Count Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ****
The Beauty and the Beast Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve ***
The Complete Fairy Tales Charles Perrault ****
The Director Daniel Kehlmann ****
The Promise Chaim Potok *****
Theft Abdulrazak Gurnah ***
Isola Allegra Goodman ***


shorts
Mimsy Were The Borogoves Lewis Padgett ***
The Machine Stops E.M. Forster ***
A Lost Opportunity Leo Tolstoy

Continuing:
The Stories of John Cheever John Cheever
Women Who Run With the Wolves Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780 Rick Atkinson
The Time Traveler's Wife Audrey Niffenegger
The Unconsoled Kazuo Ishiguro ****
Sylvia's Lovers Elizabeth Gaskell

This is a developing list.
Finished
🌻Yellowface by R.F. Kuang May 03 ⭐⭐⭐⭐
🌻 The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne by Kate Winkler Dawson--a backstory to The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
🌻 Unity by Elly Bangs
🌻 The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger May 24 ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Reading
* The Sirens of Titan
* The Promise by Chaim Potok
* Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
* In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka

Continuing:
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

On Hold:
The Stories Of John Cheever Part 1 Of 2

More to be Revealed.

On hold for now
The Stories of John Cheever
Women Who Run With the Wolves

Continuing
The Masterpiece by Émile Zola
Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen by Fay Weldon
Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson

Group/Buddy Reads
The Promise by Chaim Potok
The King's General by Daphne du Maurier
The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy

Challenge books I hope to get to
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Paradise by Toni Morrison
Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings by Shirley Jackson

We'll see how all this goes ...

Updated 5/30 —

Continued and finished:
✔️Chesapeake by James Michener - Bingo
Started and finished:
✔️The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab - Book Club St
✔️The Promise by Chiam Potok - Buddy Read and Buffet
And added, started and finished:
✔️ A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter - Bingo and Buffet

For May -
I plan to read:
Cotillion by Georgette Heyer. This is a fun book and a group read I've been looking forward to revisiting.
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw Group read here. Reread for me, but it's been decades.
Henry V by William Shakespeare Reread, as I work my way through his history plays in chronological order.
The Iliad translated by Emily Wilson. New translation to me.

To Finish:
The African Queen by C.S. Forester It's been decades since I saw the movie, but it feels very familiar.
The Brain at Rest: How the Art and Science of Doing Nothing Can Improve Your Life by Joseph Jebelli
The Everyday Naturalist: How to Identify Animals, Plants, and Fungi Wherever You Go by Rebecca Lexa

Beyond that, I don't know what I'll read. I recently got back from my first trip to our local library's used book store, and I got 19 books for $6.50 - most of them old fiction or historical nonfiction. I now have an embarrassment of riches and can't decide where to start reading them! LOL

They include:
The Double Image by Helen MacInnes (I enjoy her books, but this one isn't on Libby and I've not heard of it before.)
How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn In my challenge this year.
Night in Bombay by Louis Bromfield
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay (I listened to this in 2007 and have wanted a copy to read ever since!)
A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury by Edith Pargeter (Brother Cadfael's town, but nonfiction.)
The Zimmerman Telegram by Barbara W. Tuchman
Out of Order: An Asey Mayo Mystery by Phoebe Atwood Taylor
The 3,000 Mile Garden: An Exchange of Letters on Gardening, Food, and the Good Life by Leslie Land
The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie Jr. (#1, I own but haven't read #2 in the series.)
Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts
A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing by Elaine Showalter
Plus, some Miles Vorkosigan books I wish I owned and several novels to read in Spanish, including two Murder She Wrote novelizations. What fun!

If anyone has suggestions on what I should read first, I'm all ears. Otherwise, I'll just have to wait and see what grabs my attention best.

Cynda is preoccupied with RL wrote: "This is a developing list.
Finished
🪺 Yellowface by R.F. Kuang May 03 ⭐⭐⭐⭐
🪺 [book:The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne|21102..."

it's vague, I'm hoping to revisit a collection of shorts by Alice Walker, followed by "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose" (Alice Walker)

"A Memoir of Jane Austen: And Other Family Recollections" (James Edward Austen-Leigh), and

"The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance" (Anthony Gottlieb)

"Helen" (Euripides) / "Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series One "

Well, i never did get around to this here for either May or April like I said i would. Can i write up my June one, and then copy it to the June thread later?

Actually, for my last day of May I intend to read as much of these;
A Tempest of Tea,
Funny in Farsi,
and The Maid and/or Goodbye, Mr. Chips

For June;
Finish The Time Yravelers Wife,
The Maid,
The Moonstone
The Glimpses of the Moon,
The Book of Doors,
Goodbye, Mr. Chips (if not already done)

And start Where the Library Hides,
To the Lighthouse
and I forget the rest now...oh!
A Fable

In addition to these, I had a list of like ten others. 😭 Not enough time!

This month has been fun and active, but I read almost nothing. I have been babysitting for grandchildren. I have increased the amount of daily walking I am doing. I went to a music workshop for 2 days. So my very limited list of books read is 2 short stories.

Mimsy Were The Borogoves by Lewis Padgett (1943) May 20, 2025 5*

Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken (1932) May 3, 2025, 4*