Merry Christmas!

Update May 24, 2017: Wrap Up Post with Links to Review 

I will read these books for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2017.

1.  A 19th Century Classic - Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen (1813)

Finally, at my age, I get around to it. Better late…

2.  A 20th Century Classic – The Crying of Lot 49 – by Thomas Pynchon (1965).

An oxymoron: a short Pynchon novel. Length probably explains why it’s assigned in college English classrooms.

3.  A classic by a woman author – Domestic Manners of the Americans – Frances Trollope (1832)

I’m always up for European visitors like Charles Dickens persecuting pre-Civil War Americans, who deserved all the scolding they got from visitors because they, in the main, tolerated race-based chattel slavery. At the time of first publication of Trollope’s book, my fellow Americans, insulted and aggrieved, went into such a snit that they took great pleasure in word plays with her last name, a synonym for a vulgar or disreputable woman especially one who has sex for money or – heaven forfend! – fun.

4.  A classic in translation – The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu (tr. Seidensticker) (about 1021)

I read most of this in early 1980, but never finished it, an omission that has haunted me like an incubus ever since.

5.  A classic published before 1800 - The Adventures of Roderick Random - Tobias Smollett (1748)

I read someplace a theme of this early novel is life in the British Navy of the time. Since I used to read the Aubrey-Maturin books, this should be good. Orwell says positive things about Smollett also.

6.  An romance classic – Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë (1847)

I must confess I’ve never read it, another omission like never having read Sense & Sensibility.

7.  A Gothic or horror classic - One Thousand and One Ghosts - Alexandre Dumas (1848)

8.  A classic with a number in the title – The Case of the Seven of Calvary – Anthony Boucher (1937)

The cover of this 1961 paperback says “a great mystery classic back in print.”  Boucher (as in “voucher” I think) is the author of The Case of the Solid Key, which really is a classic. The Anthony Awards are given at each annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention.

9.  A classic which includes the name of an animal in the title -  Bugles and a Tiger: My Life in the Gurkhas - John Masters (1956, as old as me)

A military memoir, thus a guy’s book. Hey, there’s got be one among the hundreds of books read for this challenge.

10. A classic set in a place you'd like to visit – Small Town D.A. – Robert Traver. (1958)

But yet another guy’s book, to balance P & P and Jane Eyre and Lady Murasaki. So there. Traver, the author of Anatomy of a Murder, was a prosecutor in the mining, farming, lumbering district of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. This memoir, kind of true crime I suppose, features short accounts of cases he handled over ten years in what some people call God’s Country.

12. A Russian Classic – The Complete Short Novels – Anton Chekhov (tr. Pevear & Volokhonsky)

I think the best course for is to read one every other month. Savor, don’t gobble. Think it over. Write the review as I go along. Post the review in October.