The Well Educated Mind: Self Project

“What? Another project? Like a five year The Classics Club project doesn’t enough!”, I can hear you were saying…. :). However… *self defending* this one would just add the fun of munching those classics books I have listed in the CCP anyway! :) The Well Educated Mind is a guide to read and understanding classics pieces in the right method, a book written by Susan Wise Bauer.

Excerpt:

If you can understand a daily newspaper, there's no reason you can't read and enjoy Shakespeare's Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the "Great Books" without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.

Interesting, eh?

Actually, I am inspired by Ruth @ An Experiment with The Well-Educated Mind. I’m impressed on how she puts her review in neat and chronological posts, guided by some questions she took from The Well Educated Mind, which directly caught my interest. Then my craving for this book began, and last month I finally decided to buy it.

While waiting for the book to arrive, I have been creating a list of books I’d like to read for my WEM Self Project (there are 150 books from novel, poems, to plays). I have picked 31 books from it, these books are either has been included in my existing CCP list, or I just added because of WEM :) This time I won’t set any deadline to finish them, it’ll just flow with my mood and my interest; no targets, no pressures. I just want to read and savour them.

These are the 31 books I have picked (for now—it could grow wider)—this list will be posted in a dedicated page, you’ll find it on my main menu :

Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes

The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan

Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (re-read)

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy

The Portrait of A Lady – Henry James

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (re-read)

Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

The Trial – Franz Kafka

The Stranger – Albert Camus

1984 – George Orwell

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison

Possession – A.S. Byatt

The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila – St. Teresa of Avila

Walden – Henry David Thoreau

City of God – St. Augustine

The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli

All The President’s Men - Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

Richard III – William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream - William Shakespeare

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

The Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov

Saint Joan – George Bernard Shaw

Dante’s Inferno – Dante Alighieri

Although WEM advised us to read the list in order, I opt to pick the titles randomly, based on the availability of the books in my TBR pile :) or ebook list, and whether it’ll match my reading schedule (along with any challenges, read-alongs and events).

It means that starting next month I would probably post more often on each book which I’d pick for the project. I hope you won’t get bored to read a glimpse of the title each time you’re looking at your blogroll or google reader! ;) And because I would dug into these books thoroughly, I could not guarantee that my posts would be spoiler-free, and I won’t put a *spoiler-alert* sign each time I jot down my thoughts; just want to let you know beforehand.

My copy has just arrived, and the first book I’ll pick for the project is…. The Scarlet Letter.

Wait for my posts on November! ;)