“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! ;)