My Thoughts: The Classics Club Challenge

I came across  The Classics Club web site the other day. 

The premise is inspirational.  It is a challenge for book bloggers to read at least 50 classic books in the next five years and blog about them.  I'm up for the challenge and I think I will limit my list to 50:

1. Watership Down by Richard Adams
2. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
3. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
4. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
5. Stranger by Albert Camus
6. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
7. Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
8. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
9. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
10. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
11. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
12. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
13. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
14. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
15. Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert
16. Howard’s End by E.M. Forster
17. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines
18. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
19. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
20. The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
22. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
23. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
24. Doll’s House by Henrick Ibsen
25. Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
26. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
27. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
28. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
29. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
30. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
31. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
32. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
33. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
34. Animal Farm by George Orwell
35. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
36. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
37. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
38. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
39. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
40. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
41. Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
42. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
43. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
44. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
45. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
46. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
47. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
48. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
49. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
50. Nana by Emile Zola

Wow! That's a lot of reading. Most of these are new books for me (no judging!). If I have read it, it was so long age that I do not remember much.

Starting From Scratch by Susan Gilbert-Collins

Why is someone who just defended her doctoral dissertation still wasting her time at her childhood home, two months after her mother’s funeral, making coq au vin and osso buco? Olivia Tschetter, the youngest of four high-achieving South Dakotan siblings, is not returning to “normal”—or to graduate school— quickly enough to suit her family. She wants only to bury herself in her mother’s kitchen, finding solace in their shared passion for cooking.

Threatened with grief counseling, Olivia accepts a temporary position at the local Meals on Wheels, where she stumbles upon some unfinished business from her mother’s past—and a dark family secret. Startling announcements from two siblings also challenge the family’s status quo. The last thing she needs is a deepening romantic interest in a close but platonic (she thought) friend.

But while Olivia’s mother is gone, her memory and spirit continue to engage Olivia, who finds herself daring to speak when she would never have spoken before. Told with humor and compassion, “Starting From Scratch” is a lovely story about finding one’s way after losing a parent. I loved it…and it contains recipes as well!

4 stars (Rated PG – nothing too objectionable)

The Girl's Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can't Manage without Apostrophes! By Lynn Truss, Bonnie Timmons

I wasn’t sure exactly what I was getting with this book.  It’s been on my wish list on PaperbackSwap for over a year.  I read “Eat, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss and LOVED it so saw this book and wanted to read it as well.

Imagine my surprise when what I receive in the mail is a picture book.  This is her book on apostrophes for children.  It’s wonderfully delightful for a word nerd like me. I would imagine that it would be fun to share in a classroom.  I’ll probably give it to a friend that teaches school.

The illustrator, Bonnie Timmons, was also the illustrator from the TV show “Caroline in the City”.

4 stars (Rated G)

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

Maisie Dobb’s is a private investigator in London in the late 1920’s. She is the daughter of a widowed costermonger (green grocer). He has her go into service as a maid at age 15. She is incredibly bright and the owners of the home invest in her education. When World War I breaks out she goes into the nursing service and spends a few years in France at the battlefront hospitals.

The investigation in this story is about ‘The Retreat’; a place where soldiers with facial injuries go to escape from their deformities.  When Maisie discovers the graves of several of these men, which only list their first names on the gravestones, she starts to feel that something is not quite right.  She goes on to uncover the mystery.

One of my friends in review of this book on Goodreads said, “This was a good story, just painfully slow.”  I would totally agree with this. Part of the slowness of the story, I think, comes in the middle half where the author interrupts the main story to go back and fill in Maise’s story.  Because of this, I will try the next book in the series.

3 stars (Rated PG – war violence)

Raney by Clyde Edgerton

Raney is a young, small-town Southern Baptist and Charles is an educated, large-city, liberal from Atlanta and “Raney” is the story of the first two years of their marriage. Charles and Raney struggle to bring their lives together and meld themselves into a cohesive unit.

I’m not sure what to say about this little book.  All the way through I kept thinking, “Are you sure this is a book about a marriage? It seems like it is more about racism.” And then when I finished the last page and closed the book I found myself chuckling and loving the message about marriage.

There were, however, a few things I didn’t like. The racism in the book highly offended my 21^st century sensitivities, but I believe it was probably a fair portrayal of the time and place.  The other things I didn’t like were that Charles convinces Raney to accept alcohol and ‘girlie magazines’ as a normal part of live when she was offended because of religious reasons. I felt like the message was that not wanting these things in your life was ‘backwoodsy’ and not an educated choice, which I do not agree with.

Overall, I guess I’m glad I read this book. It did have a good message about marriage.

3 stars (Rated PG – nothing too offensive except blatant racism.)

On Bear Mountain by Deborah Smith

Dirt-poor, sensitive as poets, and proud as kings, the Powell family has lived on a Georgia mountaintop for generations. Then, during the 1960s, young Ursula Powell's father convinces the Tiber family, owners of everything in nearby Tiberville, to commission a huge iron sculpture of a bear for the town. Decades later the strange sculpture --- rejected by the townspeople and left to rust on the Powell farm --- symbolizes a family's failure and thwarted dreams. But, unknown to Ursula, it is now worth such a huge fortune that the artist's embittered son, Quentin Ricconni, is coming to reclaim it ... and to change everything Ursula believes about the past, the choices that break a heart, and the redeeming powers of art and love.

This book is a gentle love story, yet filled with action and interesting side story characters.

4 (3.5) stars (Rated PG – mild sex scenes)

The Good Mayor by Andrew Nicoll

In a busy little city in a forgotten corner of the Baltic, in an office on the square, the beloved mayor of Dot lies on his office floor, peering beneath his door. Tibo Krovic has come to work from his house down at the end of a blue-tiled path. He’s taken, as usual, the tram seven stops, and walked the final two. He’s stopped for strong Viennese coffee. And now, Tibo Krovic is looking at the perfectly beautiful feet of his voluptuous, unhappily married secretary, Mrs. Agathe Stopak. The Good Mayor is badly in love.

And over the course of days, months, and years, amid life’s daily routine—a fallen lunch pail, a single touch, a handwritten note and then a terrible choice—Tibo and Agathe must come to terms with this thing that has seized hold of them both, exploring the tastes of desire and despair, love, friendship, and betrayal…until fate, magic, and their own actions lift them from their moorings toward an unexpected future.

Their tortuous road to bliss is fraught with phantom circus performers, malevolent painters, rotund lawyers, mysterious fortune-tellers—and every single one of love’s astonishing little cruelties and miracles.

I loved this wonderful, meandering love story. The characters are well-developed and Nicoll fills the book with wit and magic.

4 stars (Rated PG – mild sex scenes)