Classics Spin!
The Classics Club is running a sort of reading game, and oh do I want to play! Here are the rules:
At your blog, by next Monday, Feb 18, list your choice of any twenty books you’ve left to read from your Classics Club list – in a separate post.
This is your Spin List. You have to read one of these twenty books in February & March. So, try to challenge yourself. For example, you could list five Classics Club books you are dreading/hesitant to read, five you can’t WAIT to read, five you are neutral about, and five free choice (favorite author, rereads, ancients — whatever you choose.)
Next Monday, we’ll post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List, by April 1. We’ll have a check in or something in April, to see who made it the whole way and finished the spin book.
Hee!
Here is my list of 20:
1. The Classic Fairy Tales – Tartar
2. Don Quixote – Cervantes
3. The Plague – Camus
4. 1984 – Orwell
5. Hamlet – Shakespeare
6. Macbeth – Shakespeare
7. King Lear – Shakespeare
8. Much Ado About Nothing – Shakespeare
9. The Tempest – Shakespeare
10. Twelfth Night – Shakespeare
11. As You Like It – Shakespeare
12. The Dharma Bums – Kerouac
13. The Bell Jar – Plath
14. Frankenstein – Shelley
15. Huckleberry Finn – Twain
16. Howards End – Forster
17. War and Peace – Tolstoy
18. Pale Fire – Nabokov
19. The Rainbow – Lawrence
20. Mrs. Dalloway – Woolf
I can’t wait to check in on Monday and see what number is picked! What a great idea.
Twelfth Night is my favourite Shakespeare play, though frankly I don’t like reading plays (their whole point is to be performed) and for me this is the one form I can’t separate from any visual representation. I LOVE seeing theatre performances though. Huck Finn is very interesting, with some hilarious passages and I do like Twain’s use of language. Good luck, I hope you’ll like the book that ends up being picked!
I usually like to read them first, then see them performed (a film or a live performance — whatever is accessible). I was just talking to our student worker about this. He is taking a Shakespeare class and he is having trouble connecting to the plays. I asked him if he is “hearing” the plays as well as reading them, and I was surprised that they are not watching anything in conjunction with the class. He started watching the films on his own, and is getting so much more out of the class!
I know what you mean. I was finding Shakespeare a bit of a bore, and hard to visualise at places until I started watching a film version of the corresponding plays I was reading.
That’s a lot of Shakespeare!!
….I’ve got a couple Shakespeare on my list too — King Lear and Julius Caesar. 
All the best with the pick!
Despite my stacking the deck with Shakespeare, the number that was chosen didn’t correspond to a Shakespeare play!