'Introduction to Classics' reading group

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Awesome! I'm currently waiting for a proper group to be approved for this. Have you got any suggestions about how we should run this?

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Are you? I can't see anything in the group queue :s

Reply 21

Carpe Diem Jay

Original post by Krollo

Awesome! I'm currently waiting for a proper group to be approved for this. Have you got any suggestions about how we should run this?

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Perhaps we should have a list of top #howevermanynumberyouwant... and have a vote on them. Book with the most votes we read first, book with second most we read second etc etc.
Then have a week or two (depending on how big the book is of course) to read and discuss.

I'm just throwing it out there, haven't really thought it through :tongue:

Reply 22

Krollo

Original post by greeneyedgirl

Are you? I can't see anything in the group queue :s

It's been approved - I hadn't realised!

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/group.php?groupid=2654

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Reply 23

greeneyedgirl

Original post by Krollo

It's been approved - I hadn't realised!

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/group.php?groupid=2654

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Ha ha good good I was getting all confused

Reply 24

Krollo

Original post by Jalal Uddin

Interesting... Perhaps we should divide it by subject matter though? I.e. Science / Fiction / Society / Philosophy. We should probably divide it by size too. I'll have a go tonight.

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Reply 25

Krollo

This set of fiction is a mixture of several different classic lists, but the bulk was from, as usual, Great Books of the Western World and Gateway to the Great Books. What selections pique everyone's interest? (Other genres to come shortly)

Disclaimer: This is one insanely long list that could keep most readers going for several centuries, but I beg of you not to be fazed. And the order is a bit haphazard.

Fiction - Short Stories (1-60 pages)

Rudyard Kipling, "Mowgli's Brothers" from The Jungle Book
Victor Hugo, "The Battle with the Cannon" from Ninety-Three
Guy de Maupassant, "Two Friends"
Ernest Hemingway, "The Killers" from Men Without Women
Sir Walter Scott, "The Two Drovers" from Chronicles of the Canongate
Joseph Conrad, "Youth"
Voltaire, Micromégas
Oscar Wilde, "The Happy Prince" from The Happy Prince and Other Tales
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart"; "The Masque of the Red Death"
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
Nikolai Gogol, "The Overcoat"
Samuel Butler, "Customs and Opinions of the Erewhonians" from Erewhon
Sherwood Anderson, "I'm a Fool"
Anonymous, Aucassin and Nicolette
Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (excerpts)
Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat"
Ivan Bunin, "The Gentleman from San Francisco"
Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Rappaccini's Daughter"
George Eliot, "The Lifted Veil"
Lucius Apuleius, "Cupid and Psyche" from The Golden Ass
Fyodor Dostoevsky, "White Nights"
John Galsworthy, "The Apple-Tree"
Gustave Flaubert, "The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller"
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"
Honoré de Balzac, "A Passion in the Desert"
Anton Chekhov, "The Darling"
Isaac Singer, "The Spinoza of Market Street"
Alexander Pushkin, "The Queen of Spades"
D. H. Lawrence, "The Rocking-Horse Winner"
Henry James, "The Pupil"
Thomas Mann, "Mario and the Magician"
Isak Dinesen, "Sorrow-Acre"
Leo Tolstoy, "The Three Hermits"; "What Men Live By"

Fiction - Novellas and Plays (61-250 pages)

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Herman Melville, "Billy Budd"
Ivan Turgenev, "First Love"
Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"
Molière, The Misanthrope, The Doctor in Spite of Himself, The School for Wives, The Critique of the School for Wives, Tartuffe, Don Juan, The Miser, The Would-Be Gentleman, The Would-Be Invalid
Richard Sheridan, The School for Scandal
Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya
George Bernard Shaw, The Man of Destiny
John Synge, Riders to the Sea
Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones, Mourning Becomes Electra
Aeschylus - The Suppliant Maidens, The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides
Sophocles - Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Ajax, Electra, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes
Euripides - Rhesus, The Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis, The Heracleidae, The Suppliant Women, The Trojan Women, Ion, Helen, Andromache, Electra,The Bacchae, Hecuba, Heracles, The Phoenician Women, Orestes, Iphigenia in Tauris, Iphigenia in Aulis, The Cyclops
Aristophanes - The Acharnians, The Knights, The Clouds, The Wasps, Peace, The Birds, The Frogs, Lysistrata, The Poet and the Women, The Assemblywomen, Wealth
Virgil - The Eclogues, The Georgics
Chaucer - Troilus and Criseyde
Shakespeare - The First Part of King Henry the Sixth, The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, The Taming on the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, The Life and Death of King John, The Merchant of Venice, The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, Much Ado About Nothing, The Life of King Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night; or, What You Will, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Othello, the Moor of Venice, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coroilanus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth, Sonnets
Milton - English Minor Poems, Samson Agonistes, Areopagitica
Racine - Berenice, Phaedra
Voltaire - Candide
Henry James : “The Beast in the Jungle”
Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): Saint Joan
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924): Heart of Darkness
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1922): Six Characters in Search of an Author
Marcel Proust (1871-1922): Swann in Love from Remembrance of Things Past
Willa Cather (1873-1947): A Lost Lady
Thomas Mann (1875-1955): Death in Venice
James Joyce (1882-1941): Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Virginia Woolf (1883-1941): To the Lighthouse
Franz Kafka (1883-1924): “The Metamorphosis”
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930): “The Prussian Officer”
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965): “The Waste Land”
William Faulkner (1897-1962): “A Rose for Emily”
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956): “Mother Courage and Her Children”
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961): “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989): “Waiting for Godot”
Orwell - Animal Farm
Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
Huxley - Brave New World
Lee - To Kill. A Mockingbird

Fiction - Novels (251+ pages)

Homer - The Iliad, The Odyssey
Virgil - The Aeneid
Dante - The Divine Comedy
Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
Cervantes - The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha
Milton - Paradise Lost
Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe - Faust
Honore De Balzac - Cousin Bette
Austen - Emma, Pride and Prejudice
Eliot - Middlemarch
Charles Dickens - Little Dorrit
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Count Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Sterne - Tristram Shandy
Fielding - Tom Jones
Nabokov - Lolita
Orwell - 1984
Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Heller - Catch 22
Golding - Lord of the Flies

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Reply 26

GuanyinBuddha

Hello, I wish you happiness and well-being.

I am interested in a book group to expand my knowledge, is it possible for me to join?

Many thanks.

Reply 27

Krollo

Original post by GuanyinBuddha

Hello, I wish you happiness and well-being.

I am interested in a book group to expand my knowledge, is it possible for me to join?

Many thanks.

Sure, come and join the classics party! And happiness and well being to you too.

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Reply 28

Angury

I think it may be best to start with a short story or novella to see how we do. I'm happy to begin with any on that list; I've heard a lot about Chekhov's short stories, and I recently finished The Metamorphosis by Kafka so would be interested to hear other people's opinions on that work. :smile:

Reply 29

clever_swine

Hey, I'm new to TSR, in fact this is my first post :O

This book club sounds like my kinda thing though... so hopefully I can join in!

Just in case anyone's interested, my favourite classics are To Kill a Mocking Bird and Dante's Divine Comedy. Also A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens.

Reply 30

Krollo

Original post by Angury

I read Metamorphosis quite recently, and I really liked it. It was quite heavy, but nothing impossible, and doable in a week without much hassle. I don't see why we shouldn't use it as a starter; anyone got any other ideas?

Original post by clever_swine

Welcome to TSR!

I read Dante's Inferno in Italian and in English, I must say, it does lose something in translation. I'm not saying that you should learn Italian just to read one epic poem, but if you are proficient in other languages, have a go. My Italian is only at GCSE level and I still got a lot out of it.

What do you think of Gove's decision to take TKAM off the GCSE syllabus? In my opinion, 'English' literature is a language, not a nationality, but I can see where he's coming from.

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Reply 31

edgarcats

I've joined. :smile:

I agree with starting with Kafka, got a book of some of his works that I haven't read yet. Also, seeing as I'm hoping to study English at uni in 2015, this should be a good way of getting me to read more. I like the idea of reading non-fiction, currently reading a very interesting book by Siddhartha Mukherjee about the history of cancer.

Reply 32

Angury

Original post by edgarcats

I've joined. :smile:

Is this The Emperor of all Maladies? That's on my medicine to-read list, I've heard great things about it. How're you finding it?

To Kill a Mockingbird is also one of my favourite books. I can see where Gove is coming from by taking it off the curriculum though, and I'm not too fussed about it. Then again, I was never a fan of English Lit in school, I always did badly in it. :frown:

Reply 33

Krollo

Here's a link to the Kafka if you want it:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kafka/franz/metamorphosis/index.html

This might be interesting as additional reading:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2932/2932-h/2932-h.htm

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Reply 34

edgarcats

Original post by Angury

It is! I'm really enjoying it. Mukherjee is an excellent writer and the history of cancer and particularly cancer treatment is fascinating. I would definitely recommend it.