So I finished Robinson Crusoe the other day, which was the last book on my 2005 classics list. I realize this wasn’t my original order, but I got a little desperate after Tom Jones and buying a house and all, so I skipped ahead and knocked off a bunch of the easy ones before going back to Ivanhoe and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, both of which turned out to be easy anyway.
Obviously I haven’t quite caught up on my write-ups. I will. But I wanted credit for finishing in time, so here I am, bragging.
Meanwhile I’ve been giving some thought to my 2006 personal-enrichment program. Part of the program is that I’m going to take Calculus I, for credit, because I’ve never taken any college math and that’s kind of embarrassing in a computer programmer. The other is that since I actually really enjoyed this reading list, I’ll do another.
At first I thought I’d try something different, like works in translation or works from 1900 on, but then I decided I still had a lot of classics in English to read (and I seriously slighted the Americans in the first round). Here’s my 2006 list, same rules applying (with a bonus book to make it a baker’s dozen, because I am daring like that) presented in no particular order except that Tristram Shandy is first in order to finish it in time before the Michael Winterbottom film adaptation is released in the US, which looks awesome and features Gillian Anderson, making it a movie of great interest to nearly everyone I know.
Sterne, Laurence - Tristram Shandy
Trollope, Anthony - The Way We Live Now
Stevenson, Robert Lewis - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Butler, Samuel - The Way of all Flesh
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels
Lewis, Sinclair - It Can’t Happen Here
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Collins, Wilkie - The Woman in White
Forster, E.M. - A Passage to India
Woolf, Virginia - Mrs. Dalloway
Cather, Willa - My Antonia
Sinclair, Upton - The Jungle
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn