I got Reading Lolita in Tehran for Christmas and it was a great book, but it made me feel like kind of a jerk. There are people literally dying to read works of literature that most of us have, at best, fond memories of bullshitting our way through class pretending to have read. In addition to all the other books I’ll read this year, I decided to pile on some classics of English literature that I hadn’t read before or seen movie adaptations of. After some research and consultation, I came up with this list:
- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
- Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
- Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
- George Eliot, Middlemarch
- D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
- Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
- Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
- Jane Austen, Persuasion
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
I’m going to read all twelve in 2005, although not necessarily one per month.
What’s been more interesting than the project is the vehemence of some responses from friends. There’s still a lot of hostility floating around these books that I suppose is tied up with their exaulted position in the literary canon and some hazy memories of dreadfully dull English classes. I’m hoping that I’ll find it a different experience to read them without a grade at stake, but in all likelihood my friends will be right, and this will turn out to be really boring.