readingroom

Long before the end of December I decided to dip into the classics and to make the reading of classics an objective of my leisure reading. Perhaps I can stand to devote at least one book per month to classics that I’ve never read. I bought several books with that goal in mind: Death Comes for the Archbishop (1923) and a few others whose names escape me now, but whose authors include John Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf.

There were tons of lists available to guide my choices in the selection of classics. And I made a list of titles that interested me. The Modern Library’s list was thorough. And their Reader’s List looked doable, too. Radcliffe Publishing Course has a list as well. There’s Time Magazine’s list. The BBC’s Big Read list. Those lists abound. Naturally, one of my favorites is 100 Best Works by Women Writers.
But so far, I’m unimpressed. I finished Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) a few days ago. That is, after rescuing it from underneath my bed where it languished there for weeks because I had not the energy to finish it. I’ve read Cather’s work before, perhaps it was O, Pioneers! (1913) but this book was just dry. And dull, mostly. But then again, I’m not so much interested in the Catholic church’s early presence in Santa Fe. Descriptions of the landscape were lovely. I especially enjoyed when characters were on horseback or muleback.

The characters weren’t distinct enough for me to tell them apart. All those men of the cloth. And there were parts that weren’t chronological. Parts about our archbishop’s childhood appeared at the book’s conclusion. There wasn’t much dialogue, and that was good. But there wasn’t much in-depth detail about the men the book was about. I spent days reading this book and came away without a decent sense of who those men where.

These are the titles pulled from shelves in my library that I hope to read to fulfill my reading resolution:

• Sound and the Fury
• The Group
• A Death In the Family
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Grapes of Wrath
• Age of Innocence
• Passage to India
• Wuthering Heights
• Sense & Sensibility
• Mansfield Park
• Pride & Prejudice

I’ve read Pride & Prejudice, and possibly Wuthering Heights at some point in my adolescence, but I never loved them, or remembered much of them, and so I feel beholden to go back and re-read those. Plus, the Austen titles in my list are available in the most darling edition. They are part of Macmillan’s Pocket American and English Classics. Two are, the other is a Thomas Nelson publication and stands barely an inch taller than Mansfield Park and Pride & Prejudice’s five and three-quarters inches.

Their size make them perfect for travel. And in two or three days time I’ll be flying to Philadelphia and may need literature to distract me on the plane. Now I must remember my favorite Philadelphia booksellers and add their names to my list of places not to miss during my short visit.