365 Project #328 The Classics

I've always been an avid reader, but I had so many hobbies lately, the only time I read books for pleasure anymore is reading in bed to get sleepy. Of course I read scads of stuff online throughout the day, but that's just fun stuff. I read the same books Don downloads from the web at night, but they don't really excite me. 

I tried to remember the genre I liked best and remembered I've always enjoyed Classic literature, that stuff you were supposed to read in high school and college. I read a good bit of that before I ever entered high school and did book reports on everything I read to make up for the fact that I refused to 'do' Phys. Ed. and was hopeless at Math. It saved my grade point average more than once.

Since I'm a high-school dropout and didn't go to college (though I got my GED) I missed quite a lot of the required reading in English Lit., so I'd like to round out my education. In the last three weeks I've read:

• Persuasion, Jane Austen
• Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
• The Sensitive Man, Poal Anderson
• The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy
• Twelve Years A Slave, Solomon Northup
• The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

For now I'm sticking with the free books I can find on Project Gutenberg. I suppose at some point I'll buy ebooks, but not by choice.

Now for the big guns, Middlemarch by George Eliot, 900 pages of immersion into mid-1800s England.  Here's the description;

"Vast and crowded, rich in narrative irony and suspense, Middlemarch is richer still in character, in its sense of how individual destinies are shaped by and shape the community, and in the great art that enlarges the reader's sympathy and imagination. It is truly, as Virginia Woolf famously remarked, 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'.

If I look a bit distracted for the next couple of weeks, you'll know why. I'm goin' in...