Update: Little Black Classics

A couple of years ago I got, as a gift, a complete collection of the Penguin Little Black Classics. At the time I made a post about it, which I've updated below:

While I am familiar with most of the authors, the particular shorter works are often ones I've not read. Indeed, 62 I'd not read upon receipt of the collection. But when you instead look just at the authors I'd not ever read, it becomes a much shorter list, of only 28 (with two anonymous works):

Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Gunnlaugs Saga
Pu Songling Planning to read work in full: Tales from a Chinese Studio
Baltasar Gracian
Guy de Maupassant
Suetonius Read his work in full: Lives of the Twelve Caesars
Apollonious Planning to read work in full: Argonautica
Petronious Planning to read work in full: Satyricon
Johann Peter Hebel
Henry Mayhew
Hafez
Thomas Nashe
Mary Kingsley
Elizabeth Gaskell
Nikolay Leskov
C.P. Cavafy
Samuel Pepys
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Christina Rosetti
Ryunosuke Akutagawa Planning to read work in full: Rashomon and Other Stories
Giorgio Vasari
Shen Fu Planning to read work in full: Floating Life
Richard Hakluyt
Catullus
Katherine Mansfield
Sappho
Basavanna, Devara Daismayya, Mahadeviyakka, and Allama Prabhu
Dhammapada Planning to read work in full

Other works still to be read in full:

Darwin - Voyage of the Beagle
Melville - The Enchanted Isles
Chekhov - Selected Stories

But, beyond these work to read in full, I have now read all of the Little Black Classics, including the many authors I was already familiar with (Dostoevsky, Wharton, Basho, etc.). It was a fun journey, lots of good short stories, excerpts, and poetry. Some of it forgettable, some of it mediocre - but there were some nice gems in there.

So, as things currently stand, I've read 71/80 of the Little Black Classics, and it will probably be a while until I polish of the remaining 9 works, since I'm going to read the complete texts of each. 

I think I'll start with the Dhammapada - it's short, and I feel like I should've read it by now...

NaNoReMo 2020

My friend John Wiswell came up with the idea, some years ago, of making March 'National Novel Reading Month'. You pick a novel that's been on your shelf a long time, or some classic that you've always meant to get around to, and set yourself the task of reading it by the end of March.

Usually I pick older novels and always authors I'm unfamiliar with for this task. Unfortunately the oldest novel on my shelf, currently, is from 1900, so I can't pick any 19th-century works. That novel, however, did help me make my decision.

I've never read anything by Theodore Dreiser, who, at one point, was considered a major force in American literature. And I feel bad that I'm never in the mood to read his old works - two of which are on my unread shelf. (There's only one other author who has two unread books on that shelf, and that's Thomas Mann, but I'll get to him later this year, I'm sure.) The 1900 novel is by him - Sister Carrie - which made me decide to finally give him a go.

As such, I'm going to read the later Dreiser novel, An American Tragedy, from 1925, as it's considered better by most, and more of a 'classic'. It's also 814 pages in my edition, so. Yeah. Wish me luck.