Just received a gift of the Little Black Classics released by the UK Penguin publishers. It's a complete set of 80 volumes, consisting of fifty-ish pages each. They range from complete short works (essays, short stories) to excerpts and selections of longer pieces.
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. (For example, I've read many works by Matsuo Basho, but not these particular haiku; or, having read various works by Swift, from Gulliver's Travels to the Tale of the Tub, but not the Little Black Classics' choice of A Short View of the State of Ireland.) 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
Baltasar Gracian
Guy de Maupassant
Suetonius
Apollonious
Petronious
Johann Peter Hebel
Henry Mayhew
Hafez
Thomas Nashe
Mary Kingsley
Elizabeth Gaskell
Nikolay Leskov
C.P. Cavafy
Samuel Pepys
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (I mean, I'm familiar with his operas and such, but not his non-musical writings)
Christina Rosetti
Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Giorgio Vasari
Shen Fu
Richard Hakluyt
Catullus
Katherine Mansfield
Sappho
Basavanna, Devara Daismayya, Mahadeviyakka, and Allama Prabhu
Dhammapada
So I'm excited to start in on the collection. I read the Hopkins already (and greatly enjoyed it) as well as a volume containing two short works by Ruskin, which were pretty good. At the moment reading the Gracian volume - a Spanish Jesuit's maxims and aphorisms from the 1600s.
All in all a fun new project to carry out. The Penguin Great Ideas was very beneficial, and I'm hoping this will be as well.
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. (For example, I've read many works by Matsuo Basho, but not these particular haiku; or, having read various works by Swift, from Gulliver's Travels to the Tale of the Tub, but not the Little Black Classics' choice of A Short View of the State of Ireland.) 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
Baltasar Gracian
Guy de Maupassant
Suetonius
Apollonious
Petronious
Johann Peter Hebel
Henry Mayhew
Hafez
Thomas Nashe
Mary Kingsley
Elizabeth Gaskell
Nikolay Leskov
C.P. Cavafy
Samuel Pepys
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (I mean, I'm familiar with his operas and such, but not his non-musical writings)
Christina Rosetti
Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Giorgio Vasari
Shen Fu
Richard Hakluyt
Catullus
Katherine Mansfield
Sappho
Basavanna, Devara Daismayya, Mahadeviyakka, and Allama Prabhu
Dhammapada
So I'm excited to start in on the collection. I read the Hopkins already (and greatly enjoyed it) as well as a volume containing two short works by Ruskin, which were pretty good. At the moment reading the Gracian volume - a Spanish Jesuit's maxims and aphorisms from the 1600s.
All in all a fun new project to carry out. The Penguin Great Ideas was very beneficial, and I'm hoping this will be as well.
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