The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

March 25, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – audiobook. Translated from the German. Read by Frederick Davidson. Blackstone Audio, 2009. Originally published 1812. 10 hours, 18 minutes. Library copy. Wyss’ novel follows a Swiss family figuring out how to survive on an uninhabited island after a violent storm wrecks their ship among the rocky outcropping of an uninhabited island. The rest of the crew headed to Port Jackson, Australia via the East Indies abandoned the family, taking all the lifeboats but leaving the livestock and provisions […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, German, Juvenile, Oceania, Translated • Tags: Johann David Wyss

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Part Two)

March 4, 2019 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by George Guidall. Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Recorded Books, 2000. Originally published 1866. 25 hours, 1 minute. Library copy. This post includes my thoughts on Part Four through the Epilogue of Dostoyevsky’s most famous work. For my thoughts on Parts One through Three, please see this post. As the end of Part Three, the main character, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov had awoken to find an unknown yet aristocratically dressed man standing over […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Classics, Classics Club, Crime, Europe, Fiction, Russia, Russian, Translated • Tags: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Guidall

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Part One)

February 20, 2019 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by George Guidall. Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Recorded Books, 2000. Originally published 1866. 25 hours, 1 minute. Library copy. Arguably Dostoyevsky’s most famous work, Crime and Punishment is divided into six parts plus epilogue. Given the novel’s length and (assumed) difficulty in reading, my book club decided to split the book at the halfway mark and discuss it at two meetings. Our February meetup covered Part One to Three, which […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Classics, Classics Club, Crime, Europe, Fiction, Russia, Russian, Translated • Tags: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Guidall

The Warden by Anthony Trollope

February 1, 2019 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Simon Vance. Blackstone Audio, 2005. Originally published 1855. 7 hours, 12 minutes. Library copy. In the fictional English county of Barsetshire, Septimus Harding serves as the warden of Hiram’s Hospital and Precentor of Barchester Cathedral. The hospital is supported by a charitable bequest from the Diocese of Barchester, and Harding draws a hefty salary for performing his duties as the warden. This hefty salary, though, attracts the attention of John Bold, a man who is […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, AP Literature, Audiobook, Classics, Classics Club, Europe, Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: Anthony Trollope, Simon Vance

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

January 24, 2019 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Carrington MacDuffie. Blackstone Audiobooks, 2007. Originally published 1943. 16 hours, 17 minutes. Born in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn in 1901, young Francie Nolan has fallen in love with reading. She’s determined to read every single book in the small, public library, and has already made her way through the As when Smith’s novel opens. Along with a love of reading, Francie also possess a keen ability for observation, noticing the plant in the bowl […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Audiobook, Book Club, Chunkster, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, New York, North America, United States • Tags: Betty Smith, Carrington MacDuffie

The Waste Land and Other Writings by T.S. Eliot

October 18, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Borders Classics, 2007. Originally published 1922. 151 pgs. Purchased. This collection of poems and essays includes a selection of Eliot’s poems written between 1917 and 1920, critical essays on poetry and the nature of criticism itself from 1917 to 1923, and “The Waste Land”, which was published in 1922 and is largely considered Eliot’s masterpiece. Poetry is not a particular love of mine; I often find myself caught up in cleverness of the rhyme rather than the […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Awards and Prizes, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, Nobel Prize, Nonfiction, Poetry • Tags: T.S. Eliot

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

August 23, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Ann Arbor Media Group, 2006. Originally published 1826. 414 pgs. Purchased. Set in 1757 during the French and Indian War (or, Seven Years’ War for non-Americans), the second novel in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales follows two young women named Cora and Alice Munro as they travel through the woods from Fort Edward to join their father at Fort William Henry. The two women are escorted by Major Duncan Heyward of the British Army and a singing teacher named Gamut, and […]

Categories: 101 Great Books, 2018 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, Indigenious Peoples, New England, North America, United States • Tags: James Fenimore Cooper

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

March 14, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Maggie Gyllenhaal. HarperAudio, 2016. Originally published 1963. 7 hours, 24 minutes. Library copy. Sylvia Plath’s novel opens with her main character, Esther Greenwood, in the midst of spending the summer in New York City. Having won a fashion magazine’s contest, Esther is being mentored by editors and writers on both her chosen field and the state of her complexion — a combination of feminism and femininity — as she and the eleven other winners of the […]

Categories: 101 Great Books, 2018 Reads, Audiobook, Classics, Classics Club, Fiction, New England, New York, North America, United States • Tags: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Sylvia Plath

The Classics Club: Two Years Later

July 15, 2016 by Christina

Two years ago today, I put together a list of seventy-five classics I wanted to read by July 15, 2017 and, thus, joined The Classics Club. Last year, I reflected back on my progress — how many books I had read so far (16 from the list + eight other classics), how I overcame my fear of Edith Wharton, and how I tackled one of the longest books on my list. This year? I’ve read two books — Far From the Madding Crowd by […]

Categories: Bookish Notes, Classics Club

The Iliad by Homer

February 8, 2016 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Translated from the Greek by Stanley Lombardo. Read by Stanley Lombardo and Susan Sarandon. Parmenides Audio, 2006. Originally published 800 BC. 15 hours, 13 minutes. Library Copy. Grouped into twenty-four books (or, chapters), Homer’s saga covers a series of battles during the final year of the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states lead by King Agamemnon. The war was launched because the Trojan prince Paris took Helen from her husband and the King of Sparta, Menelaus, after […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Audiobook, Classics, Classics Club, Europe, Fiction, Greek, Translated • Tags: Homer, Stanley Lombardo, Susan Sarandon

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

December 10, 2015 by Christina

Fiction — eBook. Amazon Kindle, 2012. Originally published 1874. 512 pgs. Free download. Hardy’s novel focuses on the follies of the heart with the heroine, Bathsheba Everdene,  falling for the superficial rather than the practical. At the beginning of the novel, young Bathsheba tells her first suitor, a promising sheep farmer named Gabriel Oak, that she should never want to marry him because she’s afraid he could never tame her the way a wife needs to be tamed in order for the marriage to work. […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Chunkster, Classics, Classics Club, Europe, Fiction, United Kingdom • Tags: Thomas Hardy

The Classics Club: One Year Later

August 15, 2015 by Christina

A year ago today, I decided to join The Classics Club and created a list of seventy-five classics I would like to read within a three year period. I said in my introductory post that I hoped to read twenty-five classics each year and, a year later, I’ve read sixteen books off of my original list plus an additional eight books that could also be considered classics. All of my book reviews for those titles I’ve read for the club are available […]

Categories: Bookish Notes, Classics Club