Hi clubbers!! We’re excited to be posting our latest meme question for the club! Feel free to answer now or next month at your place, & leave a link to your response in the comments below so others can see what you have to say. Or really, you could just answer in the comments if you want. We really are quite flexible here. 🙂 Here’s the question this month:
- see future questions for this meme
A meme rewind from November 2012: What classic piece of literature most intimidates you, and why? (Or, are you intimidated by the classics, and why? And has your view changed at all since you joined our club?)
Remember to check out this page for details or to share suggestions for future meme questions! And then check out one another’s posts!
Twitter hashtag: #ccmeme
The Classics Club 
Here’s my post, explaining why it’s the books that should be scared, not the readers! https://fictionfanblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/intimidating-books/
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Good question! Here ist my Answer: https://redaktionundlektorat.wordpress.com/2016/08/28/the-classics-club-august-meme-44/
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Hallo, Hallo Clubbers!
I really ought to expand on this on my blog within the next month – as I have this aversion to starting my readings of “War and Peace”. Despite having a healthy interest in reading the story, I’ve spent most of two years trying to get started on reading this epic tome of Classical Lit without success! Even after spending a lovely bit of time talking about the story & it’s implications in regards to the duality of it’s title and the aesthetics of it’s premise in an impressively lovely #LitChat (Twitter Chat for literati); yet all that I ended up doing is boomeranging back the copy my dear library gave me with ‘extended borrow’ rights where there was no due date!
I do think the librarian who took the book back from me said it best when she said there is too much war and not enough peace. Perhaps the timing is just ‘off’ for me to be reading such a hearty tome of Classical narrative!? Honestly, I don’t know what forestalled my approach into this work of literature. Initially my heart was in it as I wanted to join #LitChat’s RAL and a few others along the way, too.
Overall, I just exhausted my reasons for ‘not reading it’ and ended up returning it unopened. Yet curiously ‘curious’ about what I might have found if I had.
Strangely, I’ve not picked up a work of Classical Lit in more months than I dare admit plausible. The one I want to finish in earnest is Jane Eyre as I have after canons I want to read & review following my conclusions of this novel. This has a whole back-story of it’s own attached to it as I originally began Eyre back during Septemb-Eyre for those who participated in that blogosphere RAL. *le sigh*
Does anyone else find that sometimes your pushed away from the Classics even if they are dearly what you want to be reading!? I’m going to try to get my head back into Eyre this September, as I lost the fragments of my readings after a migraine in the Springtime. I simply had no inclination to return until now; the heavy emotions were a bit too much for me and I finally feel like I can resume without the angst of feeling like I’ve left myself on the fringes of understanding the work as a whole.
I suppose you could say, I am one frustrated Clubber! I keep starting/stopping my readings and I am finding it’s hard to get my niche of interest into gear. Anyone else struggling with the same?! How did you finally resolve it!? Maybe my timing has just been ‘off’ thus far along in my tCC readings.
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Here is my answer for this month’s meme: https://thebookwormchronicles.wordpress.com/2016/08/27/the-classics-club-monthly-meme-44/ 🙂
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I am intimidated by post-modern authors or even authors such as Gertrude Stein. I like rational narrative. Life is so irrational why would I want to spend time reading very hermetic books? I also fear the LANGUAGE poets. I get along fairly well with Ulysses but it helped enormously that I took a course on the novel.
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Some of Dicken’s books confuse me. At times there is too much going on at once.
Marilyn
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French literature. http://howlingfrog.blogspot.com/2016/08/classics-club-august-meme.html
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I’m intimidated by the size of books these days.
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Oh yea, I forgot about Ulysses. I started it once but got distracted away from it. (very easy to get distracted away…) I think all the Russian books make me shake with fear: War and Peace, The Brothers K (because I am not sure how to spell the rest of the K name), etc. I barely managed to get through Anna Karenina.
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I have also picked War and Peace for my answer!
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Clare & Jessica,
Still my heart! I’m not the only Clubber feeling woeful about now being able to soak inside War and Peace! For me, I think I ‘out talked’ myself from even broaching into it! You know how you can get inside your head to the point your ‘over-thinking’ it?! Interestingly enough, I nearly talked myself out of reading the Clan Chronicles last November [2015] and yet, I pushed through that anxiety, whereas I never let go of the anxiety I’ve had for this Classic work? Either I’m quirky or like most readers, sometimes stories that we’re curious about just do not arrive in our lives when we are in the mood to read them.
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Ulysses has always intimidated me!!
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