Book Corner: What Are You Reading?

~ The Classics Club
“Reading (portrait of Edma Morisot).” Berthe Morisot, 1873.

Here’s a space to tell the club what you’re currently reading. You’re welcome to use the comments below.

No pressure, of course! But if you’re feeling social, here’s a space to tell us about your latest classic. As always, you are of course welcome to leave a link to your blog if you prefer to share there.

Twitter hashtag: #ccreadingupdate

– The Club

50 thoughts on “Book Corner: What Are You Reading?”

  1. Pingback: On defining my reading path going forward. – In Her Books 🍀
  3. Pingback: A glance at Gone with the Wind through a feminist lens. – In Her Books 🍀

  4. I’ve just finished my CCspin book (Far From the Madding Crowd) and started my Zoladdiction book, The Kill. I’m now also a quarter of the way through Les Mis for our year-long chapter-a-day readalong. A very successful classics reading year so far 🙂

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      1. I read My Cousin Rachel for an earlier CCspin – it was fabulous and frustrating at the same time.
        East of Eden is my fav Steinbeck and long overdue for a reread.

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  8. I abandoned my spin pick, Gone with the Wind, at 15% – or an average-size book’s worth. In that time I had read roughly 129 pages about frocks, and a paragraph during which the Civil War had apparently happened off-stage . Sadly my disinterest in frocks means this didn’t seem like the perfect balance to me… 😉 So I guess I’ll be offending the whole of America on April 30th. Oh, well…

    Otherwise I finished The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and will be reviewing it soon. Thankfully, it was good, short and barely mentioned frocks at all…

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    1. My f-i-l considers Gone with the Wind to be THE Great American novel, and he’s very confused as to why I don’t love it. Your thoughts regarding “too much time talking about frocks” are much in line with mine.

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      1. I’m glad I’m not alone! I really did have high hopes of this one since I know so many people love it, and I loved the film when I was young. But I suspect it’s one that’s best read when young – I think there was a time when I might have cared more about the frocks than the war, but sadly those days are gone… 😉

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    2. That’s funny! I don’t remember anything about the frocks at all (except when Scarlett makes a dress out of the curtains later on in the book). For me it’s all about the relationships and watching Scarlett’s personality disorder unfold.

      But that’s the joy of reading. Each reader brings their own lens to each book, every time they read it. And yes, my first read of GWTW was in my very early 20’s when I thought the book was a romance.

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      1. I certainly loved the film when I was young but don’t think I thought about it in depth – just as a romance. But I just couldn’t get into the book at all, unfortunately – I fear older me would rather have followed the men to the war (in the book, I mean, not in real life) than stayed home with the women.

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        1. FF: I think Margaret Mitchell would understand your response more than you expect. Her childhood stories always involved her going off to battle with the boys.I haven’t read all her stories yet, but there’s one in particular from her teens involving a girl who watches her family be slaughtered and her sister raped. The protagonist starts out the story as an innocent girl, and ends it with her pistol trained on the attackers. It ends something like “she must not miss, she would not miss. And she didn’t.”

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    1. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed The Tenant. I’m a HUGE fan of Jane Eyre, but not so much of Wuthering Heights, so I was unsure how I would feel about the third sister’s work. I now want to read more of Anne’s books.

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      1. Brona, I am pleased to hear you enjoyed The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – I have heard only good things about it and I am loving it so far! But I am the opposite to you: I LOVED Wuthering Heights but not so much Jane Eyre 😀

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  10. I finished my Classics Spin title, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. I still need to review it, though. Right now, I’m re-reading Stephen Hawkings’s A Brief History of Time. I probably could have put that on my Club list, but I didn’t… darn.

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  12. I’m slowly reading Don Quixote. What slows me down is that I have become extremely curious about other Spanish literature of that era, and about why DQ is so famous. So I’ve read Celestina and Lazarillo de Tornes, and several books about DQ and the others. (All in English.) Plus I found an online Yale course about DQ that has 24 lectures of 1 hour each. Help! I’ve fallen down a deep rabbit hole and I can’t get up!! LOL!

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    2. I had to read both El Lazarillo de Tormes and La Celestina at school and I remember I really enjoyed El Lazarillo. I didn’t finish La Celestina and watched a film version instead – there was a rather new one back then featuring Penelope Cruz as Melibea before she went to Hollywood. I have La Celestina on my list for the Classics Club now but I really don’t know when I’ll tackle it.
      Fortunately I never had to read Don Quixote; I always found it daunting. I still do. And I have lots of respect for the brave people who make it through its pages and like it 🙂

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        1. I tried to comment several times on your blog but it seems like a had a problem with my wordpress account and it just wouldn’t work, so I’ll reply in here 🙂
          I read your review about La Celestina and I found it very interesting. But I was intrigued when you said that it was written in dialogue and sometimes had asides to clarify who was speaking. I was thinking ‘but of course, it is a play, why shouldn’t it be written in dialogue?’ But yes, I remember we were taught in high school that although it was a play it was definitely never written to be performed, for it was too complex and with long dialogues and many changes of scenery (if I’m not mistaken, that was long time ago). I wondered if perhaps it had been translated in such a way that it wasn’t presented as play.

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          1. I’m sorry the commenting didn’t work for you on my blog. I think Celestina looks like a play because it’s just dialogue with no narative. And narrative novels as we know them hadn’t been invented yet – Don Quixote came 106 years later! I don’t think there were any stage directions, though, or other things that made me think I was reading a play. It’s short for a novel, and the story was interesting, so I read it pretty quickly. I didn’t know there was a movie, I’ll have to look for it.

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        1. Thanks for the encouragement, Christina and Silvia! Perhaps I should really tackle old Don Quixote at some point. It is after all the masterpiece of Spanish literature 🙂

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  13. I’ve got something that pushes me out of my comfort zone, Elinor Brent-Dyer’s New House at the Chalet School (1935), about relationships in an international girls school in the Austrian Tyrol before the war. Slow to start, with nearly fifty names in the first few chapters, but I’ll get there!

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  14. I’m about a third of the way through Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. In my defence, it’s 1500 pages long… I’m really liking. I’ll probably need to do an interim post, just to get my first set of thoughts out.

    I haven’t yet started my spin (Morte d’Urban by J. F. Powers, but that’s a mere bagatelle, right?

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    1. Write those posts, Maximilian. (Glad you will read East of Eden soon, -I will read it at the blog with others in the summer.) It looks like Ulysses is not happening for me, or not yet, sigh. But, lots of good reads. I am reading Persuasion, it was my spin book, and I am reading an Episodio Nacional by Galdós every month, -he wrote in the 20th century, and the episodes are about 19th Spanish history, they are fine historic fiction. I just tri-read, lol, part I of Don Quixote, and may soon tackle part II.

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      1. I forgot about that book club! I don’t think I had much interest in the book before, but I ran into a colleague at the book store who insisted and placed it in his top 3, so I bought it on the spot. In that case, I may wait till June to start it, so I can chime in for the book club. I would love to read Don Quixote again! I met someone a couple months ago who has a giant tattoo of Picasso’s Don Quixote—he said the book was one of the funniest he ever read but also that it changed his life. Persuasion is a fun read too. Once I finish my presentation for class, I’ll be able to start a longer book…

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        1. Double wow, one for you considering joining us for East of Eden. The other wow for you having read DQ. The second and third time it gets funnier, and also more profund. Good luck on your class presentation. I always like to see what you read or want to read. I do love reading your reviews, and the prospect of you joining in the summer EoE is making me happy.

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  16. I AM CURRENTLY READING VERA BRITTAIN. She may be destroying me more than Margaret Mitchell. Give yourselves a moment to let that soak in & recall that today is April 1. Am I lying? One can never tell.

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    2. It may have been the 1st of April, but having read and been moved by Brittain myself, I can believe she would have such a profound effect on you too.
      The truth will be in the reread!

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