My Bookshelf, Part 2

The original plan for this weekend was for the lovely boyfriend and I to go on an IKEA adventure to buy new bookcases. However, the weather yesterday was truly crap and the general logistics of carrying two bookcases across London escaped us, so we decided to make use of modern technology and simply order the furniture online and have it delivered to us. No pain, but much gain.

Alas, delivery takes a few days so you will have to wait a while before I regale you with the assembly process. All I will say is that my excitement about all of this is two-fold because (1) I love assembling IKEA furniture and have done since I was a child, and (2) I cannot wait to go through all of our books and start arranging them.

Just because I don't have my shiny new bookcases, however, does not mean that I cannot start writing about the individual books that will fill them. In my previous post from this series (My Bookshelf, Part 1), I included a list of categories that at first glance through our collection I thought would be appropriate.

In this post, I would like to focus on Category 3, as it is probably the one which we have the least of.

Classics

Wikipedia tells me that a classic is a book accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy. This much I gathered already and was also gratified to see that I am not the only person to have asked why we should read classics, or what, indeed, constitutes a classic.

There is, apparently, such a thing as a 'canon' that refers to a list of books considered 'essential' reading. The best known is, perhaps, the Penguin Classics Collection which is a collection of  over 1300 books...that is a lot of books. Then there are features online such as the Guardian's list of The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time (from 2003) or the Telegraph's more recent 100 Novels Everyone Should Read (from 2014).

To keep things consistent, I will let the Penguin Classics Collection be my guide, but will set a personal limitation and say that anything originally published after 1900 falls under the category of a Modern Classic.

So, with that in mind, let's see what we have on our bookshelf.

Our small collection of Classic books

Hehe, it's really not much:

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813).

Of these four books I have only read Great Expectations (hence it is underlined) when I was, I think, 14 or 15 years old as it was assigned reading for my English class.

It bears mentioning that apart from the books listed above - which are the ones we have in London - I also have dozens of books back home, in Slovakia. Amongst those is:

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare (~1600)
Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (1895)
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868)
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (1838)
Silas Marner by George Eliot (1861)

I also have, but was surprised to discover they do not feature on the list of Penguin Classics, Othello and Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (~1622 and 1597, respectively). The majority of the above books were purchased because they were compulsory reading at school. Only Kidnapped and Little Women were bought for leisure reading.

My Kindle features:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1845)
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

While my new Audible Wishlist has:

Frankenstein
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869)

Taking into account the books back home, it is actually not a bad collection of books. It remains to be seen if the collection will expand - I don't see myself buying any new classics until I have read the ones we already have.

I enjoyed some of these more than others. Othello stands out as a clear favourite from Shakespeare; I quite enjoyed Silas Marner at the time of reading, but don't remember it much now. Dracula was one I was really looking forward to but was unable to finish and Frankenstein was a present from a friend - the reason I want to listen to it, is because I found a version narrated by Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey fame.

Until next time,
Lucia