A Classics Haul

It’s time again for another classics related post – as I mentioned not too long ago, I want to really get on top of things, and read more classics alongside YA. Because of this, I have recently acquired a huge number of classics which will take me at least a year to read. There are around twenty books in this haul, so I will simply go into detail about the ones which I bought myself to start!

I bought a number of classics online: firstly, A Room With a View by E. M. Forster. I am actually reading this at the moment, and I am really enjoying it! This is about a young girl called Lucy who is visiting Florence, and becomes torn between her dull life in England with her equally dull fianceé, and vibrant Italy, with a man she just met.  Alongside this I bought The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger – this book is about the self-exploration of a young man named Holden, who is expelled from his boarding school and spends a few nights wandering the city alone before he has to return home. I read this recently and liked it, although I found the protagonist slightly unbearable, and the plot a little slow.

I also bought Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – I don’t know a whole lot about this, except that it is a dystopian in which books are burnt (Fahrenheit 451 being the temperature at which paper burns), and the protagonist is a firefighter of sorts, and one of the people in charge of burning books. I have been wanting to read this for such a long time, and I am so excited to now own a copy! Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is another dystopian, this one about a society which is controlled through consumerism; there is so much recreation that the government can get away with an awful lot. I think this sounds really interesting, and may even have some sort of commentary on today’s society. I don’t know – we’ll see.

During a gorgeous day out visiting the Waterstones in Picadilly with a friend, I bought a copy of The Collector by John Fowles, which is the story of a woman who is stalked and kidnapped, told from the perspective of the stalker. I was unsure of whether to buy this or not, but a friend I was with assured me that it was creepy, but not overly so, and I decided to give it a try; hopefully it will be interesting from a psychological perspective. At the YALC book swap this year, I swapped a book for a copy of Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys – I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure what this book is about, as whilst I remember the blurb sounded very interesting when I read it, it has since been lost among all the other blurbs I read over the YALC weekend.

As I am starting my English Literature A-Level in September, I also bought a couple of poetry anthologies, which were recommended to help familiarise me with a variety of types of poems. I bought The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, and Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley, off of Amazon; both of these, I’ll be honest, terrified me a little when they arrived, as they are so much bigger than I expected!

Last month, my dad also retrieved old boxes from our attic, and so I acquired lots of lovely classics from there, including:

1. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
2. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
3. Closing Time by Joseph Heller
4. The Female by Germaine Greer
5. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
6. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
7. Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
8. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
9. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
10. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
11. The Odyssey by Homer
12. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

 

So all in all, I have so many hours of reading ahead of me. If you have read any of these before, or have any ideas as to where I should start, please let me know (as in all honesty, I am feeling a little overwhelmed)!