Back to the Classics Challenge 2013 Wrap-Up

Monday, December 9, 2013


Each year Sarah Reads Too Much hosts the Back to the Classics Challenge. I need very little prodding to read classics, but I always participate in this one because I love the categories she comes up with! I completed the challenge and below are my books with links to each review. I earned three entries by finishing all six main categories and the six optional categories.

I read some really fascinating books for this challenge. I encountered Hemingway in the unexpected gender-bender The Garden of Eden and comtemplated solitude with Thoreau in Walden. I considered the morality debates in The Brothers Karamozov and the impact of societal expectations in Native Son. It really was a wonderful collection of books!

I’d like to say a huge thank you to Sarah for hosting this. It’s a lot of work to coordinate something like this. She even has individual pages for each category to link up, etc. I’m a list maker, so I love being able to check these off my list as I go through the year. Thank you Sarah!

THE CATEGORIES

The Required Categories:
A 19th Century Classic – Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)
A 20th Century Classic – The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway
A Pre-18th or 18th Century Classic – Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
A Classic relating to the African-American Experience – Native Son by Richard Wright
A Classic Adventure – Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
A Classic that features an Animal – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

Optional Categories:

Re-read a Classic – Persuasion by Jane Austen
A Russian Classic – The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
A Classic Non-Fiction title – Walden by Hendy David Thoreau
Classic Children's/Young Adult title – Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
Classic Short Stories – A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

6 comments:

jmisgro said...

good job!! I only read the first six categories!

Kailana said...

I need lots of prodding to read classics. Some years I read none...

Jillian said...

Great job! I failed my reading goals this year, but it's nice to see others accomplish theirs. I want to do the classics challenge now!

Melissa (Avid Reader) said...

Thanks guys! I do very few challenges each year, but I love this one!

Arenel said...

Congrats on finishing! Vanity Fair is one of my favourites, as is Three Musketeers and Persuasion. I'm really ashamed of not having read The Brothers Karamazov, but I have a love/hate relationship with Dostoyevsky: I loved Idiot and I hated (and DNF) Crime and Punishment. But they say third time's a charm, so I'll try it!

Melissa (Avid Reader) said...

Ekaterina Egorova - I loved The Brothers K much more than Crime and Punishment, so I'll have to try the Idiot.