Back to the Classics Challenge 2013 Wrap-Up

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

Top Ten Books On My Spring 2013 TBR list!

This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for my Top Ten Books on My Spring 2013 TBR list. I have books I need to read for my book club and other book blogging events I’m participating in, so I’ll have a very busy spring! I’m also hosting a readalong of Birdsong for the Classics Club’s April theme: reading about war.

  

1) State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (Book Club Pick)

2) Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare (Let’s Read Plays)

3) Birdsong by Sebastian C. Faulks (April Readalong)

4) The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway (A Modern March)

5) 1776 by David McCullough (TBR Challenge)

6) The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin (Book Club Pick)

7) The White Masai by Corinne Hofmann (Book Club Pick)

8) Oresteia by Aeschylus (Let’s Read Plays)

9) Requiem by Lauren Oliver (Comes out this month!)

10) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams (Let’s Read Plays)

Image from here. 

The Garden of Eden

The Garden of Eden

by Ernest Hemingway

★★★☆

Newlyweds Catherine and David are enjoying an extended honeymoon while he tries to write his next book. As Catherine putters around the coastal town she begins to change both her appearance and her attitude towards her husband. Then everything in their relationship changes when she makes friends with a woman named Marita.

Such a strange book, published posthumously, and one that I never would have guessed was written by Hemingway. It contains his clean prose, but his characters are wildly different from anything else I’ve read of his. After A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and other big Hemingway novels I thought I know what to expect from his writing. If it’s fiction there is usually a badly drawn female willing to do whatever the hero wants. This book is the polar opposite of that assumption. It makes me wonder if he only wanted to publish the incredibly masculine novels he wrote during his lifetime.

While Catherine and David are still attempting to find their footing as a couple, Marita’s presence throws them off kilter. They begin to reevaluate their roles in the relationship. Catherine carefully pushes and prods until David accepts Marita as a friend and then as a lover. The ménage à trois relationship sneaks slowly into their lives until it’s hard to remember what they were like as a twosome.

After reading The Paris Wife last year it made me wonder how much of this book was inspired by bits and pieces of Hemingway’s own life. His first marriage ended when a close female friend (Pauline Pfeiffer) slowly worked her way into the lives of both Hemingway and his wife Hadley. There are even some parallels with destroyed manuscripts, though in the novel it’s a malicious act and in real life the manuscripts were stolen while in Hadley’s possession.

  

BOTTOM LINE: A strange look inside one couple’s marriage. A crucial book to read if you think you really know Hemingway’s work, but not a must for those who just want a taste. I’d highly recommend his nonfiction book, A Moveable Feast, about his time in Paris to provide another aspect of his writing style.

Roof Beam Reader’s great review of the book prompted me to check this one out.

  

I read this as part of Allie's Modern March event.