The Classics Club Spin (23) #ccspin

In case you don't know about what the spin entails...

• Pick twenty books that you've got left to read from your Classics Club List.
• Post that list, numbered 1-20, on your blog before Sunday 19th April.
• We'll announce a number from 1-20. 
• Read that book by 1st June 2020.

More info on The Classics Club here.

My Spin List (chosen using random.org)

1. Roxana, Daniel Defoe

2. Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg

3. The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes

4. The Faith of a Writer, Joyce Carol Oates

5. Villette, Charlotte Bronte

6. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

7. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo

8. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton

9. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

10. The Collector, John Fowles

11. The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp

12. The War of Art, Steven Pressfield

13. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

14. Emma, Jane Austen

15. On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner

16. The Writing of Fiction, Edith Wharton

17. If You Want to Write, Brenda Ueland

18. Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin

19. Take Joy, Jane Yolen

20. The Sylph, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

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The Classics Club Spin (22) #ccspin

The Lucky Spin Number came up as 13. My book is The Virginia Woolf Reader. I have to say...I'm pleased!

I'm down to the wire...it's 5:40 am my time, but I figure if I get this in before CC Club posts the spin number, I'm good. On another note...trying again with this.

1. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
2. Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
3. The Writing of Fiction, Edith Wharton
4. The Painted Veil, W. Somerset Maugham
5. Escaping into the Open, Elizabeth Berg
6. Roderick Hudson, Henry James
7. On Writers and Writing, John Gardner
8. The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp
9. Murder in the Cathedral, T.S. Eliot
10. Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin
11. The Writing Life, Annie Dillard
12. Emma, Jane Austen
13. The Virginia Woolf Reader
14. Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood
15. The Forest for the Trees, Betsy Lerner
16. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
17. The Legends of Parsifal, Mary Hanford Ford
18. Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg
19. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
20. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

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Classics Club Spin #21 #ccspin

#5 was the lucky spin!
Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury

I know I shouldn't be adding another book to this busy reading season...and yet I am going to do it anyway. Such is the way the mind of a book lover works. I selected from my Classics Club list using Random.org

1. On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner
2. The Writing Life, Annie Dillard
3. The War of Art, Steven Pressfield
4. The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp
5. Zen and the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury
6. If You Want to Write, Brenda Ueland
7. The Virginia Woolf Reader, Virginia Woolf
8. The Collector, John Fowles
9. The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes
10. Escaping into the Open, Elizabeth Berg
11. Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande
12. Murder in the Cathedral, T.S. Eliot
13. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
14. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
15. The Vein of Gold, Julia Cameron
16. Writing Past Dark, Bonnie Friedman
17. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
18. Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin
19. The Painted Veil, W. Somerset Maugham
20. Take Joy, Jane Yolen

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The Classics Spin 17 - Updike's Rabbit, Run...a big DNF #ccspin

I made a pact with myself to never continue reading a book I'm not liking past 50 pages (100 max). With this one, I had to remind myself that the rule should also apply to classics. I'm sorry. I just could not keep reading (and this is part one of a four part series. Ack!).

I have never despised a character quite as much as Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Ugh. If I had to listen to one more line of his self-serving internal diatribe, I may have used the book to beat myself unconscious. Extreme? Read it, or try to. I do realize there are some who probably like this. Sorry if this offends you, but we all have our likes and dislikes. I have to keep this in mind when I find someone doesn't like a book I enjoy.

I came across this fantastic treatise about the book over on Goodreads. This gentleman by the name of Jason Pettus is the owner of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com] (CCLaP). He embarked on a mission called the CCLaP 100. It's mission statement: "In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label."

I'm going to share some highlights from Essay #48: Rabbit, Run (1960), by John Updike. You can follow the linked title to read the entire essay, or click below the quotes.

The argument against:
"...being guilty of nearly every criticism that's ever been made about Postmodernism: it is overly talky yet goes nowhere, much more interested in precocious language than in constructing a good story, designed to appeal not to the general public but mostly to his fellow academes, and which lacquers a shiny intellectual sheen over what in reality is some pretty brutal misogyny, the kind of whiny, rambling snoozer that inspired the creation of such frou-frou critical terms as "essayistic saunter," "interruption of the abyss," "sense of self-qualification," "a dialectical theological debate between the book itself and its reader..."

My verdict:
"So to understand what my personal reaction to Rabbit, Run was, you really only need to know this -- that after starting it, not only did I quickly abandon my original plan to read all four "Rabbit" novels as part of this essay series, but even the first book itself became one of only a handful of CCLaP 100 titles so far I haven't been able to finish, and the only one so far that I abandoned not for arcane outdated language but rather because IT WAS SO FREAKING TERRIBLE. And that's because, Dear Lord, every single thing that critics of this book complain about is true; and in fact you could strongly argue that this single title virtually creates the blueprint for every snotty, cooly ironic, pop-culture-obsessed, casually sexist diatribe about jaded middle-class white people in the Big Bad Suburbs that has come since, a glut that had become intolerable by the turn of the 21st century and that the "Sincerists" of post-9/11 literature* are actively fighting against."

Read the entire essay here

Yes, he pretty much summed up my feelings.

So, another Classics Club spin not completed, a title which needs replacing on my Classics Club list AND the book for April not completed for my Read Your (Book) Shelf challenge. Oh, well. You win some, you lose some.

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