So there is a whole lot of the literary canon I am yet to read, and while I'm maaaybe more interested in personal canons, I know there's probably a lot of gooduns I'm missing out on. Also there are references to classics everywhere. I've read a few of the big ones. For example I did my Advanced Higher English dissertation on Jane Austen's Emma, and Pride and Prejudice (still can't ever spell prejudice right on the first try though). There are some I read for school like To Kill A Mockingbird, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men. When I was about 16 I did a talk on 'How Dodie Smith represents Cassandra's character development' in I Capture the Castle, for English class. I read 1984 and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in my first year of art school. I took Brideshead Revisited with me inter-railing and can remember reading it on a rocky Croatian beach. I predictably read The Great Gatsby after I saw the film. I got about 80% of the way through Brave New World two years ago and gave up for some reason. So I've read a few and seen film adaptations of the rest.
I'm defining my 'classics' as literary canon texts; ancient classics, classics and 'modern classics'. I want to brush up my knowledge on Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters' catalogues but also get to know the likes Jack Kerouac and Sylvia Plath.
I think I'm going to try and squeeze in at least a-classic-a-month, so here is a list of classics to tick off already stocked up in my kindle (for free, yay for free classics!) and I'm going to look out for some more modern classics in the charity shops!:
Sherlock Holmes- Arthur Conan Doyle
Little Women- Louisa May Alcott
Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
Frankenstein- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Far From the Madding Crowd- Thomas Hardy
Tess of the d'Urbervilles- Thomas Hardy
The Beautiful and Damned- F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise- F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Importance of Being Earnest- Oscar Wilde
A Tale of Two Cities- Charles Dickens
The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Persuasion- Jane Austen
Mansfield Park- Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility- Jane Austen
The Odyssey- Homer
Lady Chatterkey's Lover- D H Lawrence
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