I’ve just signed up to take part in an event called the Classics Spin, details here and being hosted by the Classics Club.  Fortunately this isn’t really reading intensive but I think it’s a really great idea (picked up courtesy of a lovely blogger who you can find here should you wish to take a look).

Obviously it involves reading (dur) but it’s hopefully not too intensive (although I suppose that depends on which book is randomly selected! How many pages in Les Miserables?)   By Monday 18th you need to list a choice of twenty books – if you check out the blog it does say from your Classics Club list – which I don’t have!!  Hopefully nobody will mind if I take part.  I’ll just tiptoe in and post my list and wait to see what number pops up.  Then the challenge is to read whatever book is listed against this number in February and March.  Now, the idea is not to just pick 20 books that you would love – have a look at the books you’ve had sat waiting on your shelves, the ones you’ve been putting off reading – and put some of these on the list (and don’t be pretending you don’t have any because you know you do!  Those books have shown enough patience already and it’s there time to have a chance).  This could give you the impetus to pick them up and might also help you to stay on track with a New Year’s resolution?   So, without further ado my list is as follows: (and believe me, I’ve chosen books that I’ve had on my shelves for a long time and I would sooner read some of these than others – but I’m not giving any clues aways about which ones I’m dreading!) (apart from the last four I own all these books):

1. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
2. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
3. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
4. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
5. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
6. The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch
7. Three Men in a Boat
8. The Birds by Daphne du Maurier
9. A Passage to India by E M Forster
10. Legend by David Gemmell
11. Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy
12. The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry
13. The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson
14. The Ghost of Sleath by James Herbert
15. Twelfth Night by Shakespeare
16. Wicked by Gregory Maguire
17. The Once and Future King by T H White
18. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
19. The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde
20. Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury