Good news, friends! The Classics Club is hosting another one of their Classics Spins! This is the first time I’ve participated, so here’s the idea: you list twenty books from your original list, in no specific order except coordinating with categories that the club comes up with. The club will randomly choose a number, and whatever book on your spin list corresponds to the selected number, that’s the book that you’re reading next (-ish; you have a certain period of time to read and blog the book – in this case, it’s the remainder of November, and all of December). Here’s my list:
5 you are dreading/hesitant to read
1. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
2. Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
3. Everything that Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O’Connor
4. Finnegan’s Wake, by James Joyce
5. The House of Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
5 you can’t WAIT to read
6. Confessions, by St. Augustine of Hippo
7. Daisy Miller, by Henry James
8. A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster
9. The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
10. Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym
5 you are neutral about
11. The Ambassadors, by Henry James
12. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys
13. Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne
14. Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin
15. Slaughterhouse-Five, by fellow Cornellian Kurt Vonnegut
5 free choice (I selected re-reads)
16. My Antonia, by Willa Cather
17. The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty
18. Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen
19. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
20. Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
Can’t wait to see what my “assigned” reading turns out to be! Check back to see what number the club “spins” and what book I’ll be reading.
covered in flour 
Finnegan’s Wake has always been on my “dread” list; its position there was forever solidified by repeated references to its impenetrability by the lead character Switters in “Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates”. Author Tom Robbins once said he had been reading Finnegan nightly for fifteen years — and was up to page 39.
Oh, my. Yep, that’d make me dread a book too. I have a similar dread of reading Swann’s Way after there was a joke in “Gilmore Girls” about the first sentence being twenty pages long. Gulp.
Good luck! Great list. You’re brave for selecting the books numbered 1-5 (those are ones I would be dreading, not just ones I’m hesitant to read!). I love all of the books you listed 16-20, and, as I’ve mentioned before, your #15 is one of my favorite books.
I’m definitely dreading them! Fortunately I escaped this time. 🙂
Congrats! I was hoping you’d get a number between 6-10 or 16-20. 🙂
Heh, me too! Although 11-15 would have been okay, too. Mostly I was just crossing my fingers for not 1-5! Clearly, I’m very happy with the lucky number this go-round.