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Sunday, November 28, 2021

November Wrap Up

 



November has reached its end and so has my month of reading War and Peace. As I expected, I didn't get much else done, but I'd say reading a book that is 1,215 pages long is a pretty big accomplishment. I also reflected on my reading of Les Misérables and finished my Classics Club and my Back to the Classics Challenges. All in all, it was a successful month for me. Here's what I worked on:

Classics Club Wrap Up

I really enjoyed both Les Misérables and War and Peace, but they were long, dense reads. For December, I don't want to tie myself down to too many specific books. Instead, I'm going to let my mood dictate what I pick up. I'm hoping to read at least four books and reread From the Earth to the Moon in preparation for my first read of 2022, which will be its sequel.

I'm looking forward to having a more relaxed time in December. In addition to doing a bunch of mood reading, I'm going to take time to plan out my reading goals for 2022, which is always fun for me. I'll certainly be happy to be reading books under 1,000 pages! What about everyone else out there? Are you working on reading goals for 2022 yet? 

Classics Club Wrap Up

 


Just about five years ago, I decided to join the Classics Club Challenge. The official rules called for participants to create a list of 50 classic novels to read over the course of five years. Being an overachiever, I decided to create a list of 100. I divided my list into several sections, in order to read somewhat diversely over the years. I had several different genres and time periods represented on it. My start date was January 1, 2017. My end date was December 31, 2021.  After years of dedication and commitment, I finally finished about one month early, on November 28, 2021.

Reading these 100 novels was a massive undertaking and probably one of the biggest accomplishments of my life. All of my reading for the past five years was centered around trying to finish it. I read at least one book from it pretty much every month and based a lot of my other reading goals and challenges around making progress on it. I found some books that I truly loved throughout my journey and some that I truly hated. I learned a lot about which kinds of classics I like to read and which kind don't work out for me. Somehow, I read War and Peace twice. Everything I read helped me to grow. I am now undoubtedly a better reader than I was before I started. This experience was so valuable to me that it's actually hard to explain here.

Reflecting back over everything I read and everything I experienced, I came up with three main takeaways:

1. Translations matter.
When reading a book originally written in a different language, it is extremely important to research which translation you are going to read. They are not all equal! Big chain bookstores like Barnes and Noble will generally use the translation that's in the public domain for their editions, which will not necessarily be the best one. A quick Google search will help you determine which version is the most highly recommended. Having a good translation can be the difference between struggling through a classic and actually enjoying it.

2. Spread out reading classics over time.
I knew that works from long ago would contain a lot of racism, sexism, and other disturbing ideas. What I didn't expect was how weary I would soon grow of it all. I do think there is a lot of value in exploring these books, but there is truly a lot you have to overlook. Reading so many of them in quick succession really brought this issue to the forefront. For me at least, it's better to spread out reading classics to avoid being constantly bombarded with the worst ideas of humanity over and over again. On the other hand, when you find a classic that does a good job of treating woman and people of color fairly, you know you have found something special. 

3. Pick classics based on enjoyment.
When I was creating my Classics Club list, my main goal was to create a list full of notable works from many genres. I put a lot of books on there that I felt like I "should" read, even though I knew I probably wouldn't like them much. I ended up paying dearly for that idea with picks like Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow taking up huge amounts of my time and adding no real value to my reading life beyond building my stamina. Books I was excited about and thought I would like, I generally did. If I were to make another list, I would pick more books based on my favorite genres, time periods, and authors. It's good to explore a bit and try new things, but it's even more important to know yourself as a reader and treat yourself kindly. 

Now that I've finished everything, I looked back over my list and tried to figure out what my best and worst reads were. I definitely can't narrow it down to one of each. My favorites included Wives and Daughters, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Around the World in 80 Days, A Room with a View, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Bell Jar, Heidi, Black Beauty, The Custom of the Country, The Bluest Eye, Native Son, Germinaland Les Misérables. My least favorites included Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, Midnight's Children, On the Road, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Daniel Deronda. I'm lucky to have found so many new favorites throughout this process. I'm also pretty lucky that out of the 100 books I read, there were less than ten that I truly didn't like at all.   

Now that this huge undertaking is officially over, I guess the next thing I have to decide is what to do moving forward. It feels weird to not have this challenge running in the background. This provided structure to all my TBRs over the past five years. Honestly, I'm tempted to make another list and do it all again, but I don't think that's my best move. After all, one of my takeaways was that you should spread out reading classics over time. I think I'm going to take a year off from it, and use that time to really research other classics I would like to read and put together a thoughtful list based on my interests. I'll still read classics in 2022 of course. I'll still do Back to the Classics if it's offered. I'm just going to take my time before jumping back into this awesome challenge for another round.

So I guess that's all, for now at least. This has been a true labor of love and I'm so happy to have finished it. Even so, I'm a little bit sad that it's over.

War and Peace (again) by Leo Tolstoy



Okay, so, here we go again.

Once upon a time, in the quaint, innocent year 2017, I thought I read Leo Tolstoy's famously long classic novel War and Peace. I was wrong. I discovered that I had read an abridged version after I finished. Feeling like this didn't count as reading the real thing, I pledged to eventually read it again before crossing it off my Classics Club list. The years went by and I put off this giant reread until I had no other Classics Club books left to finish. I completed 99 out of my 100 picks. It was finally time to go back and fulfill the promise I made to myself four years ago. It was time to read War and Peace as it was meant to be experienced--all 1,215 pages of it.

Armed with an unabridged edition and more than a little trepidation, I embarked on a marathon of reading. I had a lot of questions I wanted answered. Would reading the complete version make a difference? Would I like it any more than my first time around? Would my interpretation or appreciation level change? Would I even be able to tell a difference between the two versions at all, with several years between my readings? 

As it turns out, the answer to all of those questions was yes, and that fact really surprised me. In looking over my review from back in 2017, I feel like I read a different book. My experience was much better this time around, and I think that the main reasons for this were that I was reading a better translation and I have four more years of classics experience under my belt now. 

As I noted in my first review, the plot of the novel follows several upper class Russian families between the years 1805 and 1820. Russia is fighting in the Napoleonic Wars during this time, and the political strife affects the characters in different ways. The main players are as follows:
  • Pierre Behzukov, the illegitimate son of a wealthy Count whose fortunes take a dramatic turn when his father dies and makes him his sole heir. Pierre is intellectual, bumbling, and ultimately a good person at heart. He bounces between several different modes of life, most of which leave him feeling empty and confused. He tries living the party lifestyle and the religious life, but doesn't find fulfillment in either one. He becomes disillusioned and struggles to find deeper meaning in a world that often feels mean and random.
  • Andrei Bolkonsky, a moody prince who distinguishes himself through military service in the wars. He comes to prefer life in the service over dealing with his social butterfly of a wife, difficult to manage elderly father, and needy sister. He spends most of the novel away from home. When he falls in love with a beautiful young woman, however, he finds his attitude beginning to change.
  • Nikolai Rostov, a young count who takes an active role in the war. He spends much of the novel uncertain about how to manage his personal life. He faces intense pressure from his family to marry for wealth, as their personal finances are falling apart due to mismanagement. He falls in love with two different women (one rich and one poor) and must choose which of them to marry.
  • Natasha Rostov, Nikolai's beautiful sister. Everyone instantly feels drawn to her charismatic personality and child-like joy. She becomes romantically linked with a few different characters throughout the book and grows from a flighty, flirtatious girl to a more serious, mature woman as she learns from her experiences. 
  • Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France. Russians throughout the novel regard him with admiration or loathing depending on the current political situation, which does shift throughout the novel. Tolstoy focuses on his successes and failures throughout the story, and how his actions affect Russia as a whole over the course of the wars.
One aspect of my reading that stayed the same as my first time was keeping the character names straight. There are many more characters in the novel than the ones I listed above, and differentiating between them was challenging. Russian naming conventions are complex, and characters often go by more than one name or by nicknames that aren't necessarily close to whatever their original name is. Even more confusing was the fact that some characters have the same names or names that are only a few letters different. I often had to pause and think through who each character was while I was reading. This wasn't enough of an issue to seriously impact my understanding of the novel, but it was definitely a consistent point of confusion. 

Aside from that, the rest of my reading experience was different and better. I liked the novel well enough back in 2017, but I struggled with the overall purpose of it and had a hard time getting through the sections focusing on war. This time around, I didn't really have those issues. Don't get me wrong, the war parts were still less interesting to me than the family dramas, but I was able to navigate them better and find the beauty in them this time around. I feel like a lot of the military material was cut from my abridged version, and reading what was included felt choppy. Having all of it there helped me to see what Tolstoy was conveying more clearly. His analysis of the wars was extremely detailed and impressive. I could sense that his love for Russia ran deep and I appreciated that. I am sure that the different translation helped as well. I was reading the Constance Garnett translation from 1904 on my first try, and this time I read the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation from 2007. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what was better about this version than the first one I read since it's been four years, but I liked it a lot more. It felt smoother and was easier to understand.  

Reading this version also helped me to understand what ties the whole novel together. It's love. I don't know why I had such trouble with this the first time around. It seems so obvious now. The whole novel centers around it. Love for a romantic partner, love for family, love for friends, love for a country, love of power, love of God, love for mankind--it's all there. Love leads the characters into terrible pain at some times and into great happiness at other times. It's transformative and powerful. It's behind every decision the characters make. It's the thread that ties everything in the story together, and the way Tolstoy presents it is remarkably relatable and understandable. I was very invested and interested in the characters this time around and I had a much better time staying engaged. This is a good book. It's an epic read. It's worth the time just to see the breadth and depth of human experience Tolstoy is able to convey in its pages.    

When I first started off my reread of this, I was viewing it more as a duty I was honor-bound to complete. I didn't expect to actually enjoy it or even be able to tell a difference from my first reading. War and Peace remains a challenging read, but I liked it much more this time around. My greater reading experience and having an unabridged, more modern translation ended up making a huge difference. In the end, I'm actually happy that I went back to revisit this novel. It was a great way to see how much I have grown as a reader over the course of this challenge and a really fitting way to finish it off. I think, in a weird way, this was the best ending possible for it. I'm really happy with how everything turned out, and I'm happy to finally be done with my Classics Club journey.    

Pierre's insanity consisted in the fact that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people's merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and loving people without reason, be discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.

Challenge Tally
Classics Club (#68 on my list): 100/100 books completed - DONE!

Total Books Read in 2021: 47



Sunday, November 21, 2021

Back to the Classics 2021 - Wrap Up Post



Well, another year is reaching its end and along with it comes the end of another Back to the Classics Challenge. This is my seventh (!) year completing this challenge, and as usual, it was a worthwhile experience. My selections this time around were challenging, to say the least. I had some very long novels to get through, including the 1,200 page Les Misérables, but I ended up finishing everything in the end. Here are links to all my reviews:

1. A 19th century classic: Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy (1872)
2. A 20th century classic: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
3. A classic by a woman author: Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (1876)
4. A classic in translation: Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862)
6. A classic by a new-to-you author: Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (1920)
7. New-to-you classic by a favorite author:  Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (1894)
8. A classic about an animal, or with an animal in the title: The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (1915)
10. A humorous or satirical classic: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1847-1848)
11. A travel or adventure classic (fiction or non-fiction)From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne (1865)
12. A classic play: Hamlet by William Shakespeare (c. 1600)

Many of these classics were books that I had been meaning to get to for years, so I am glad to have read them in that sense. Most of them, however, were not particularly memorable or enjoyable for me this time around. The exceptions to that were Les Misérables and Our Mutual Friend, which I did enjoy, but most of the rest were just okay. I didn't find many new favorites this year. That's alright though, I'm bound to have unlucky picks every once in a while. I'm still quite happy to have finished, because most of these were part of my Classics Club list too, so reading them helped push me closer to the end of that challenge.

Overall, I finished all twelve prompts, meaning I get three entries in the prize drawing. If I should win, I can be contacted at quiet.kristina [at] gmail [dot] com.

Of course, if Karen K. decides to host this challenge again in 2022, I will definitely be participating. It would be a different kind of year for me because I will be done with my Classics Club Challenge by that time, so I wouldn't be trying to double dip with books from another challenge list. The whole world of classics would be open to me! I'm looking forward to it already.

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

 


I first learned about Les Misérables in my sixth grade reading class. In what was a dubious use of instructional time, my teacher played us the entire cast recording of the musical version while we watched the words scroll by on a screen. Most of my classmates completely checked out during this, but I fell in love. I immediately begged my mom to buy me the soundtrack (which came on an expensive multi-disc CD set in those days) and listened to it over and over. Before long, I knew all the words and had a new favorite musical. I eventually got to see the show in person a handful of times, and it really kickstarted my love of all things Broadway. I knew it was based on a book, and I went out and bought it in the thick of my new-found obsession, but alas, I was twelve, and 1,200 pages was a bit much for me to handle at the time.  

When I was building my Classics Club list, it was an obvious choice to include this novel. I was still a bit intimidated by the length, but I really wanted to see how it compared to my beloved musical and experience the full story of it for myself. I didn't want to get too bogged down reading it though, so I decided to tackle it bit by bit. I faithfully read 25 pages of it in between each and every book that I read this year. When I got to only 100 pages left, I just went ahead and finished. As it's now the beginning of November, this means that I've spent almost the entire year working my way through it. It was basically the soundtrack to my reading year--always running in the background. This strategy worked too; I never felt overwhelmed by it and I consistently enjoyed it all year long.

It's hard to give a concise plot summary of the novel because it is so long and includes a lot of information. In addition to the main story, there are pages upon pages of French history, cultural information, and philosophical musings. There are many characters that appear only once to fill out a minor detail of the plot and are never seen again. There's even an extremely long section detailing the history of France's sewer system (what a wild ride that was). At its heart though, Les Misérables is the story of Jean Valjean, a man imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. He eventually escapes from prison and tries to start a new life for himself. He begins using a different name, becomes a respected member of society, amasses a fortune, and adopts a young girl named Cosette, whom he raises as his own daughter. 

Despite his successes, however, Valjean is continually worried that his past will catch up with him. An extremely determined policeman named Javert has never forgotten about his case and wouldn't hesitate to arrest him if he ever crossed his path. Valjean's own conscience plagues him as well. Now that he's reformed himself, it bothers him that he is living a lie. Meanwhile, the political situation in Paris has come to a boiling point, and many young men are preparing themselves to fight against the monarchy. Valjean, not wanting to draw attention to himself, stays out of the situation. That soon becomes impossible, however, when Cosette falls in love with a young rebel named Marius. Once Valjean learns of their feelings, he can't help but be drawn into the rebellion in an effort to try and protect the man his daughter loves. 

This novel is undoubtedly a masterpiece. Everything about it feels important and intricate. Hugo paid an incredible amount of attention to detail in crafting this story; places are described down to the street names and house numbers, characters' backgrounds are extensively described, and the historical information behind many events is provided to put plot events in their proper context. Honestly, the amount of details provided are exhausting, which is why my method of reading the story in several short sections over a long period of time worked well for me. I didn't get too overwhelmed with the vast amount of information and I didn't ever get too bored. Honestly though, boredom wasn't much of an issue in general here. The story is long, but not particularly boring if you're a seasoned classics reader. The only sections I struggled with a little bit were the digressions into history. There were several places where the action stopped entirely and Hugo would give a lesson on topics ranging from wars to religion to philosophy. These parts weren't exactly thrilling, but I could still appreciate the care with which Hugo included them. All throughout my reading, I had the sense that Hugo wanted his readers to truly understand all the implications of what he was writing about. I think his efforts went a bit overboard, but it's really something to see how nicely he crafted everything.

The characters really stood out here as well, especially Jean Valjean. His story is both heartbreaking and triumphant, and you really come to feel for him as you read about everything he goes though. Hugo uses him to ask a lot of questions about morality. Can a convict ever become a respectable man again? Do people that break the law deserve second chances? Is stealing something to feed yourself the same as stealing for other reasons? Of course, Javert's unbending, black and white sense of justice comes into conflict with these questions, and watching him pursue Valjean throughout the course of the text is genuinely compelling. Valjean's relationship with Cosette is also heartwarming to witness. Their bond shows the power that love has to reform someone and completely change their lives.  The parts with Marius and the rest of the rebels were less interesting to me, but that's more a matter of personal taste. Those characters were developed as well as all the rest, and explored issues related to personal freedoms and patriotism.

In comparison to the musical, I was really surprised to see that the  show actually does a nice job of conveying the feeling and general story of the book. Obviously, the novel contains a lot more details and some differences here and there, but honestly, the show is a great summary of all the key plot events. It is actually a fairly faithful adaptation. I found myself singing the musical numbers in my head while reading some of the chapters. I could tell exactly where each song would appear. Some of the lines from the book appear pretty much word for word in the show. It was a pretty cool experience to read because it felt like I was combining two things I really love, and deepening my knowledge of both of them.

Reading  Les Misérables was a massive undertaking and took up most of my reading year. I started off feeling apprehensive about its length, but I ended up really enjoying it. I'm happy to say that it was totally worth reading. It was compelling, emotional, and complex. Finishing it felt like completing long, satisfying journey with friends. This was my last read for the Back to the Classics Challenge this year, and it was quite a nice way to end that too. I've had a bit of a shaky experience with classic novels this year, so it was nice to finish up this challenge with a good one. 

Finishing this novel means that my Classics Club Challenge is nearly done as well. I just have to reread War and Peace, and then that will be complete too. I'll be working on that throughout November, so the blog will be quiet. That book is just as long as Les Misérables is, but I'm trying to read it within a month. Hopefully it won't be too trying of an experience! 
   

Challenge Tally
Back to the Classics 2021 (A Classic in Translation): 12/12 - done!
Classics Club (#67 on my list): 100/100 books completed - done pending one reread

Total Books Read in 2021: 46