Classics Club Spin #5 — which landed me with Great Expectations — was, to my surprise, a great success, so I’m throwing my hat into the ring again. Same list, just swapped in a new number 20.
Here’s my (randomly chosen) list, from my larger List o’ 51, for the Wheel of Fortune to choose from on Monday:
- Homer, The Iliad
- Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
- Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
- Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
- Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
- Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
- Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
- Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
- Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
- Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
- Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea
- James Baldwin, Another Country
- Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
- Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
- Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Wish me luck!
Rosemary and Reading Glasses 
I wish you Nabokov!
I wish you Stegner 🙂
I kind of wished myself Stegner too!
I just saw this list after reading the spin results! You got The Iliad! I read that a few years ago and have to confess that I get tired of descriptions of battle, although the translation I read was very poetic. I got Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gillman.
I read it years ago, so now I’m hunting for the best translation. Looking forward to it, actually!
I heard a lot about Robert Fagel’s translation, which is the one I got.
Thanks — my dad recommended that one too. I think I have the Lombardo here at home, so maybe I’ll take a look and see how that is first, and then try the Fagle if it doesn’t work out.
That’s probably a sensible way to go about it. I wanted to read a trilogy by the historical novelist Sienkiewicz (the guy who wrote Quo Vadis, which I don’t really recommend) and read a lot about the two translations from Polish that were available. Based on what I read, it seemed like the first translation stayed truer to the original novel, but it was criticized for its quality, since the translator was not an expert in Polish. The second translation was done by a Polish poet, but it took liberties with the structure of the novel. I was going to read the first, but then I looked at it. It was turgid, while the poet’s translation was very readable. I read the second. Great trilogy, by the way.
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