Pre-Blog classic Classics – Part 2 

During my rather callow youth I had a mixed, somewhat ambiguous relationship with classic literature. There was a feeling that I should be reading them, that doing so was important and culturally enriching. The other, sometimes equally strong feeling, was that I shouldn’t bother and that classics, by their very nature, would be boring, difficult and honestly pointless to read. I had tried, growing up, a handful of classics (mostly prompted no doubt by movies or BBC adaptations), but had largely crashed and burned each time. As you can see from my previous listing my early forays into the classics consisted of truly classic SF, a touch of Fantasy and good old Sherlock Holmes. As many people have done over the years, I developed a real love for Conan Doyle’s prose and this, I believe, broke forever the fear of ‘difficult’ older texts. The more classics I read, the more classics I felt that I could read. So, I continued thus... 

Men Like Gods by H G Wells 

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 

A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

The Call of the Wild by Jack London 

Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee 

Animal Farm by George Orwell 

One, Two, Buckle my Shoe by Agatha Christie 

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie 

Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie 

Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie 

The French Lieutenants Woman by John Fowles 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark 

The Natural by Bernard Malamud 

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce 

On the Beach by Nevil Shute 

Looking back, I’m rather surprised by the number of classics I accumulated over time – still a vanishing small percentage of the whole (and rather ‘obvious’ ones too!) but you have to start somewhere... Part 3 next week.