Quote:
Originally Posted by sun surfer
issybird of the pensive avatar, I swear one of us must have unrealised ESP. I kid you not, I was thinking how nice it would be if a group of us tackled a famous difficult classic every so often together like we're doing with the Iliad, and for the last few days have been pondering suggesting that perhaps we could do it on a seasonal timeline at least for 2012 if there's interest, i.e. one every three months. I didn't have any particular books in mind, but I like your suggestions.
Anyway, you can take all that to say, of course I'm for it for 2012 if others are. And if they're not, well I'll be (hopefully) reading two of the four this year regardless.
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Hah! Let's keep it under advisement; I'm game and there must be others out there.
Let me explain that the books I named were mostly out of the natural progression of epics, as it seemed to me, from
The Iliad to
Ulysses.
The Odyssey as the follow-up story to
The Iliad and the direct inspiration for
Ulysses, and
The Aeneid as another tale of a wanderer after the Trojan War. But if we're going to get serious about this, I realize that may make it too classic-heavy and epic-heavy for some tastes, and perhaps mixing it up a bit would be better. On the other hand, I'd hate to see it become more about the selection process than the actual reading. Not that that would ever happen here at MR.
I'm very fond of the notion of tackling a difficult work by reading it slowly and discussing it while in the process. Partially because people want time for other reading, but also because I think trying to "gulp" a harder work, as if it were a detective story or a romance, is both to miss a lot and to set oneself up for possible failure.
I'm looking forward to the discussion of
The Iliad and hope that it lives up to the initial interest.