What I've Read So Far

In my last post, I talked about my summer goals. One of my main ones was to read 5 classics, and another was to finally finish reading John Adams. That's a lot of reading, so I've been working hard and I've already got three books crossed off my list!

First up was Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. I've been wanting to read some Verne for awhile and I'd heard this was a great one to start with. I loved it! If you're wanting to read a classic, but are intimidated by classics, this is a good place to go. It's a fun adventure story with mishaps and misunderstandings and twists and turns and a race to a deadline. The two main characters are delightful. I was genuinely excited to see what would happen.

Next I decided to go for an American book and read Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow. This one was honestly a little disappointing. I had seen it on a lot of lists of the best books ever and read some things about how it changed the genre of historical fiction, and these are some of the reasons I picked it. I also liked the idea of the time period - America right before WWI starts. One thing I didn't realize until I started reading it was that it was written in the 1970s and there really isn't much I like about that decade, including literature it seems. I never really connected with any of the characters and it was just a really different story from what I expected. The historical part of the historical fiction was neat though. Houdini, Ford, and other famous figures were also characters in the novel and that was interesting, but not interesting enough to save the book for me. I wouldn't recommend it.

After that I decided to completely switch time periods and genres and decided it was time to read The Once and Future King by T.H. White. I haven't read a lot of Arthurian legend before and this one was really fun. The first part is what the Disney movie The Sword in the Stone is based on. Whereas older epics like Morte D'Arthur describe a lot of what happened in the life of Arthur, this story delves into why things happened and how all the characters felt about it. It was written during and after WWII in England, and the narrator uses much of Arthur's struggles to comment on the nature of war and civilization in our own time. So despite it being the classic tale of Arthur, Merlyn, Lancelot, Guenever, and other knights that many of us already know, there was also a lot of new and interesting detail in it that I really enjoyed.

So now I'm taking a short break from the classics to read more of John Adams. I have about 350 pages left of that, so I'm going to read at least 100 pages and then read another classic. I'm also going to be watching some classic movies soon, so I'll post about those here too!