Clear Ur Shit Readathon – Sign Up and TBR

Hi all! I decided this year I'm going to be joining the Clear Ur Shit readathon. I have tentatively made plans to do this readathon before but always gave up not long after it started. However, I recently finished my Classics Club challenge and the 2022 PopSugar Reading Challenge and I am bereft. I have …

I finished my goal of reading 50 classics books

Hi there! I'm so excited to announce I've finished my goal of reading 50 classics books in 5 years! In 2017, I joined the Classics Club, an online blog of readers who set goals to read between 50-100 books in a specific amount of time; usually 5 years. I joined with 50 books and a …

Mini classic review: The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

The story begins with a lonely boy named Bastian and the strange book that draws him into the beautiful but doomed world of Fantastica. Only a human can save this enchanted place by giving its ruler, the Childlike Empress, a new name. But the journey to her tower leads through lands of dragons, giants, monsters, …

Mini classic review: The Princess Bride by William Goldman

What happens when the most beautiful girl in the world marries the handsomest prince of all time and he turns out to be...well...a lot less than the man of her dreams?As a boy, William Goldman claims, he loved to hear his father read the S. Morgenstern classic, The Princess Bride. But as a grown-up he discovered …

Mini classic review: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Only eleven of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published prior to her death in 1886; the startling originality of her work doomed it to obscurity in her lifetime. Early posthumously published collections-some of them featuring liberally “edited” versions of the poems-did not fully and accurately represent Dickinson’s bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the …

Mini classic review: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

Gilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who has moved into nearby Wildfell Hall with her young son. He is quick to offer Helen his friendship, but when her reclusive behaviour becomes the subject of local gossip and speculation, Gilbert begins to wonder whether his trust in her …

Mini classic review: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness …

Mini classic review: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. …

Mini classic review: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centring on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time …

Mini classic review: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Elinor is as prudent as her sister Marianne is impetuous. Each must learn from the other after they are they are forced by their father's death to leave their home and enter into the contests of polite society. The charms of unsuitable men and the schemes of rival ladies mean that their paths to success …