Those who’ve been around for a
while will have noticed that my reading really expanded and versified last
year, particularly with classics and adult novels. I read Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and I *ugh* can’t
even talk about it without squealing and flapping my hands around it's so good.
I fell back in love with classical mythology and its gods, goddesses and
heroes. I've also fallen back in love with classics.
The Mission
And so I’m
combining them. One of the first texts I studied at university was Metamophoses by Ovid, but it’s pretty
hefty and so I never managed the whole thing. So this year I’m going to embark
on what I'm calling an Extended Reading Project and I’ll be reading Metamosphoses by Ovid and Homer’s The Illiad and The Odyssey.
They're actually
not as long as I had first thought – between 400-550 pages – but they're going
to take some concentration and I want to savour them! As I studied Metamorphoses (briefly) I’ll be starting
with that, and I already have a battered Penguin Classics paperback which
helps! I’m not sure about using the translations available in the free Kindle
editions – does anyone know if they’re okay? But once I finish it, I give
myself full permission to buy the Penguin Clothbound Classics hardback to add
to my collection!
The Plan
Metamorphoses
Using my
copy, I've worked out that Metamorphoses is
divided into 15 books, each comprising of several poems/narratives. I'm planning
to read a book a week, which is actually only between 40-70 pages, so that
sounds completely doable to me! I’ll be able to read along at a nice pace and
research and investigate anything when I need or want to. I’m not going to
include this as part of my classics challenge, it’ll just be alongside it.
If this works out this year, I'd love
to use it to finally get some of the heftier classics under my belt in 2017; I’m
(already) thinking of Vanity Fair,
Middlemarch and Anna Karenina…
Tweet me (@sophie_waters) and let
me know if you’ll be reading any of these along with me and we can puzzle them
out together!
Sophie
Sounds like a good plan! I'm tempted to join you in reading Ovid, I can't remember if I actually read any of the stories at uni!
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